Tampa, Florida
Sixty-five votes. That’s where this thing stood last Wednesday morning, Scott Colom and Cindy Hyde-Smith separated by fewer people than you’d find in a small-town Baptist church on a rainy Sunday. I watched that number all week the way you watch a storm track out of the Gulf, first thing with coffee and again before bed.
That same morning, Hyde-Smith’s campaign said it was “confident that when every legally cast vote is fully and accurately counted, Mississippians will have reelected Cindy Hyde-Smith.” I’ll give her this much. She was right about the counting.
Mississippi counted every legally cast vote. Scott Colom is going to the United States Senate.
He’ll be Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, and he won it in the slow part of an election, the folding tables and sealed envelopes nobody puts on the evening news, which happens to be the exact part the Trump administration is in court right now trying to keep from being certified in Alaska.
I keep coming back to Hinds County. Officials there accepted 817 affidavit ballots, the kind you fill out when a poll worker looks up from the book and tells you something doesn’t match. Colom got 703 of them. Picture it. You give your name, and the poll worker runs a finger down the page and comes up empty. You can walk back to the car. Or you can take the envelope, sit down at the folding table, and fill it out. Eighty-six percent of the Hinds voters who did that and got counted picked the man who won. By 6:17 p.m. Wednesday, the Associated Press had his lead at 4,669 votes, up from 2,990 that morning.
On Monday I wrote about the Ring doorbell video out of Ole Miss and said Black women carried the ballot in Mississippi. I don’t have the crosstabs to prove it yet, and I won’t pretend I do. But I know who stands in those lines in Jackson with a toddler on one hip and a shift starting in an hour. I know what it costs to hear “your name isn’t here” and stay anyway. That’s who I’m betting is inside those 703.
Three years ago Hyde-Smith blocked Joe Biden’s nomination of Scott Colom to the federal bench. Wednesday afternoon she picked up the phone and conceded him a Senate seat. Then she posted a video: “While this is not the outcome we worked for or hoped for, I respect the decision of Mississippi voters.” Colom told NBC News he had already forgiven her. I did 23 years in the Air Force and watched plenty of people swallow a grudge for the mission. That’s a bigger swallow than most.
Now the part that sits wrong with me. Hinds County also rejected 1,609 affidavit ballots, almost two for every one it took. Maybe every rejection was by the book. I still want to see the reasons, and winning doesn’t make me stop asking. I’d want the same accounting if those ballots had broken her way. Nothing is certified yet, either. Counties finish Friday, the state makes it official December 3, and I’ll be reading the paperwork.
Alaska is living the same lesson in slow motion. It’s the last Senate race in the country without a call. Mary Peltola leads Dan Sullivan by 4,250 votes with 84 percent counted, and the final count isn’t due until November 18, because ballots there get flown in from villages no road reaches. The Trump administration already went to court to block certification if she wins, over a same-name candidate it says Democrats planted, a claim Peltola calls a sham. A judge threw it out, and the Justice Department appealed. Peltola keeps telling her people, “This is Alaska normal.” She’s right. Slow is what an honest count looks like. Count all of it, then certify it.
Here in Tampa I hear it every week. Florida’s gone. Don’t bother. Most forecasters had Mississippi rated safely Republican, too. So if a poll worker here ever hands you a provisional ballot, fill it out. Florida law makes your county supervisor give you a free way to check whether it counted, and if it didn’t, why. Use it.
That envelope is a vote. Ask Scott Colom.
Vote totals are Associated Press figures as of 6:17 p.m. ET, Nov. 11, 2026, the same count shown in the results graphic. Counts can still move until Mississippi certifies the result on Dec. 3.
Sources: Associated Press; NBC News; CNBC; CNN; Mississippi Free Press; Mississippi Today; WLOX; KPTV/Gray News; Alaska Beacon; Alaska Public Media; Alaska’s News Source; Florida Statutes s. 101.048.
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