Democratic candidate Scott Colom ( Scott Colom ) held a slight lead over incumbent Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith ( Cindy Hyde - Smith ) in the Mississippi Senate election, and that lead slightly expanded as two key voting deadlines approached on Tuesday.

According to reports from The Associated Press, as of 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time in the United States, Colom led Heide-Smith by 2,607 votes; out of the 953,547 votes that have been counted, it is estimated that 97% of the votes have been tallied. This advantage is equivalent to only 0.27 percentage points.

Independent candidate Tai Ping Kings ( Ty Pinkins ) received 20,034 votes.

Tuesday is the deadline for processing affidavit ballots or provisional ballots, which voters cast when their eligibility on election day is in dispute or unclear. The same day is also the deadline for receiving mailed absentee ballots, which must be postmarked before election day on November 3rd.

Mississippi is currently one of only two states where the outcome of the Senate election has not yet been determined; the other is Alaska.

So far, in this election, the Democratic Party has managed to flip 7 Senate seats previously controlled by the Republican Party, ensuring that starting from January, the Democrats will have at least a new majority of 54 out of a total of 100 senators.

Up until the election day, Alaska was considered a key state that could determine whether the Republican Party would be able to maintain its slim majority in the Senate.

Mississippi has not elected a Democratic senator since 1982, when the pro-segregation candidate John Stennis was elected ( John Stennis ). In the view of many political analysts, the state is not considered a key area where Democrats might make a comeback. If Collom wins this election, he will become Mississippi's first black senator since the Reconstruction period after the Civil War.

In Alaska, Democratic candidate Mary Peltola (Mary Peltola) leads the incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan (Dan Sullivan) by 2,517 votes; among the 218,641 ballots that have been counted, this gap is 1.1 percentage points.

Pertola currently has 48.6% of the total votes. If neither she nor Sullivan manages to obtain over 50% of the total votes, the election will proceed to a ranked choice voting round. In this round, the other two candidates—Gerald Hakes ( Gerald Heikes ) and another candidate with the same name, Dan Sullivan—will be eliminated. The second-choice votes cast by voters who selected them as their first choice will be allocated to Pertola and the current senator.