As Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) narrowly trails her Democratic challenger Scott Colom by just a few hundred votes in the unexpectedly close Senate race in Mississippi, Republicans are now hoping a Supreme Court loss on late-arriving mail ballots earlier this year will help save their senator from being the latest victim of the blue tsunami.
Colom leads Hyde-Smith by 1,724 votes with an estimated 95.6% of the votes counted, as of midday Thursday per the Associated Press, in a race that major media outlets have yet to call for either candidate. The remaining votes will be largely from provisional ballots and late-arriving mail ballots, which both Democrats and Republicans hope will break toward them.
But if the GOP had its way earlier this year at the Supreme Court, none of the late-arriving mail ballots would have counted.
In June, the Supreme Court upheld a Mississippi law allowing mail ballots received days after Election Day to be counted, rejecting arguments from the Republican National Committee that under federal law, mail ballots must be received by Election Day to count. The 5-4 ruling in Watson v. Republican National Committee was seen as a surprise by some court watchers, who believed the high court would strike down the law that allowed for the counting of mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but arrive up to five days late.
“In sum, the election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day. That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi. But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the 5-4 majority, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Republicans in June blasted the high court’s ruling, with even Mississippi officials treating the win for the state law — which they had defended in court — as a defeat.
“With the bedrock constitutional principle of federalism now affirmed, I am hopeful that the Mississippi Legislature will take this opportunity to amend the law and require absentee ballots be received on the same day ballots are cast at the polling place,” Republican Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, whose office successfully defended the late-arriving ballot law, said at the time.
Mississippi is one of the two Senate races that have yet to be called, with the other being in Alaska. Democrats are currently projected to have at least 54 seats in the Senate and are leading in both uncalled Senate races by narrow margins as officials continue tabulating the results.
HOW THE SUPREME COURT SHAPED THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS
The Senate race in the Magnolia State has another judicial connection beyond the pivotal Supreme Court case earlier this year. Colom, who serves as a district attorney in the state, was nominated by then-President Joe Biden in 2022 to be a federal district court judge in Mississippi, but he needed “blue slips” from both Mississippi senators for his nomination to advance.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) returned his blue slip, but Hyde-Smith did not return hers, citing Colom’s views on allowing biological men in women’s sports and his donations from liberal megadonor George Soros. After Hyde-Smith blocked him from becoming a federal judge, Colom could be on his way to unseating her from the Senate.