Kalshi puts Colom at 92% in Mississippi as Senate count stays on a knife edge

Kalshi’s market for the Mississippi Senate race briefly put Democratic challenger Scott Colom’s chance of winning at 92% on Wednesday morning, after late returns moved him ahead of Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith in a contest that remained too close to call. The price later eased to 89%, leaving Hyde-Smith at 11% in the market.

The exchange’s shift was dramatic. Traders had assigned Colom only about a 15% chance before Election Day and had favored Hyde-Smith throughout the campaign, pricing her near 89% in the final week. Kalshi’s polling average had shown Hyde-Smith ahead by roughly five points, and President Donald Trump rallied for her in Corinth during the campaign’s closing week.

Colom’s price fell as low as 9% around midnight Eastern time on election night, then rose to 60% by 1 a.m. as returns arrived from Hinds County and majority-Black areas of the Delta and southwest Mississippi. He later moved ahead in the vote count, reached 84% on the market and climbed to 92% around the time of a Wednesday press conference. Kalshi’s margin market still forecast a Colom win of less than half a percentage point.

One Kalshi snapshot showed 95.6% of votes counted, with Colom on 462,821 votes to Hyde-Smith’s 462,778, a 43-vote gap, while both stood at 48.9%. The BBC later reported a 65-vote Colom lead with 96% counted and about 50,000 ballots outstanding. NBC News said Hyde-Smith would need 49% of the remaining vote to catch or pass him, and calculated that the Senate contest had shifted 22.9 percentage points toward Democrats compared with the 2024 presidential election.

The result could take days to settle. Qualifying Mississippi mail ballots can arrive after Election Day if postmarked by then. Although Kalshi said a candidate could seek a recount through a judge, the BBC and Election Law Blog said Mississippi has no automatic recount or general recount mechanism under state law. Election Law Blog noted that a losing candidate could still litigate decisions to include or exclude particular ballots, and that the Senate has constitutional authority to judge its members’ elections.

A Colom victory would end a Democratic Senate drought in Mississippi stretching back more than 40 years and make him the state’s first Black senator elected since 1875. Hyde-Smith, first elected in 2018, led when roughly 30% of votes had been counted before Colom gained a narrow edge as processing continued.