Southern Democrats gained 10 to 26 points, but Mississippi is not decided

Fact-check · 2026 midterms · Mississippi, Texas, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina

Reviewing: viral Bluesky posts and campaign statements, Nov. 3 to 6, 2026 · Published 2026-11-06 · 33 sources · Counts are unofficial unless marked certified

Verdicts

• Mostly True“Scott Colom’s lead just grew again… His lead keeps growing as more ballots are counted. Mississippi is on the brink of electing its first Democratic U.S. senator in 44 years!”Jon Cooper, Bluesky, 14,334 likes when read Nov. 6Colom’s lead rose from 28 votes at midnight on election night, as the Mississippi Free Press reported, to 1,813 in the AP count, and Mississippi last elected a Democratic senator in 1982. Cooper’s exact totals (a 1,974-vote lead, later 2,087) do not match the AP and he names no source. “On the brink” is fair; the race has not been called.
• Unproven“Scott Colom is going to be the next Senator from Mississippi.”Marc Elias, Colom campaign lawyer, BlueskyA forecast from the candidate’s own counsel. The AP has not called the race, mail ballots can arrive through Nov. 10, and affidavit ballots are still being judged county by county.
• Unproven“Cindy Hyde-Smith is going to represent Mississippi in the United States Senate for the next six years… We believe thousands of votes remain to be counted from dozens of Republican counties.”Hyde-Smith campaign, XThe premise is partly right: Rankin and Lee counties, both Hyde-Smith strongholds, hold about 3,200 uncounted affidavit ballots. Thousands more sit in counties Colom leads, including Hinds and DeSoto, and the outcome is a forecast either way.
• UnprovenImplied: the outstanding affidavit ballots will break for Hyde-Smith and close the gap.The one county breakdown published so far points the other way: Lafayette County’s affidavits went 69% to 29% for Colom, against a 49–48 split in the county overall.
• MisleadingThe Mississippi GOP declared “230,000 mostly Black Mississippi voters ‘inactive’ just hours before the midterm vote in order to block their votes.”Robert Scott Horton, Bluesky230,000 is the statewide total of inactive voters, built up over months, not a list flagged hours before the vote. County election commissions do the inactivating, using data the Republican secretary of state’s office supplied. No source we found reports the race of those voters or shows intent. Inactive voters can still vote by affidavit, and those ballots are being counted now.
• Mostly True“WE JUST TURNED TEXAS BLUE! … James is the first Democrat to win a statewide election in Texas since 1994, and he is the first Texas Democrat to win a Senate election since 1988.”Indivisible, BlueskyBoth “since” dates check out, and Democrats won or led every statewide executive race KUT tracked and flipped the Texas House. Republicans still hold the Texas Senate and a majority of the state’s U.S. House seats, so the state did not turn blue top to bottom.
• UnprovenImplied: Texas is now a Democratic state.One midterm under an unpopular president of the other party does not establish a realignment. NPR’s own analysis poses this as an open question for 2028.
• Misleading“Our margin gains were almost identical to everywhere else, we just didn’t quite get over the line!”Florida Bluesky userFlorida’s Senate margin moved 10.2 points toward Democrats from 2024, a large shift. The four other Southern Senate races we measured moved 20.2 to 25.8 points, about twice as far.

How far the South moved

The Bluesky trend that drew attention to these states is a set of vote-margin comparisons, and the comparison matters more than the raw result. We use one yardstick for every state: the margin of the total vote in the 2026 U.S. Senate race against Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential margin in the same state. That compares a midterm to a presidential year with a different electorate, so the numbers measure how far the result moved, not how many individual voters switched.

Compared against: Trump’s 2024 margin in each state from official results (Texas, Georgia and Florida secretaries of state) or, for Mississippi and South Carolina, Wikipedia tables citing the state certifications; and each 2026 Senate race in the five Southern states where we could get a near-final count. 2026 figures are unofficial and labeled with their source and count status.

The governor’s races tell the same story at a smaller scale. Gina Hinojosa beat Gov. Greg Abbott by 7.1 points in Texas, a 20.8-point shift from 2024; Keisha Lance Bottoms won Georgia by 8.6, a 10.8-point shift; and Byron Donalds held Florida for Republicans by 1.3 points over David Jolly, an 11.8-point shift, each measured against the same 2024 presidential margins.^{[16][22][25][21][23][26]} In Georgia, Democrats won all 11 statewide offices on the ballot, from Senate to two Public Service Commission seats, while the state’s U.S. House delegation stayed 9 Republicans to 5 Democrats, the same split as 2024.^[22][23]

Mississippi: what is counted and what is not

As of the AP’s last update on Thursday, Nov. 5, at 5:44 p.m., Colom had 466,775 votes (49.0%) to Hyde-Smith’s 464,962 (48.9%), with independent Ty Pinkins at 20,007 (2.1%) and an estimated 96% of votes counted. That is a 1,813-vote lead, about 0.2% of the votes counted. The AP has not called the race. Mississippi has no recount law and no Senate runoff, so the plurality winner of the final count takes the seat.^[7][8]

Three pools of ballots remain. Secretary of State Michael Watson said Thursday that about 3,300 mail absentee ballots were outstanding; ballots postmarked by Election Day count if they arrive within five business days, by Nov. 10.^[9] Affidavit (provisional) ballots are the larger pool. Watson said 6,936 had been processed; CNBC put the number needing eligibility review at 10,000 to 15,000, the same range the Colom campaign gave on election night.^[8][12] Voters who cast one because they lacked ID have until Nov. 10 to show it to the circuit clerk.^[9] County certification is due Nov. 13 and state certification Dec. 3.^[12]

Is the lead growing?

Yes, in the AP count. The Mississippi Free Press reported Colom ahead by 28 votes at midnight on election night and, citing the AP, by 1,138 on Wednesday evening; the AP showed 1,813 by Thursday evening, after a 136-vote gain from seven county updates.^[31][7][9] Tabulators disagree on the exact figure. The Free Press reported 1,138 from the AP and 1,818 from Decision Desk HQ on the same Thursday morning.^[9] Jon Cooper’s viral posts gave 1,974 at 5:18 p.m. Eastern and 2,087 near 11 p.m., both above the AP’s 1,813, and cited no source.^[1] We could not match his totals to any published count. The direction of his claim holds; the specific numbers are unverified. His “44 years” line is checked under Precedent.

Is Colom “going to be the next senator”?

Marc Elias, whose law firm represents Colom, posted on Wednesday that Colom “is going to be the next Senator from Mississippi,” and late Thursday that his firm represents “the next Senator from Mississippi, Scott Colom.”^[2] The Congressional Black Caucus PAC went further on Facebook, posting “HISTORY IS MADE IN MISSISSIPPI”; the Mississippi Free Press published a correction noting the race had not been called.^[9] The AP’s decision desk wrote Thursday that it expects several thousand provisional ballots to be counted before Nov. 10.^[7] Colom may well win. A lead of 0.2% with thousands of ballots unresolved is not a result, and the claim is a prediction from an interested party.

Do “dozens of Republican counties” still hold thousands of votes?

Hyde-Smith’s campaign posted Thursday that she “is going to represent Mississippi in the United States Senate for the next six years” and that “we believe thousands of votes remain to be counted from dozens of Republican counties.”^[8] Some of that is documented. Rankin County, where she leads 61.7% to 36.1%, has 1,667 affidavit ballots awaiting decisions plus 282 mail ballots; Lee County, where she leads 58% to 40%, has 1,545 affidavits.^[9] Other pools sit where Colom leads: about 2,100 affidavits in DeSoto County (Colom 52% to 46%), roughly 900 in Oktibbeha, 550 in Lowndes and an unknown number in majority-Black, Democratic-leaning Hinds County, where counting continues with no estimated finish. Jackson County on the coast has more than 1,400 affidavits, at least 327 of them counted; the reporting does not say which candidate leads there.^[9] No public source tallies the remaining ballots by county partisanship statewide, so “dozens” is unverified, and the six-year prediction is a forecast like Elias’s.

Two legal moves are in motion. On Thursday the Hyde-Smith campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee asked all 82 counties to keep affidavit ballots physically separate from other ballots; Colom’s lawyers replied that the demand “has no basis in Mississippi law” and would threaten ballot secrecy.^[8][9] State GOP chairman Mike Hurst said the party would bring court challenges “if and when” it found violations, and added that “right now, there’s nothing for us to do under state law.”^[9]

The 230,000 “inactive” voters

A post on Friday attributes the “election drama” to “the Mississippi GOP’s last minute vote fraud, declaring… 230,000 mostly Black Mississippi voters ‘inactive’ just hours before the midterm vote in order to block their votes.”^[5] The figure is real and the underlying story is serious, but the post rearranges it. A Mississippi Today analysis published the day before the election found that more than 230,000 voters, about 1 in 9, were listed as inactive statewide, and that inactivations had more than doubled in some counties in the eight months since the March primaries.^[11] That is a running total accumulated over months, not a list produced hours before the vote.

The inactivations followed Secretary of State Watson’s $50,000 deal to give counties credit-bureau data from Experian for cleaning voter rolls; Mississippi Today had earlier documented legitimate voters wrongly inactivated with that data, and his office has since switched vendors.^[11] County election commissions carry out the inactivations. DeSoto County alone accounted for more than a third of the statewide increase, removing over 15,000 voters from active rolls.^[11] None of the reporting we read gives the racial makeup of inactivated voters. Inactive voters were not blocked outright: they could cast an affidavit ballot, which counts if the voter was registered in that precinct and the envelope is properly signed.^[12] Whether the purge cost legitimate voters their ballots will be visible only when counties report how many affidavits they rejected and why.

Did Texas turn blue?

On the statewide ballot, yes. James Talarico beat Attorney General Ken Paxton for the Senate seat 55.1% to 43.0%, a margin of about 1.2 million votes with 99% counted, and Hinojosa unseated Abbott 52.8% to 45.7%.^[15][16] Democrats also won lieutenant governor, attorney general and railroad commissioner, and led for comptroller, agriculture commissioner and land commissioner in the Secretary of State’s count as reported by KUT.^[17] The AP projected Democrats would win 76 of 150 Texas House seats, a majority, after flipping 21.^[18]

Two parts of the state did not flip. Republicans keep the Texas Senate, 19 seats to 12 by AP projection, and CBS News counted 18 U.S. House seats won by Republicans with five more leaning their way, against 13 for Democrats with one more likely.^[18] “Texas turned blue” is accurate as a description of Tuesday’s statewide vote. The post that called the state “completely BLUE” overstates it.^[32]

Florida’s smaller swing

The Florida claims are mostly correct about the result and wrong about the comparison. Ashley Moody beat Angie Nixon 50.87% to 47.99% in the state’s unofficial count, a margin of 238,733 votes, or 2.9 points; posts that she won “by under 3 percentage points” are right.^[33][24][28] That is a 10.2-point move from Trump’s 13.1-point win in 2024 and a 13.5-point move from Marco Rubio’s 16.4-point Senate win in 2022.^[26][27]

A Florida Bluesky user who pushed back on calls to give up on the state wrote that “our margin gains were almost identical to everywhere else.”^[6] Against the Southern states in the table above, they were about half: Texas moved 25.8 points, Mississippi 23.1, South Carolina 22.3 and Georgia 20.2. The governor’s races complicate the picture: Florida’s 11.8-point shift beat Georgia’s 10.8 and trailed Texas’s 20.8. Ten points is still a double-digit move, and the poster’s larger point that Florida is competitive is supported by a 1.3-point governor’s race. “Almost identical” is not.

Precedent: “since 1994,” “in 44 years”

Compared against: every statewide general election in Texas since 1994, using PolitiFact’s 2012 review and 2026 reporting by KUT and the AP; every U.S. Senate election in Mississippi since 1982, using CNBC’s reporting and the 2018 and 2020 results.

Indivisible’s two dates hold. PolitiFact found in 2012 that the last Democrats elected statewide in Texas won in 1994, Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, Attorney General Dan Morales and Comptroller John Sharp among them, and called the state’s drought the longest in the country.^[20] KUT described Talarico’s win as breaking a “32-year losing streak” and as the first Democratic U.S. Senate win in Texas since 1988; the AP notes Texas had elected only Republican governors since 1994.^[17][16] “First” is shared: the AP called Talarico’s race at 11:03 p.m. and Hinojosa’s at 11:17 p.m., and several other Democrats won statewide the same night.^[15][16]

Cooper’s “first Democratic U.S. senator in 44 years” also holds. CNBC reports Mississippi has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1982.^[8] Hyde-Smith won her 2020 race by about 10 points, 54.1% to 44.1%, over Mike Espy.^[13] If Colom wins he would also be the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction.^[7][8]

What the posts imply

Hyde-Smith’s camp implies the remaining affidavits will rescue her. The only county breakdown published so far runs the other way. In Lafayette County, home of the University of Mississippi, affidavit ballots went 142 to 60 for Colom (68.6% to 29.0%), while the county as a whole split 49.4% to 48.3%.^[10] One county does not set the statewide pattern; Rankin and Lee could break hard for Hyde-Smith. The implication is unproven, and the available evidence leans against it.

“Texas turned blue” carries a second idea: that Texas is now a Democratic state. That has not been tested. The 2026 electorate voted in a midterm with the president’s approval average down to as low as 36% and a war raising gas prices, and NPR’s analysis asks whether the result is a realignment or “a giant asterisk” that will be settled in 2028, when Democrats “won’t have Trump as their rocket fuel.”^[19] It reports that Latino voters, whom Trump lost by only 5 points in 2024, “swung strongly away” from him this year, a sign the state’s electorate is still in motion.^[19]

The 230,000 post implies the inactivations, not voters, explain why the race is close. The count so far does not show it: Colom’s lead widened on Wednesday, the day Hinds County began counting affidavits, though no source has published how those ballots broke, and Democracy Docket ties this year’s large affidavit volume to the inactivation surge.^[31][12][10] We rate that within the post’s main verdict above.

What it changes

For Mississippi, the next week decides the seat on narrow, administrative questions: which affidavit envelopes are signed correctly, which ID-less voters return by Nov. 10, and whether courts entertain a challenge in a state with no recount law. The Republican demand to segregate affidavit ballots matters because it would make individual ballots traceable to a later challenge; Colom’s lawyers argue that conflicts with state ballot-secrecy rulings.^[9] If the final margin stays this narrow, affidavits cast by voters inactivated with commercial data could be a deciding pool, which would put Watson’s Experian program at the center of any dispute.

For the region, the swing table points to a forecast, labeled as one: a uniform 20-point shift from 2024 is what turns states Trump won by 13 to 23 points into toss-ups or Democratic wins, and Florida’s 10-point shift was not enough there. Whether 2028 presidential campaigns treat Texas and Georgia as battlegrounds depends on whether the Latino shift NPR reported this year holds without Trump on the ballot.^[19] And in Georgia, an 18-point Senate win that moved no House seats shows how much a district map can absorb.^[22]

What would change these verdicts: a race call in Mississippi (Elias’s and Hyde-Smith’s forecasts become true or false); county-by-county affidavit breakdowns from Rankin, Lee, Hinds and DeSoto (the implied claim about affidavits); a demographic breakdown of the inactivated voters (the “mostly Black” part of the 230,000 claim); and certified Florida results, which could move its swing by a few tenths of a point.

Sources