Tense wait for Mississippi Senate vote result

USA:

Jackson, United States

Mississippi residents faced a "nerve-wracking" wait to see whether the southern state elects its first Black senator in more than a century as vote-counting dragged on Sunday after this past week's US midterms.

Voters who spoke to AFP in the state capital Jackson on Saturday anticipated that history could be in the making in the whisker-close race between Democrat Scott Colom, an African-American man, and Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, a white woman.

With 97 percent of the vote counted by Sunday afternoon, Colom was 2,574 votes ahead of Hyde-Smith -- a gap of just 0.3 percentage points.

Mississippi has not elected a Democratic senator since 1982, and Colom would be its first Black senator in nearly 150 years -- since the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War that ended slavery.

Gregory Glass, a 47-year-old restaurant owner, himself an African-American, said a victory for Colom would be "historic" but admitted to having "bittersweet" feelings about that.

"It should have happened sooner than that, especially in Mississippi, in a state that has so many African-Americans in it," said Glass.

According to the US Census Bureau, more than one-third of the state's population, long viewed as a bastion of Republican politics, is Black.

A victory for Colom would also put another staunchly Republican state -- including Texas, South Carolina and Kansas -- in the Democrats' column for Senate in Tuesday's election.

The midterms were a resounding win for Democrats, who seized control of both houses of Congress as voters nationwide delivered a stinging rebuke to Republican President Donald Trump.

But the count is not over yet.

The unusually long wait reflects Mississippi's election procedures, which allow officials several days to process mail-in and provisional ballots -- potentially enough to decide the contest.