Mississippi voters will choose a U.S. senator to represent the state in Congress in the general election on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026. Use this guide to learn about candidates’ backgrounds and policy views.
U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Incumbent Republican
Background: U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is a Brookhaven, Mississippi, native who attended Lawrence County Academy, a segregation academy, and earned degrees at Copiah-Lincoln Community College and the University of Southern Mississippi.
She served in the Mississippi Senate as a Democrat from 2000 until 2010, when she switched to the Republican Party for the remaining two years of her term. Hyde-Smith served as Mississippi’s agriculture and commerce commissioner from 2012 until 2018, when Gov. Phil Bryant picked her to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran. She won a special election in 2018 to serve the remainder of Cochran’s term and voters reelected her for a four-year term in 2022.
In the U.S. Senate, she is a member of the U.S. Senate committees for Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; Appropriations; Energy and Natural Resources; and Rules and Administration.
In May 2019, Hyde-Smith cosponsored the Transporting Livestock Across America Safely Act, a bipartisan bill to reform hours of service for livestock haulers by allowing drivers to rest any time during their trips without the time being counted against their hours of service. The legislation was unsuccessful.
She supported the Agricultural Trucking Relief Act in July 2019 that would change the definition of an agricultural commodity to add horticultural and aquacultural products and encourage consistency in regulation between federal and state agencies in the agricultural trucking industry. The bill was unsuccessful.
In February 2024, Hyde-Smith was the sole force behind blocking a federal bill to protect access to in-vitro fertilization treatments in the aftermath of the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling in LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine. In a speech on the Senate floor on Feb. 28, 2024, she said the bill went too far beyond IVF access, which she said she supported, and would “legalize the creation of human-animal chimeras.”
“Creating rights to human cloning, the genetic engineering of human embryos and surrogacy is too extreme and goes far beyond IVF,” Hyde-Smith said on the Senate floor.
In 2022, she voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which formally repealed the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act and codified federal protections for same-sex couples. The senator also opposes abortion rights and has supported personhood-style legislation that would prohibit abortions from the moment of conception.
Hyde-Smith is a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, and she voted in favor of the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, House Resolution 1. The law cuts $5 trillion in taxes, cuts the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, adds work requirements for Medicaid enrollment that could cut millions off the program, and increases funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall and Trump’s deportation efforts.
Hyde-Smith voted against creating an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
She voted to block a 2022 bill that would’ve banned foreign entities from making campaign donations to U.S. candidates and that also would have strengthened disclosures on campaign expenditures and political advertisements.
The senator voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that helped address the Jackson water crisis—legislation that her Mississippi Republican colleague, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, supported.
During a 2025 Senate Rules and Administration Committee meeting, the senator also voted against a measure that proposed banning Congress members and their spouses from trading individual stocks.
In June 2026, Hyde-Smith cosponsored the Lieutenant Osvaldo Albarati Stopping Prison Contraband Act (S.736) to raise the penalty from a misdemeanor to a felony for smuggling or possessing a cellphone in federal prison. The Senate passed the bill on June 10, but the House held it at the desk on June 15. She also cosponsored the Cellphone Jamming Reform Act (S.1137), to allow state and federal prisons to use cellphone jamming systems that interfere with the cellphones’ wireless communication abilities to prevent inmates from using them in prison. That bill has not seen any action in Congress.
“Contraband cellphones in federal prisons pose a risk to guards and other prison personnel, and in the worst cases to the victims of crime orchestrated using cellphones from within prison walls. Those supplying the phones are just as much to blame, and this bill ups the price they’ll pay,” Hyde-Smith said in a June 11 press release. “I’m pleased this bill has been passed now to give the House time to pass it and get it to the President.”
Hyde-Smith helped intervene in the deportation of the Makoka brothers, allowing the boys to return to their host family in Diamondhead, Mississippi.
She cosponsored legislation to fund six rural Mississippi hospitals, including Greenwood Leflore Hospital, to allow them to continue using Medicare hospital payment models that will help with financial sustainability and health care access.
Policy Views:
- Opposes abortion rights
- Supports Israel’s war in Gaza
- Opposes same-sex marriage
- Opposes Medicaid expansion
- Supports in-vitro fertilization access
- Cosponsored legislation to help fund rural hospitals
- Wants to ban incarcerated people from having and using cell phones
Website: www.hydesmith.senate.gov
Social Media: Facebook | X | Instagram
Scott Colom, Democrat
Background: Scott Colom is a seventh-generation Mississippian who was born and raised in Columbus, where he became the city’s first Black prosecutor and still resides today. He gained his bachelor’s degree from Mississippi College and his juris doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He currently serves as the district attorney for Mississippi’s 16th district which includes Lowndes, Oktibbeha, Clay and Noxubee counties.
Former President Joe Biden nominated Colom to serve as a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi on Oct. 14, 2022. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith later blocked the Senate from even considering his nomination in 2023 by refusing to return a “blue slip” to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Senators can block judicial nominees from their home states if they do not submit the slip. Her colleague, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, supported Colom’s nomination.
As she explained her decision to block Scott Colom’s nomination to the federal judiciary in 2023, Sen. Hyde-Smith said that she disapproved of Colom’s support for transgender rights and the support he garnered from a PAC that billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros funded in 2015.
In 2021, Mississippi enacted a law banning transgender student athletes from participating on teams that match their gender identity. Colom had not directly addressed that issue, but did sign a letter in 2021 opposing “ongoing efforts to criminalize transgender people and gender-affirming healthcare across the country,” including efforts to “criminalize parents who allow their children to receive medically recommended treatments.” The letter did not mention sports.
Colom told the Mississippi Free Press on Aug. 25, 2025, that as the coach of his daughters’ girls’ soccer team, he does not support “biological boys … playing girls’ sports.”
“I never believed that. But I will tell you, as a Mississippian walking around and talking to voters, talking to citizens, I talk to a lot of people, unlike our current senator, who hasn’t had a town hall since she’s been senator. I’ve talked to a lot of people, and they’ve never brought this up to me, Heather. Never, not one time,” he told this reporter on Aug. 29.
As a district attorney, Colom said he has a conviction rate of 94% on cases prosecuted by his office.
He is a strong proponent of rehabilitating incarcerated people so that they can become skilled, educated workers upon their release from prison. He said one of his top priorities if elected to the U.S. Senate is to make prisons safer and provide more educational opportunities. One way to improve safety is to increase prison guards’ salaries, he noted.
In his campaign for U.S. Senate, he promised to lead the charge to abolish the federal income tax for teachers and police officers making less than a $70,000 annual salary. Colom supports raising the minimum wage, which has not increased since Congress set it at $7.25 an hour in 2009. The minimum wage in Mississippi is based on the federal minimum wage law.
He says he supports gun ownership under the Second Amendment. The candidate wants to ban lawmakers from trading individual stocks, aim for campaign finance transparency, and “drag the Epstein files into the light,” he said at the Neshoba County Fair on June 24.
“I’ll also fight to cut taxes for teachers, our police and our working families, not just folks at the very top,” Colom said at the fair. “I will work with anybody—Republican, Democrat, Independent—that wants to lower costs, save our rural hospitals, bring good jobs to Mississippi and raise wages.”
Policy Views:
- Wants to cut federal income taxes for teachers, cops
- Aims to raise the federal minimum wage
- Hopes to rehabilitate and educate incarcerated people
- Supports transparency in campaign finance filings
- Wants to ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks
- Aims for transparency with the Jeffrey Epstein files
- Won’t “compromise” Second Amendment rights to gun ownership
Website: scottcolom.com
Social Media: Facebook | X | Instagram | TikTok
Ty Pinkins, Independent
Background: Ty Pinkins is a decorated U.S. Army veteran and the son of Mississippi Delta farmers in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, who was the first in his family to graduate from high school and college. He obtained his law degree from Georgetown University and worked as a public-interest lawyer for the Mississippi Center for Justice representing Mississippians in the Delta’s underserved communities until 2023, when he first started running for U.S. Senate.
Pinkins lost the 2024 U.S. Senate race to incumbent U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker. Pinkins left the Democratic Party to become an Independent in July 2025 while campaigning for his bid for U.S. Sen. Hyde-Smith’s seat. The candidate also unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for Mississippi Secretary of State in 2023, losing to incumbent Republican Michael Watson, after former Democratic candidate Shuwaski Young dropped out of the race.
“I’m running as an independent veteran for Mississippi because leaders in both parties in Washington have failed to live up to the principles (Thomas) Jefferson put on paper 250 years ago,” Pinkins said at the Neshoba County Fair on June 24. “For nearly half a century, both political parties have had multiple chances to lead under unified government, controlling the White House, the House of Representatives and the United States Senate at the same time. They had the power, they had the votes, they had the opportunity to deliver lasting change—and still we’re dealing with a broken immigration system, rising prices, unaffordable healthcare, exploding debt and war after war after war.”
The 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission found that corporations and outside groups can spend as much money on elections as they wish. If elected, the independent candidate for senator said he would advocate for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and sponsor legislation that bans insider stock trading in Congress.
Pinkins’s platform has five pillars: economic investment in rural towns; affordable health care in every municipality; care for veterans; voting rights; and cleaning up government by banning stock trading for lawmakers and repealing Citizens United.
He says he believes that Medicaid expansion is key to helping solve Mississippi’s healthcare issues, including hospital closures, unaffordable costs and a lack of access to care. The candidate also wants to strengthen the public-education system by raising teacher salaries, boosting literacy programs and expanding preschool and kindergarten programs.
Pinkins supports legal immigration and wants to offer a pathway to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants.
Policy Views:
- Wants to fix the immigration system to offer a pathway to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants
- Supports Medicaid expansion
- Plans to invest in healthcare for veterans
- Aims to lower costs of gas, groceries and health care
- Would vote to ban stock trading for lawmakers
- Wants to repeal Citizens’ United
- Supports policies that protect LGBTQ+ rights
Website: www.typinkins.com/
Social Media: Facebook | X | Instagram | TikTok
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