All eyes are on Democrat Scott Colom as a candidate with the potential to unseat a Trump-aligned Republican incumbent and change his own party’s 40-plus years of U.S. Senate losses.

Colom is technically the 15^th Democrat nominated for a Mississippi U.S. Senate seat since the last year a member of the party won. That number is slightly deceptive, though, given that two of the previous candidates—Erik Fleming and Mike Espy—each ran twice, meaning there were 15 candidacies by 13 individuals. In two of the cycles in between their races, no Democrat appeared on the general election ballot.

The last time the Democrats still had the political clout to elect a U.S. senator was 1982. The following is a thumbnail history of Democratic U.S. Senate candidates following the party’s loss of overwhelming public support in the 1980s.

• 1982

By this year, John C. Stennis had been in the Senate since a 1947 special election was called to fill the seat opened by U.S. Sen. Theodore Bilbo’s death. In the 1982 election, Stennis had run the Senate’s Armed Services Committee from 1969 to 1980. At 81, he drew a 34-year-old Republican challenge from lobbyist Haley Barbour, who made age the issue. Stennis took 414,099 votes to Barbour’s 230,927, carrying 64.2 percent and all but two counties. He did not run again in 1988 and left office in January 1989. No Democrat has won a Mississippi Senate race since.

• 1984

William Winter, an influential Democrat, had just finished his four-year limited term as governor, having earned accolades for shepherding through the Education Reform Act, when he took on Mississippi’s other U.S. senator, incumbent Thad Cochran. Cochran beat him 580,314 to 371,926. Winter took 39.06 percent of the vote.

• 1988

Wayne Dowdy, a Democratic congressman from the Fourth District ran for the seat Stennis was vacating but lost to Trent Lott, 510,380 to 436,339. Dowdy took 46.09 percent, closer than any Democrat has come to winning a U.S. Senate race since. He raised $2,889,015 against Lott’s $3,847,126, marking the only time during the post-1980s era that a Mississippi Democrat has been within a million dollars of the Republican candidate.

• 1990

There was no Democrat on the ballot this year. Cochran ran unopposed by a major party candidate.

• 1994

Democrat Ken Harper, a lawyer from Vicksburg, took on incumbent Lott but lost the election 418,333 to 189,752, taking 31.2 percent of the vote. The amount of campaign funds Harper raised is not retrievable from the Federal Elections Commission, where the finance volumes for those years are unsearchable scans. Filings reviewed by The Associated Press in February 1996 showed Harper closing out the campaign with $538 on hand and more than $59,300 in obligations, almost all of that personal and bank loans he had made to his own campaign.

• 1996

James W. “Bootie” Hunt of Ackerman lost to Cochran, 624,154 to 240,647, taking 27.39 percent of the vote, the weakest performance by any Mississippi Democrat in this period. The FEC lists Hunt as a candidate but reports no financial data at all for the 1995-1996 cycle. In February of that year the Associated Press, going through the commission’s records, found no report on file from him.

• 2000

Troy D. Brown Sr., a Democrat and political unknown, lost to Lott, 654,941 to 314,090, taking 31.59 percent.

• 2002

There was no Democrat on the ballot for U.S. senator from Mississippi in 2002. Steven Douglas Turney won the June Democratic primary with 52.23 percent and then withdrew. Cochran’s only opponent in November was the Reform Party’s Shawn O’Hara, who took 15.42 percent.

• 2006

State Rep. Erik Fleming, a Democrat, lost to Lott 388,399 to 213,000 and took 34.87 percent. Through Oct. 18, 2006, Fleming raised $43,157. Lott raised $2,480,556.

• 2008

This year was a special election to fill Lott’s unexpired term after he resigned. Former Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove lost to Republican Roger Wicker, 683,409 to 560,064 and took 45.04 percent, the best showing by a Mississippi Democrat since Dowdy. He raised $5,372,412 to Wicker’s $6,227,613.

Also in 2008, Erik Fleming was again on the ballot but this time lost to Cochran, 766,111 to 480,915, taking 38.56 percent. Fleming does not appear anywhere in the FEC’s state-by-state listing of Senate campaign finance for that cycle, and the agency’s page for him still says the data is being processed.

• 2012

Democrat Albert N. Gore Jr. lost to Wicker, 709,626 to 503,467, taking 40.55 percent of the vote. He filed no campaign finance reports that have been published by the FEC.

• 2014

Democrat Travis W. Childers, a former congressman from the First District, threw his hat into the ring after Chris McDaniel nearly took the Republican nomination from Cochran. Childers lost, 378,481 to 239,439, and took 37.89 percent. He raised $691,776. Cochran raised $7,094,038.

• 2018

State Rep. David Baria, a Democrat from the Gulf Coast, lost to Wicker 547,619 to 369,567, taking 39.47 percent. He raised $904,539. Wicker raised $6,622,480.

In the 2018 special election, former agriculture secretary and congressman Mike Espy finished second in a four-way field and forced a runoff against Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith. She won the runoff 486,769 to 420,819. Espy took 46.37 percent, the closest any Mississippi Democrat has come since Stennis. He also outraised her: $7,488,522 to Hyde-Smith’s $5,545,933.

• 2020

Espy again ran against Hyde-Smith in the following regular election, and again lost, 709,511 to 578,691, taking 44.13 percent. He raised $12,320,919, more than three times what Hyde-Smith raised and more than any Mississippi Democrat before or since.

• 2024

Ty Pinkins, a Democrat and a 21-year Army veteran with a law degree from Georgetown and no previous record in elected office, lost to Wicker 761,934 to 450,749. He had raised $887,198 through Sept. 30, 2024, and $1,047,306 through the end of the year. Wicker raised $9,850,511.

• 2026

Scott Colom, a Democrat who has been district attorney for the Sixteenth Circuit since 2016, is running against Hyde-Smith, who blocked his nomination to the federal bench in 2023. Through June 30, 2026, his campaign had reported $2,384,921.

Vote totals come from the Federal Election Commission’s official election results and, for 2024, from the Mississippi Secretary of State. Finance figures come from the FEC except where noted.

A list of every Mississippi county where Choctaw-language voting materials are provided to Native American voters has surfaced in a contentious lawsuit seeking to uncover the full extent of the federal government’s plans to deploy law enforcement and soldiers to polling places and election offices during the 2026 midterm election.

The 11 counties are contained in newly disclosed Department of Homeland Security court records that identify every county nationwide legally obliged to provide non-English language materials, according to District of Columbia District Court records. The list was circulated among high-ranking Trump administration officials, where the subject line notes “DOJ Criminal Checklist – Voter-Related Prosecution Requirements.”

Mississippi’s Choctaw and other Native American communities have not been a primary target of the immigration and voter-fraud directives issued during Donald Trump’s second term. But the administration’s sweeping efforts to expand the White House’s role in elections have raised concerns about a chilling effect on minority voters, including Native Americans, who have a long history of discrimination at the ballot box.

DHS’s legal disclosures don’t specifically mention that the administration intends to target any voters or send federal agents to polling places. But amid accusations that the Trump administration is actively pursuing voter suppression and fraud prosecutions ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms, the appearance of Mississippi’s Choctaw communities in unexplained records connecting language-minority jurisdictions and potential election prosecutions has drawn scrutiny from attorneys seeking the records.

“The logical inference that I think anyone would make is that they are thinking about the prosecution of federal election crimes in jurisdictions where elections are conducted in a language other than English,” said Dan Freeman, the Democratic National Committee’s litigation director and a former Department of Justice voting section attorney.

The Democratic National Committee obtained the heavily redacted records through a lawsuit against the DHS, Department of Justice, and Department of Defense.

The case has already forced the administration to turn over thousands of pages detailing the extent of election enforcement. But recent filings indicate that thousands more pages remain outstanding and may not be processed before the Nov. 3 election. DNC attorneys have also challenged extensive redactions in the records already produced.

Among the records is President Trump’s March 25, 2025, executive order, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” part of a broader administration effort to identify and prosecute noncitizens suspected of registering or voting illegally.

In a statement, DHS said a lack of English proficiency should not shield anyone who violates federal election law from prosecution.

James Percival, DHS general counsel, is among the officials named in the records. Percival has been closely involved in the second Trump administration’s immigration agenda, an enforcement effort that has increasingly intersected with the administration’s focus on elections.

Noncitizen voting, however, is rare. Multiple studies, state audits and the administration’s own enforcement campaign have identified few confirmed cases among the tens of millions of ballots cast in U.S. elections. Some suspected noncitizen registrations have also been traced to administrative or data errors.

Claims of widespread illegal voting became a central feature of Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss and have remained prominent in his political rhetoric. Since returning to office, his administration has used concerns about noncitizen voting to justify a series of federal initiatives involving voter rolls, citizenship verification and election administration, many of which have faced legal challenges. Critics say the president might resort to draconian measures, threatening the democratic process, to ensure that Republicans do not lose control of the U.S. House and/or the U.S. Senate.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in September that his department had more than 1,600 open voter-fraud investigations and had made 151 arrests. He said the department was examining more than 300,000 additional cases. Those figures describe suspected cases and investigations, not findings that 300,000 people voted illegally.

The DNC lawsuit argues that the administration is using federal power to interfere with the 2026 elections in ways that could benefit Republicans. The administration disputes accusations that its election initiatives are improper and says its efforts are intended to enforce federal law and protect election integrity.

At the same time, the federal government’s traditional election-security apparatus has been substantially diminished. The administration has cut staffing and programs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has historically worked with state and local election officials on cybersecurity, foreign threats, physical security and election-risk assessments. He also cut three of the four commissioners from the independent Election Assistance Commission.

The administration has separately sought restrictions on mail voting, proposed a larger USPS role in handling election mail, used federal citizenship and passport data to identify potentially ineligible voters, and sought voter-registration data from states, including unredacted information in some cases.

Those efforts represent a significant expansion of federal involvement in an election system that the Constitution largely divides between the states and Congress, with Congress possessing authority to regulate federal elections.

Why Mississippi is on the list

Mississippi law does not independently require counties to provide voting materials in the Choctaw language. Federal law does.

Attala, Carroll, Jackson, Jones, Kemper, Leake, Neshoba, Newton, Noxubee, Scott and Winston counties are covered by Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires certain jurisdictions to provide language assistance to voters who belong to designated language-minority groups and have limited proficiency in English.

Congress added Section 203 in 1975 after concluding that the original Voting Rights Act had not adequately addressed another barrier to the ballot, specifically that American citizens eligible to vote had difficulty participating because of limited English proficiency.

Lawmakers at the time had documented discrimination affecting American Indian, Alaska Native, Hispanic and Asian American citizens and concluded that language barriers were often intertwined with broader histories of discrimination, including unequal educational opportunities that contributed to lower literacy, registration and voting rates.

The formula requires language assistance wherever five percent of a county’s voters speak another language. However, federal law contains a separate provision for American Indian and Alaska Native populations living within American Indian areas. If the statutory threshold is met within such an area, a county containing all or part of it can become subject to Section 203 even when the Native population does not make up five percent of the county as a whole.

That distinction helps explain why 11 Mississippi counties must provide Choctaw-language assistance even though only three have Native American populations comprising more than five percent. More than 17 percent of Neshoba County’s population, for example, identifies as Native American.

The number of Choctaw speakers in Mississippi has more than doubled since 2011. Carroll County was added to the Section 203 list in 2021.

The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians has about 11,000 members spread among communities across rural Mississippi, and the tribe has previously undertaken substantial efforts to overcome barriers to voting.

In 2020, a $55,000 grant helped the tribe reach younger voters through social media and peer-to-peer texting, canvass communities and provide transportation to the polls for elderly tribal citizens. Childcare was offered to parents on Election Day, while Choctaw-language interpreters were made available at polling places on tribal lands.

“For decades, minority voices, which include the Choctaw people, have been suppressed,” Tribal Chief Cyrus Ben said at the time.

Voting barriers

For Native American voters, barriers to participating in elections have persisted long after they formally obtained voting rights.

Research has documented difficulties ranging from geographic isolation and unreliable mail service to inadequate polling locations, limited internet access, nonstandard residential addresses and voter-identification requirements. The particular obstacles vary widely among tribes and states.

Mississippi accepts tribal identification as a valid form of voter ID. But voting barriers do not necessarily have to be designed with Native Americans in mind to affect Native voters disproportionately.

Mississippi’s recent effort to maintain its voter rolls provides one example.

Beginning in 2025, the Secretary of State’s Office supplied county election officials with addresses derived in part from Experian data as part of an effort it said would strengthen election integrity. A Mississippi Today analysis found that at least 50,000 voters were subsequently made inactive because of it.

Experian itself had cautioned that the commercial information did not verify where a person legally resided.

A study by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission also found that Experian was more likely to suggest new addresses in counties with larger populations of certain racial minorities, including Black and Native American residents. The study did not determine whether the Experian addresses or the addresses already contained in voter files were correct.

The disparities extend well beyond Mississippi.

The Native American Rights Fund, a national nonprofit legal organization representing Native American tribes and citizens, noted in an Aug. 2026 report that Native voters continue to encounter disproportionate barriers at virtually every stage of the voting process. Using federal election-administration data from 30 counties where Native Americans constitute more than a quarter of the population, researchers found that new voter registrations fell 59 percent between 2020 and 2024, while voter-address confirmation notices increased 178 percent. Nine out of 10 of those notices went unanswered in 2024.

Registration problems accounted for 60 percent of provisional ballots cast in those counties, and provisional ballots were rejected at a rate nearly twice the national average.

“For Native Americans, the right to vote has been obstructed, delayed and denied across two centuries of United States history,” Native American Rights Fund Senior Staff Attorney Jacqueline De León said in an Aug. 26 statement. “Closing that participation gap is not simply a technical problem. It’s a question of whether American democracy is willing to extend its guarantees to all its citizens, including the first peoples of this land.”

Image: Choctaw dancers in Neshoba County (via Natalie Maynor, Flickr)

When U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said she would block Scott Colom from becoming a federal judge in April 2023, she cited as one reason that he had received district attorney’s race campaign funding from George Soros, the investor and philanthropist reviled by conservatives because he is a major liberal donor to Democratic political campaigns.

Hyde-Smith’s claim was untrue. Though Soros funding was used to promote Colom’s candidacy, neither he nor his campaign received any of the money, nor was there any coordination.

In a statement her office still posts online, Hyde-Smith explained her rationale for undermining Colom’s judicial nomination.

“I visited with the District Attorney recently, and I recognize that he is smart and well liked in his district,” Hyde-Smith said. “However, there are a number of concerns I have regarding his record.” Among them, she cited his position on legislation concerning female athletes, then this: “The significant support his campaign received from George Soros also weighs heavily against his nomination in my view. I simply cannot support his nomination to serve on the federal bench in Mississippi for a lifetime.”

Under Senate custom, a home-state senator’s withholding of support can stop a district court nomination without a vote. Colom was first nominated on Nov. 15, 2022, and renominated on Jan. 23, 2023. He never got a hearing, and the nomination was returned to President Joe Biden at the end of the 118th Congress.

The support Hyde-Smith referred to came from the 2015 race that made Colom district attorney for Mississippi’s Sixteenth Circuit Court District. A committee called Mississippi Safety and Justice registered that year, and the report it filed with the Secretary of State’s Elections Division on Jan. 8, 2016, covering Oct. 25-Dec. 31, 2015, lists $923,226.45 in disbursements for the year. The largest share of that, $716,125.72, went to the New York communications firm Berlin Rosen for work the committee itself described on the form as ‘Independent Expenditure - Support Scott Colom’ and ‘Independent Expenditure - Oppose Forrest Allgood,’ the incumbent district attorney. Every dollar the committee took in that year came from George Soros. The form reports $926,500 in contributions from him for 2015, the last of which was for $101,500 on Oct. 28, and lists his employer as Soros Fund Management and his occupation as chair.

Colom’s campaign did not receive any of the money. The committee registered as an independent expenditure group, which by law cannot coordinate with the candidate it supports. Nsombi Lambright signed the report as the committee’s contact person and swore before a notary that the spending was “not made in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of” any candidate or a candidate’s committee or agent.

Three years after Hyde-Smith’s erroneous statement, Colom is the Democratic nominee for her Senate seat. And this time he is, in fact, getting Soros money.

On Sept. 12, 2025, nine days after Colom registered his Senate committee, George Soros and his son Alexander each gave it $3,500 for the primary and $3,500 for the general, the maximum an individual may give for each election. Both listed the same New York address and gave their occupation as philanthropist. Stacey Abrams gave $1,000 on Sept. 30, 2025, routed through ActBlue and designated for the primary. The committee’s first report, covering Aug. 21-Sept. 30, 2025, lists $569,792.59 in contributions and a $25,000 loan from Colom to his own campaign, $594,792.59 in all. Through the committee’s most recent report, covering activity to June 30, 2026, it has listed no refund of either Soros contribution.

Meanwhile, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has kept using the 2015 money as a political cudgel even though its claim of a campaign contribution is erroneous. In a statement issued on March 10, 2026, after the primary, the NRSC’s regional press secretary Samantha Cantrell called Colom “handpicked by Chuck Schumer and George Soros to push their leftist agenda on Mississippi” and said he had “received $716,000 in support from a PAC bankrolled by liberal billionaire George Soros” in his first race for district attorney. That is the amount the committee reported paying Berlin Rosen.

Colom was nominated to the seat that opened when Judge Michael P. Mills took senior status on Nov. 1, 2021. It stayed empty for the rest of President Biden’s term. President Trump nominated James Donald Maxwell II to the judgeship on Sept. 2, 2025, the Senate confirmed him on Dec. 9, 2025, and Hyde-Smith’s office announced the confirmation. Colom is on the November ballot against her.

Image: Scott Colom, Cindy Hyde-Smith (via Creative Commons)

The case, now before the U.S. Supreme Court, centers on two Arizona laws passed in 2022 that require voters to prove citizenship and allow election officials to remove noncitizens from voter rolls within 90 days of an election—a period during which federal law restricts large-scale removals of registered voters.

The case isn’t exactly about what those laws do, but more about the principle of whether the state or the federal government has primary authority over voter eligibility, and to what extent.

Watson disagreed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s ruling that the Arizona laws were preempted by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

“The Constitution gives States exclusive authority to define and enforce voter qualifications,” Watson argued in the Sept. 4, 2026 friend-of-the-court brief jointly filed by the secretaries of state of Kentucky and Nebraska. Oral arguments are scheduled for Dec. 8, 2026.

It was a familiar position for Watson to take. In six years as Mississippi’s chief elections officer, he has built a substantial record of defending states’ constitutional authority to decide the “Times, Place and Manner of holding Congressional elections,” as noted in the nearly 240-year-old Elections Clause. He has defended that against previous presidents and even his own party—and he won in the Supreme Court earlier this year. But there’s a notable absence among the names Watson has vanquished to protect this constitutional right: President Donald Trump.

Watson’s seemingly contradictory position comes as Trump continues attempts to commandeer a far larger executive role in how federal elections are administered. In using executive orders and regulatory rule changes within agencies under his control, the president has sidestepped Congress and been accused of undermining the very Constitutional election laws Watson has spent years defending.

These interventions have raised an uncomfortable prospect that many of the nation’s secretaries of state have been preparing for as the highly divisive midterms rapidly approach. If Trump invoked emergency powers, or directed federal agencies to intervene in how Mississippi runs elections or even to alter results, would Watson treat it as the kind of federal intrusion he has consistently fought, or would he cooperate?

Watson, who is running for the office of lieutenant governor, did not respond to multiple requests for comment about what Mississippi plans to do if Trump declares a national emergency involving the midterms.

State Sen. David Blount told The Mississippi Independent it is difficult to determine what Watson has planned, but he was adamant that state officials have to do everything in their power to ensure that all elections are free from unconstitutional and outside interference, particularly from the highest office in the country.

“There is no law allowing the president to run our elections,” Blount, who worked as a communications director under former Democratic Secretary of State Eric Clark for 13 years, observed. “The federal government doesn’t run elections. The GOP doesn’t run elections. The states do.”

How it started and how it’s going

Watson’s Arizona intervention arrives amid heightened anxiety about the impending midterms and their potential consequences for the long-term stability of American democracy.

The story of how the nation arrived at this remarkable confluence of legal and political questions began in Arizona, after President Joe Biden unexpectedly carried the state by slightly more than 10,000 votes in 2020. Maricopa County quickly became the epicenter of President Trump’s election-fraud claims despite a GOP-ordered forensic audit of more than two million Maricopa County ballots finding 99 more votes for Biden and 261 fewer for Trump.

The audit failed to quell election-fraud claims and later helped give rise to the same election laws Watson is defending in the Supreme Court six years later. Federal courts found that Arizona’s legislature failed to produce evidence that any noncitizens were registered to vote before enacting the laws. Since then, extensive investigations into noncitizen voters have found almost no evidence of voter fraud.

Yet those unfounded claims have helped fuel a political movement that has produced new laws, new litigation and new assertions of federal power over elections—an ironic outcome given Watson’s passion for state election rights.

For now, Watson has not indicated whether or how he is preparing for potential unrest, including as a result of election interference by Trump.

Reuters interviewed more than 50 officials, including 12 secretaries of state, and found that nearly all were taking new precautions against political interference, federal investigations, misinformation, cyberattacks or violence.

Dozens of election officials and government attorneys attended training on responding to federal subpoenas and search warrants, while officials in Marin County, California have rehearsed what to do if immigration agents appear at polling places. Attorneys in Dane County, Wisconsin have drafted legal filings in advance in case the Trump administration attempts to seize voting equipment or election records. Some states have even passed new laws banning armed federal agents from polling places.

This stems from repeated efforts by the Trump administration to find ways to improve his party’s chances of prevailing in the midterms.

Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon predicted that Trump would declare a national emergency ahead of this year’s midterms, while activists with links to the White House produced a 17-page draft executive order that recommends blaming China for election interference in 2020 to unlock unprecedented presidential powers around voting.

More recently, the Trump administration has begun using passport data for citizenship checks, according to court filings.

Trump has had little success in pursuing his agenda through the courts. In mid-September 2026, the Supreme Court blocked an executive order aimed at using the U.S. Postal Service to screen mail ballots using state voter data, concluding that Congress had not given the postal service the election authority the administration sought to exercise.

Watson’s deference for Trump

Watson took a starkly different approach to Biden’s election initiatives.

He and 14 other secretaries of state wrote to the Biden Administration in August 2022 demanding the president rescind his voter-registration executive order signed in March 2021, describing it as a “gross federal overreach” and saying federal agencies would “infiltrate state-run elections.”

“Neither the U.S. Constitution nor the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) include any such grant of executive authority to the President to require federal agency involvement with state-level voter registration processes,” Watson’s co-signed letter argued in response to the order, adding that changes to state voter-registration responsibilities “must be authorized by Congress or the states themselves.”

Watson was blunter in a March 2024 letter to then-U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. “I will not let the Biden Administration break the law in our state,” he wrote. He later described the executive order as a scheme to “weaponize the vote.”

Biden’s order directed federal agencies to consider ways to provide registration information and assistance through their existing interactions with the public, required them to formulate plans, and encouraged cooperation with states, provided they complied with existing laws.

Mississippi and eight other states took the Biden administration to court in August 2024, using much of the same rhetoric contained in the letter, but with one notable statement: The federal government risked becoming “an unregulated—or, at best, a lesser regulated—player in the state electoral process,” the lawsuit noted.

The lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed Jan. 27, 2025, after Trump returned to office. Biden’s order was never deemed unlawful.

Two months after the Biden lawsuit was dropped, newly sworn-in President Trump issued his own executive order, which was considerably more prescriptive about election administration than his predecessor’s. And Watson was significantly quieter. Rather than directing federal agencies to facilitate voter registration, Trump’s order sought to impose specific registration requirements, citizenship verification, voter databases, voting equipment and the receipt of mail ballots.

Watson said in a July 2025 press release he was “extremely pleased to see the prioritization of free and fair elections,” while noting that he had been invited to the White House to share election safeguards that his office had implemented in Mississippi and to discuss the president’s focus on “election integrity across the country.” Watson added: “However, whether there is a Republican or Democrat in the White House, my goal has, and will always be, to follow the law.”

Trump’s order requires documentary proof of U.S. citizenship as part of the federal voter registration form—the same voting registration requirement that Watson told the Supreme Court in his September 2026 brief is assigned exclusively to the states by the Constitution.

Trump’s order also declared it his administration’s policy that ballots in federal elections must be both cast and received by Election Day. The order directed the U.S. attorney general to act against states that counted ballots received after Election Day and directed the Election Assistance Commission to condition federal funding on compliance.

Mississippi law allows mail-in ballots to arrive up to five days after Election Day, provided they are postmarked before polls close. Watson defended that state law before the Supreme Court in June. He didn’t just win; he beat his own party, the Republican National Committee.

Watson has drawn a line at some Trump proposals. When Trump suggested in early February 2026 that Republicans should “nationalize” elections, Watson called it a “terrible idea.”

A year later, Trump added another executive order instructing the federal government to compile state-by-state lists of confirmed U.S. citizens from federal databases and directing the postal service to develop nationwide mail-ballot requirements, including unique tracking barcodes and state-specific participation lists that could determine whether the service woul transmit particular mail ballots.

The March 2026 order caused an uproar among those who believe Trump was, and still is, trying to circumvent the election clause by creating new rules for how mail-in ballots would be regulated.

Mikel Bolden, executive director of the Mississippi Democratic Party, told The Mississippi Independent that Watson has been slow to respond to Trump.

“Secretary Watson has shown he can move quickly and proactively when he sees something on the horizon,” Bolden said, pointing to his office’s preparations in June for a possible return to Mississippi’s 2022 legislative maps. “We’d like to see that same urgency applied here.”

“This rule could directly affect how absentee ballots reach Mississippi voters this November, and his office has been silent,” Bolden added, noting fears of executive orders and public confusion over how the postal service will handle mail ballots.

The voter rolls

The handover of Mississippi’s voter files is perhaps the clearest test of Watson’s deference to Trump.

The federal government requested states’ full and unredacted statewide voter-registration lists, to assess compliance with federal voter-list maintenance laws. The U.S. Department of Justice proposed sharing the lists with the Department of Homeland Security to cross-check voters against federal databases and identify noncitizens or others potentially ineligible to vote. DOJ argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1960 gives it authority to demand the records despite state privacy protections.

Watson’s office initially sought clarification from DOJ about the respective roles of the federal government and the states before Mississippi entered the confidential arrangement.

Eventually, Watson complied. DOJ has since sued 30 states for refusing its request. Twenty-five of those lawsuits have since been dismissed.

Mississippi law ordinarily restricts public access to some of the most sensitive information contained in voter files. Dates of birth, Social Security information, driver’s license numbers and other fields are subject to various statutory or regulatory protections.

It is not clear if Watson’s move was legal.

But other Republican election officials reached a different conclusion about the Trump administration’s request for voter data. On the same day that DOJ announced Mississippi’s cooperation, it sued Georgia, where Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had declined to turn over confidential voter information.

“I will always follow the law and follow the Constitution,” Raffensperger said.

Republican officials in New Hampshire, West Virginia and Utah also resisted providing protected voter information.

Trump’s DOJ has taken legal action against dozens of states that declined to turn over voter information. DOJ is yet to prevail in any of the 30 voter roll data lawsuits. Courts have rejected most and are considering appeals.

Mississippi reached a different conclusion the last time Trump sought large quantities of state voter information.

In 2017, then-Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann forcefully rejected a request from Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity for voter data.

“They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from,” Hosemann, who is now the state lieutenant governor, and is expected to run for governor, said in a statement at the time. “Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”

Watson did not respond to questions about any material differences that prompted him to share the unredacted voter data years after Hosemann refused.

Watson’s record leaves little doubt about the constitutional principle he says governs elections. States retain substantial authority; Congress possesses some powers of its own; and a president cannot simply rewrite that arrangement through executive action. What remains considerably less clear is where Watson believes federal involvement becomes federal interference—and, more consequentially, what he would do when that line is crossed.

Watson’s record cannot be reduced simply to partisan loyalty. He has demonstrated that he is willing to defend Mississippi’s election laws against Republicans as well as Democratic presidents. What makes his more accommodating response to some of the Trump administration’s election initiatives consequential is precisely that record. Watson has spent years defining the constitutional boundary between state and federal power but refuses to say what Mississippi would do if Trump crossed it when it matters most, during an election.

That question is no longer fear-mongering. Trump has repeatedly challenged the boundaries of presidential authority over elections. Blount doesn’t expect that onslaught to slow down ahead of Nov. 3, 2026.

“I am very concerned about further actions the president may take,” Blount said. “He has refused to acknowledge the election that he lost. He has repeatedly tried to interfere in the electoral process that is left to the states, left to be governed by law, not by executive order. He has a track record of undermining Americans’ ability to vote and undermining Americans’ confidence in the basic system of our government. I fully expect that to continue given the type of person Donald Trump is.”

Image: Secretary of State Michael Watson (via SoS Facebook page)

State Sen. Dean Kirby on Thursday night opened the eighth redistricting hearing on his committee’s schedule, the last one currently set, by telling the room what his committee does and does not do. The Joint Legislative Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting draws state House and Senate districts. Congressional maps, Kirby said, move through Judiciary A in the Senate and Judiciary B in the House.

Twenty minutes later, the first member of the public to reach the microphone asked the committee to redraw a congressional district.

State Auditor Shad White told the committee members that he wanted them to take up congressional redistricting, whether in a special session or a regular one. His reason, he said: “The Delta has been at the bottom of far too many rankings for far too long, and the Delta deserves better leadership than Bennie Thompson. It just does.”

White’s remarks were an overt call to use redistricting to target a political candidate—specifically, the only statewide elected official who is Black.

Thompson has represented the Second Congressional District since 1993 and is the only Black member of Mississippi’s congressional delegation.

The room booed.

White kept talking.

“That’s fine, you can boo if you want, that’s totally fine,” White said. “But I’ll just tell you, not a lot of people want to stand up in a room like this and speak for a majority of people who want to see our congressional districts changed.”

White said there is “a silent majority of people who want better representation for the Mississippi Delta”—people, he added, who want “somebody who is not focused on running the January 6th committee.”

Kirby cut in to say that if the hearing got too disrespectful he would adjourn it and nobody else would speak.

White returned two weeks ago from a National Guard deployment to the Middle East and has said publicly that he is weighing a run for governor. He told the committee he worked as a Senate staffer during the 2011 redistricting.

More than 40 people spoke after him over the next three hours at the New Capitol, allotted two minutes each, with a bell sounding at 90 seconds.

Jesse Otto Smith went to the podium and said he had heard the auditor.

“My father was born in 1926. He couldn’t vote,” Smith, who is 76 and lives in Jackson, told the committee. “My grandfather was born in 1891. He couldn’t vote. My great-grandfather was born as an enslaved man, considered less than a human, in 1861. He couldn’t vote. He was a piece of property. That’s why I am here.”

Smith expressed gratitude to Thompson for road resurfacing and healthcare in the district and said he hoped the congressman would keep the seat as long as he wants it.

State Rep. Kabir Karriem of Columbus, who chairs the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, came wearing the caucus lapel pin, which carries the image of Robert G. Clark Jr., the first Black Mississippian elected to the Mississippi Legislature since Reconstruction. Karriem told the committee he sees echoes of 1876 and 1890 in 2026, and that after the last Black legislator of the Reconstruction era left office, 73 years passed before another was elected.

“On behalf of the 1.2 million people that we represent, we’re totally against this,” Karriem said.

A dozen speakers asked the committee to draw new maps. Most came from Madison, Rankin and Simpson counties, several identified themselves with the Mississippi Federation of Republican Women, and their arguments ran along the same line: Draw to traditional criteria, compactness and contiguity and county boundaries, and treat voters as individuals and not by race. Karen Mosley of Simpson County put it this way. “A good candidate is a good candidate. They will get elected regardless of race or gender.”

Kyari Davis, a sophomore political science major at Jackson State University, asked when in the history of this United States that had ever been true.

A rally billed as Rally for Fair Maps had gathered on the Mississippi Supreme Court lawn two hours earlier, and its flyer told people to wear black and bring signs. Several speakers said they had come from the rally. Malik Ross of the Mississippi Votes Action Fund gestured at the room and pointed out “all these black and white shirts here out in the crowd.”

The students were the largest group that signed up. They came from Tougaloo College, Jackson State and the University of Southern Mississippi, and several said they had stood outside in the heat for hours before the doors opened, one of them wearing a suit in “feels-like” temps bumping 100 degrees. Several focused their two minutes on people who had organized in Mississippi before them, including Bob Moses and the citizenship schools, Stokely Carmichael, the Tougaloo Nine, Medgar Evers and James Meredith.

Aznii Welchlin, the 94^th student government president at Tougaloo, spent the end of her two minutes repeating one sentence eight times. “Leave our maps alone.”

Arianna Brumfield of Tougaloo used her time to ask what the hearings are for.

“Public participation cannot end with just giving us two minutes here at a mic,” Brumfield said. “Are Mississippians being consulted or are they exercising political agency? How will testimony affect maps?” A mapmaker knows what a census population looks like, she said, and residents know where their children go to school and where their churches are. “If this here is democratic participation, show us where the people answered the decision.”

The committee has not released any draft maps. Members took no questions Thursday, as they have not at any of the eight hearings.

Robert James, president of the Mississippi State Conference NAACP, asked the committee directly whether it is weighing changes to Senate District 45, Senate District 2 and House District 22, three districts redrawn in 2025 under a federal court order. He got no answer, which is how the hearings have been run.

State Rep. Zakiya Summers of Hinds County had the last word of the night, and spent it on the vote counts from that 2025 session. The House adopted the Senate plan with 62 Republicans, five Democrats and three independents in favor. The Senate approved the plans 41 to 8 and 45 to 7.

“That’s bipartisanship,” Summers said. “Let us just go forward with the work that we have done in a bipartisan manner and let us not do anything with these districts.”

The committee took no questions and adjourned before 9 p.m. Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Hearing in the state Capitol (credit Derrion Arrington)

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Sept. 25, 2026, that the state of Missouri must run its November congressional elections on the map the state drew in 2022, it blocked for the third time a replacement map the state’s legislature passed in 2025 that would have made incumbent U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City district more Republican.

The order in People Not Politicians v. Onder was unsigned, and no justice noted a dissent. The ruling did not decide whether Missouri’s new map was legal. The justices cited the principle that courts should not change election rules once voting has begun, noting that ballots had already been printed and mailed under the old lines.

U.S. Rep. Robert Onder, the sitting Republican congressman in Missouri’s Third District, and another Republican candidate, Richard Brattin, had sued in federal court saying they would be harmed by having to campaign in districts different from the ones where they won their August primaries. They won at that stage. The state court had ruled for the 2022 map, but a federal judge then said the opposite and ordered Missouri to use the 2025 map.

What kept the new map off the ballot and got the U.S. Supreme Court involved was a provision of the Missouri Constitution that Mississippi voters no longer have—the right to put a referendum to statewide voters, which in Mississippi’s case was struck down by its state supreme court in 2021.

Under Missouri law, citizens who gather enough signatures can suspend a statute until voters approve it at the next election. Opponents of the state’s new congressional map did just that. On Sept. 3, 2026, the Missouri Supreme Court placed the referendum on the November ballot and held that the 2022 map governs until Missourians vote on it. The referendum group went to the U.S. Supreme Court to attempt to block the federal order to use the 2025 map, and the court ruled in their favor.

Mississippi had a comparable referendum mechanism for 29 years. The state supreme court struck it down in 2021, ruling that the signature requirement written into the 1992 amendment could no longer be met because Mississippi’s congressional representation had dropped from the five designated in the measure to four.

Lawmakers have not restored the ballot provision. State Sen. Jeremy England filed a measure during the 2026 session that would have required referendum signatures from 10 percent of active registered voters, or roughly 189,000 people, with no more than a third from any one congressional district. The bill died in the state Senate on Feb. 13, 2026, without a House companion bill. Senate Republicans who opposed earlier versions cited the risk of out-of-state money driving petition campaigns.

Mississippi’s ballot initiative history has come up at redistricting hearings that the legislature has been holding across the state. State Rep. Jeffrey Hulum III, who represents state House District 119 and is the Democratic nominee in the Fourth Congressional District race, was the first speaker at the Sept. 22, 2026, hearing on the Gulf Coast.

“Legislators should not choose their electors. The electors should choose their legislators,” Hulum told the joint committee. “If we want to do this, let’s go back to the ballot initiative. Put it on the ballot. Let the people of Mississippi decide if they want to redistrict in the state of Mississippi.”

Jim Smith spoke later the same night. “Mississippi state Republicans have refused to restore the people’s constitutional right to petition our government through the ballot initiative for three years,” Smith said. “They certainly do not trust the people who elected someone else to represent them, but now they want us to trust them to conduct a redistricting that is not even necessary until the year 2030.”

In Mississippi, legislative districts are adopted by a joint resolution that never reaches the governor’s desk. Congressional districts pass as a conventional statute that the governor can veto and the legislature can override with two-thirds of both chambers. If lawmakers deadlock on congressional lines, the courts step in, as federal judges did in 2002 and again in 2011. None of those paths includes a vote by state residents.

The legislature’s Joint Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting holds the last of its eight public hearings on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026, at the New Capitol in Jackson. It has released no proposed maps and published no criteria. England has not said whether he will sponsor another referendum bill in the upcoming session.

Written comments about the legislature’s redistricting may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Redistricting protesters in the Missouri Capitol on Sept. 10, 2026 (Creative Commons credit Ceilidh Kern/The Beacon)

The Joint Legislative Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting holds the last of its eight public hearings on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026, at the New Capitol in Jackson. Speakers at the first seven hearings asked the committee repeatedly what comes next and were told at every stop that the members were there to listen and would not answer questions.

State law and the record of the last two times Mississippi redrew its congressional map answer some questions.

The committee itself is a permanent body created by Mississippi Code Section 5-3-91. It seats the chair and vice chair of the House apportionment and elections committee, the chair and vice chair of the Senate elections committee, 10 additional House members appointed by the speaker and 10 additional senators appointed by the lieutenant governor, two from each congressional district in each chamber. Nothing passes the committee without a majority of its House members and a majority of its Senate members.

The two kinds of maps follow different processes.

Legislative districts are adopted by joint resolution. A joint resolution does not go to the governor, so the House and Senate can redraw their own seats without Gov. Tate Reeves signing anything. He has no veto power over it.

Congressional districts are different. They are enacted as an ordinary statute, which means the governor can veto the map, and overriding him takes two-thirds of both chambers.

Mississippi law already sets criteria for legislative districts, several of which speakers at the hearings asked the committee to adopt. Districts must be contiguous and compact and must cross political boundaries as little as possible, with county lines given priority. Federal law adds equal population and the Voting Rights Act on top of that.

If the legislature cannot agree on legislative districts, the job passes to a five-member commission, made up of the chief justice of the state Supreme Court, the attorney general, the secretary of state and the majority leaders of the House and Senate. That commission has 180 days to produce a plan.

There is no equivalent backstop for congressional districts.

In 2002, the legislature could not agree on a congressional map. A three-judge federal panel drew one instead and released it on Feb. 26 of that year. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that in Branch v. Smith on March 31, 2003, confirming that a federal court may impose an interim congressional map when a state fails to produce a usable one before candidates have to qualify.

The legislature deadlocked again in 2011, and a federal court drew the congressional districts a second time.

State legislative seats next go before voters in 2027. Congressional primaries for this year were held in March 2026, and the general election is in November, so a congressional map redrawn now would first be used in 2028. Nothing the committee does this fall changes the ballot Mississippians will receive in six weeks.

State law sets no deadline for congressional redistricting. The practical limit is candidate qualifying, which falls on March 1 of an election year. For legislative districts, the legislature’s own deadline runs to the end of the regular session in the second year after a census.

The committee has not produced the material many of the speakers asked for. No proposed maps have been released. No criteria have been published. The committee’s website carries no meeting notice for any session after Oct. 1, and its page describing the committee’s own authority and duties reads, in full, “More info coming soon.”

Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Redistricting committee members via Mississippi Legislature site

Carl Boyanton, an independent candidate for Mississippi’s Fourth Congressional District, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Sept. 21, 2026, alleging that U.S. Rep. Mike Ezell’s campaign accepted contributions above the legal limit from the family that owns two of the Gulf Coast’s largest shipbuilders.

Ezell’s campaign called the filing a political stunt in a statement issued after it was filed and said it would report Boyanton to the FEC for making false statements. The campaign did not respond to questions from The Mississippi Independent.

Boyanton has filed against this seat before. On Jan. 17, 2020, he filed the complaint that became Matter Under Review 7680 against then-Rep. Steven Palazzo, who held the same seat. The commission found reason to believe Palazzo’s committee had converted campaign funds to personal use, citing $24,000 in rent paid on Palazzo’s own property, $65,893.51 in vehicle leases and thousands more in undocumented reimbursements. Palazzo and his committee signed a conciliation agreement in January 2025, paying a $13,500 civil penalty and reimbursing $16,500. Boyanton’s allegations also triggered a House Ethics Committee investigation that found substantial evidence of wrongdoing. Palazzo lost his 2022 primary runoff to Ezell.

The current complaint rests on a single day of giving. FEC records attached to the filing show that on Aug. 26, 2025, seven members of the Chouest family each gave $7,000 to the Committee to Elect Mike Ezell, the legal maximum across the primary and general elections. The same seven gave $25,000 that day to Ezell’s leadership PAC, New Sheriff PAC, and $150,000 to the Ezell Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee Ezell shares with the leadership PAC and the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Three weeks later, on Sept. 18, 2025, the Victory Fund sent $73,867.54 to the NRCC, $24,298.53 to New Sheriff PAC, and two transfers of $23,812.56 each back to Ezell’s campaign.

The complaint’s first count concerns that pair of contributions, totaling $47,625.12. Joint fundraising committees have to divide what they raise according to how much each donor can still legally give to each participating committee. Every Chouest who gave to the Victory Fund had already reached the ceiling with Ezell’s campaign the same day.

“They’re not allowed to go to a PAC or Super PAC or joint fundraising committee and add any more money than that $7,000 they’ve given,” Boyanton told The Mississippi Independent. He said he called the FEC repeatedly while preparing the filing. “They said, no, if you gave to him directly, you can’t. You can give to the joint fundraising committee, but your money has to, if you’re already over the $7,000, has to go to another member of the joint fundraising committee.”

The family behind the contributions is the Chouest family of Louisiana, which owns Edison Chouest Offshore and, with Bollinger chief executive Ben Bordelon, acquired Bollinger Shipyards in 2014.

Ezell chairs the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, which oversees Coast Guard procurement.

The Coast Guard has awarded Bollinger three contracts since early 2025. On March 25, 2025, the agency awarded Bollinger Mississippi Shipyards a $951 million contract modification for the Polar Security Cutter program. Ezell issued a statement the same day calling it “a major win for America’s maritime strength and Arctic presence.”

Six weeks later, Bollinger and Edison Chouest announced the United Shipbuilding Alliance, a partnership formed to answer the Coast Guard’s April request for information on Arctic Security Cutters. The Chouest contributions came on Aug. 26, 2025.

On Dec. 29, 2025, Bollinger signed a contract to build four Arctic Security Cutters, an award reported at $2.14 billion. Boyanton said a further $95 million contract came in September 2025, putting the total near $3 billion.

“The $951 was just the start of the money,” Boyanton said.

Boyanton’s press release named only the March award.

Boyanton stepped back from two of the complaint’s four counts when asked about them.

Count three alleges a violation of the federal ban on contributions by government contractors. Every contribution in the complaint’s exhibits came from a named individual, and FEC regulations state that nothing in the contractor rules prohibits stockholders, officers or employees of a corporation from giving out of personal assets. Asked about it, Boyanton agreed. “They are legally, independently, they can donate to the campaign,” he said. His concern, he said, is whether one person wrote the checks and distributed them under seven names, which would be a separate violation. He said he has no evidence of that.

“This would have to be investigated by the FEC, which is the reason why I filed it,” Boyanton said. “And they can figure that out.”

The complaint also names Edison Chouest Offshore and Bollinger Shipyards as respondents. No contribution from either company appears in its exhibits.

The filing’s headline figure is also wrong. The complaint alleges $217,000 in contributions, but its own itemization adds up to $224,000. Boyanton said he caught the error himself and told his publicist the day before the interview.

“I think I left out one of the Chouest families,” he said. “It’s actually 224.”

Boyanton said he prepared the complaint alone, beginning with FEC records he pulled in January 2026. He is a Diamondhead businessman who founded Farmer Fresh Produce and has run twice before in Republican primaries for the seat.

“If I could go through all 535 guys’ FEC filings, I would probably be filing violations against probably half of them,” he said. “I’m running to get rid of corrupt politicians.”

The Ezell’s campaign statement said the campaign “is in compliance with the law.”

“While Mr. Boyanton’s allegations are obviously a political stunt, making a false statement to a federal agency, such as the FEC, is illegal and we will be reporting him for doing that,” the statement said. The campaign did not answer questions about how the Victory Fund allocated the Chouest contributions or whether any portion was refunded or redesignated.

An FEC complaint is not a finding. The commission notifies respondents, takes their replies and votes on whether there is reason to believe a violation occurred, a process that in the Palazzo matter ran five years from filing to settlement.

Ezell, Boyanton and Democratic nominee Jeffrey Hulum III are all on the ballot in November.

Image: Carl Boyanton (L) and Mike Ezell (via Facebook and the U.S. House of Representatives)

BILOXI—Sonya Williams-Barnes told the Joint Legislative Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting on Tuesday night that she did not learn about House District 119 from a map.

“I knew them by name,” Williams-Barnes said of the district’s constituents. “They called when their sons and daughters were sick inside our state prisons and could not get medical care. They called when conditions in one prison unit was so deplorable that they were unfit for an animal.”

Williams-Barnes, who represented District 119 from 2012 until she resigned in May 2022 to take a job with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and who ran for mayor of Gulfport last year, closed with four words that other speakers returned to throughout the hearing: “Leave our maps alone.”

Fifty-five people signed up to speak at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, the seventh stop on the committee’s eight-hearing tour. State Sen. Dean Kirby, the committee’s chair, told the room it was the largest sign-up list of the tour.

“This is not the largest crowd we’ve had, but it’s the most people that want to make comments of any place we’ve been, and we’ve been all over the state,” Kirby said.

Comments were held to two minutes. Ryan Morgan, an attorney with the legislature’s PEER committee, rang a bell at 90 seconds and twice more when time ran out.

The first speaker was state Rep. Jeffrey Hulum III, who holds the District 119 seat Williams-Barnes left and won the Democratic nomination in March for the Fourth Congressional District seat held by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Ezell.

“I’m totally against any midterm redistricting,” Hulum said. “The Callais decision did not say we have to redistrict in the state of Mississippi.” He said the legislature should instead restore the ballot initiative and let voters decide.

Most speakers took that position. A larger number than at the committee’s earlier stops asked the legislature to redraw the maps, framing the request around the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais and a standard they described as race-neutral.

Rob Maness opened his remarks with a disclaimer. “Since I am a retired military officer, I’ll just do a disclaimer right now. Nothing I say represents the Department of War or any other government entity that I may be working with.”

Maness retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 2011 after more than 30 years and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana before moving to Mississippi. He sits on the Harrison County and Gulfport Republican executive committees. The Washington Post reported this year that he holds an undisclosed role in the office of the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. He told the committee that Callais “returns authority to the states” and that Mississippi’s Second Congressional District “has been among the poorest in America for years.”

“Those outcomes did not happen by accident,” Maness said. “They have persisted under the current lines.” He said he supported redrawing congressional districts “to respect communities of interest” and opposed “maps drawn that protect incumbents or to serve an outside agenda.”

Mark Brody spoke later in the evening and identified himself as with the Conservative Coalition of Mississippi and the same Harrison County Republican Executive Committee.

Brody’s remarks tracked Maness’s closely. He said the Second District “has remained one of the poorest in the entire country for years” and that “these outcomes have persisted under the current district lines.” He said the maps should not “protect any particular incumbent or outside agenda,” that Callais “returns one more authority to the states,” and that the committee should “take bold action,” a phrase Maness also used.

Brody cited a median household income of $47,495 for the Second District and a poverty rate of 23.6 percent. He said the Conservative Coalition was circulating a redistricting pledge for legislators and candidates to sign. The Second District, which covers many of Mississippi’s westernmost counties, does not encompass the Gulf Coast.

Vivian Daly, an educator born in Biloxi, described a specific redistricting method. “Draw four districts of equal population that are contiguous, reasonably compact, respect county and precinct lines, and keep communities of interest together with no racial data in the room.”

Most speakers rejected that framing directly.

Monica Thomas-Hurst said the phrase troubled her. “I’ve heard a few say that they don’t see color. Now that statement alone troubles me, because what that means is you don’t see me and many others in this room.”

Noelle Nolan Ryder, a resident of Ocean Springs, identified herself as a fifth-generation Mississippian from Natchez and the granddaughter of William A. Geiger, whom she described as an active member of the Silver Dollar Group of the Ku Klux Klan during the civil rights movement.

“I say that so this panel understands I know what white supremacy in Mississippi is and how it operates,” Ryder said. She referenced the state’s 1890 constitution and its poll taxes and literacy tests, and noted that lawmakers were now redrawing districts in Forrest County, “named after the founder of the KKK.”

Betty Sparkman of Pass Christian told the committee her ancestors enslaved people and that eight of her forefathers fought for the Confederacy.

“They fought to preserve a system that denied Black Americans their freedom, their rights, and their voice,” Sparkman said. “And here we are, 156 years later, discussing a new version of that same oppression.”

Alan Jenkins, who said he has been a Baptist pastor for 26 years, gave the committee numbers from the same period. At least 142,000 Black men were registered to vote in Mississippi before the 1890 constitution, he said, and only 8,615 remained on the rolls by 1892.

“Do you think those men suddenly decided they didn’t want to vote anymore?” Jenkins said.

Cost came up repeatedly. Warren Conway told the committee a special session would run $100,000 per day. Chantrelle Graham-White, a Gulfport voter, said the money should go to problems that residents had actually raised.

Several speakers asked for something the committee has not provided at any stop. Angela Ellis of Gulfport asked for the court order she said would justify the redistricting effort.

“Show us the order. Show us the specific legal requirement that says Mississippi must redraw these districts right now,” Ellis said. She asked the committee to release proposed maps with racial voting-age population data attached, and to say how many majority-Black districts exist now and how many would exist afterward.

Mohamed Hardy, a Harrison County voter and a leader in what he called the largest Islamic community on the Coast, said his members were watching the precedent.

“Are we going to draw the lines based on religion?” Hardy said. “If it bothers my constituents, it probably bothers yours as well.”

Carrissa Corbett, the Ward 6 councilwoman in Gulfport, said the committee could not speak for her constituents without having been among them. “You cannot speak for us, especially without listening to us.”

John Whitfield, pastor of Morning Star Baptist Church in Gulfport, said he believed the effort originated outside the state. “You can move the line, but you should not, and you will not, silence the voices.”

The last speaker was Mitch Ellerby of Moss Point, a Vietnam veteran who represented Jackson County’s District 110 in the state House and told the committee he served from 1984 to 1992.

“I’ve done redistricting,” Ellerby said. “Listen to your heartbeat, listen to your mind, most of all, listen to the voters, because we know best, too, but you have the last say.”

The committee took no questions and adjourned. One hearing remains, at the New Capitol in Jackson on Oct. 1, 2026. Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Participants in the Biloxi hearing (credit Derrion Arrington)

HATTIESBURG — Clarence Magee told the Joint Legislative Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting that he came to Hattiesburg in 1956, after the Korean War, wanting to be a full citizen of the country he had served.

Magee said he took the literacy test then required for voter registration five times and failed it all five times. He finally got his voter registration card in 1963. Written across it, he said, were the words “by order of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.”

Magee said his ability to vote was ensured by judicial design, and the state’s current district maps are in keeping with that.

“Keep the 2025 lines,” Magee told the committee. “That was progress.”

Roughly three dozen people spoke on Thursday night at the Mannoni Performing Arts Center at the University of Southern Mississippi, the sixth stop on the committee’s eight-hearing tour. The majority of them asked the committee to leave the state’s existing district maps alone.

State Rep. Noah Sanford of Covington County, the committee’s vice chair, opened the hearing by telling participants that the maps displayed at the front were for review only. “They are not proposals,” he said. “No maps have been drawn or considered at this point.”

Speakers were required to limit their comments to three minutes, with Ben Collins, the legislature’s GIS and redistricting bureau chief, ringing a bell at 30 seconds and again when the speaker’s time was up.

Forrest County has a specific stake in the outcome. The legislative maps adopted in 2025 under federal court order created additional Black-majority districts, Senate District 45 among them. Johnny DuPree, who was mayor of Hattiesburg from 2001 to 2017, won the seat in a November special election with about 71 percent of the vote over Republican Anna Rush. Republican Sen. Chris Johnson, who had held District 45, ran in neighboring District 44 instead and won. Several speakers at Thursday’s hearing identified themselves as District 45 residents.

“I live in District 45, and I am grateful that we finally have someone who represents the concerns of the people who live in my community,” said Deborah Delgado, who represented Ward 2 on the Hattiesburg City Council for 24 years before retiring in 2025. “What we wanted was someone who did more than drove down Main Street. We wanted someone who turned off into the communities to see how we actually live.”

Speaker after speaker made the same three arguments. The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais does not require Mississippi to redraw its maps. The 2025 maps are legal. The next census is in 2030.

Kenan Walker, a Forrest County voter, put a price on it. Eight hearings means eight sets of per diem reimbursements, eight venue rentals, security and insurance, he pointed out, and a special legislative session runs $100,000 a day. “I think that myself and anyone else in this room can find other ways to spend that money,” he said.

Deborah Gambrel Chambers said she and Percy Watson were the first African Americans elected in Forrest County, in 1979. She served 30 years as a justice court judge and 12 as a chancery court judge.

“It was difficult to see my campaign materials run over by my opponent,” Chambers said. “It was difficult to see the trials and tribulations that we went through, the preclearance, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed districts to be established so people like me could run and be elected.”

Chambers said the money would be better spent elsewhere. “Do you know how heartbreaking it is to stand behind somebody in a grocery store picking up a package of ground beef and agonizing as to whether or not they can buy it?” she asked.

Kathy McNair reminded the committee that it was sitting on the campus where Clyde Kennard began trying to enroll in 1955, and was denied, imprisoned on a false charge and died in 1963. She noted that Vernon Dahmer Sr. was killed in January 1966 after Klansmen firebombed his home, and that his voter registration card arrived in the mail 15 days later.

McNair referenced biblical David slaying Goliath with a slingshot, and described voter suppression as a modern-day version of the same type of contest, with “Jim Crow, poll taxes, literacy tests, redlining, voter suppression, and redistricting” representing Goliath. He added: “But if Goliath has cousins, David has cousins too. You’ve got giant slayers in this room, and we are not going down without a fight.”

Not everyone came to argue about race or whether to redraw district lines. Two speakers from Petal asked only that the city be kept in one district. Drew Brickson, the town’s Ward 5 alderman, said Petal has about 12,000 residents and was split between Senate districts 42 and 45 under earlier plans. He said Ward 3 Alderman Blake Nobles joined him in the request.

“When you divide a 12,000-person municipality, nobody wins,” Brickson said. “Keep the city of Petal whole in District 42.”

Kay Clay, a retired educator from the Petal area, made the same request without naming a district. “We want Petal area to speak with one voice, with one senator,” she said.

A speaker from Jones County asked that his county be kept as intact as possible.

Several people spoke in favor of the committee’s work, including one who alluded to political ideology. A Purvis resident addressed himself to the Republican members and said he supports “any redistricting that most supports and allows to prosper the conservative ideals of our state.” Elizabeth Alford of Walthall County said the objections had “little to do with race” and everything to do with “the Democratic Party needing help getting more representation.”

Ron Swindle, of Jones County, criticized the committee from a different direction, faulting the Senate leadership for how it drew former state Sen. Chris McDaniel out of his district. “You’ve disenfranchised a white man,” he said, adding that “what the white man did to the Black man in Mississippi is also equally ungodly.”

Vince Thorpe brought printed congressional maps going back to 1973 and argued that the Second District was redrawn repeatedly in the 1980s to raise its Black voting-age population. Thorpe ran as an independent against U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson in 1994, in a three-way race that also included Republican Bill Jordan.

“I knew I didn’t have a prayer of winning because they racially gerrymandered that district against me,” Thorpe said. He told the room he was not with the rest of the crowd and that the committee was doing the right thing. “Callais was right.”

Alex Pickle, a Hattiesburg resident who said he is a seventh-generation Mississippian descended from Confederate soldiers and enslavers, cited math: Republicans held 115 of the legislature’s 174 seats before the 2025 special elections and 112 afterward, he said, a drop from 66.1 percent to 64.4 percent.

Pickle then asked how many Republicans on the committee faced a Democratic challenger in 2023. “It was zero, none,” he said. “In fact, in 2023, 99 Republicans ran for House or Senate seats in Mississippi without a Democratic challenger.”

Paul James Blackman, a Gulfport resident, 20-year Navy veteran and 2026 Democratic candidate in the Fourth Congressional District, asked whether the hearings were authentic. “Is this a true public hearing or kabuki theater meant to dress up an outcome set beforehand as public consent?” he asked.

Raylawni Branch, who gave her age as 85, told the committee this was the third time she had sat through such a hearing. Branch and Elaine Armstrong became the first Black students to enroll at what was then Mississippi Southern College in September 1965. She later made lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve and taught nursing at the university until 2004. She ran for the state Senate as a Republican in 2003 and said her district was split just before the election.

“I never thought I would have to go through this again,” Branch said.

The committee took no questions and adjourned. Two hearings remain, in Gulfport on Sept. 22 and Jackson on Sept. 24. Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Redistricting committee on stage in Hattiesburg (credit Derrion Arrington)

This article includes a correction: Amir Badat is no longer voting special counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He is now voting rights attorney and political strategist for Fair Fight Action. In addition, the date for the Jackson hearing is now Oct. 1, 2026, not Sept. 22.

MERIDIAN, Miss.—An attorney with a voting rights group who grew up here stood before the state’s redistricting committee on Sept. 10, 2026, and told the members he expected them to redraw Mississippi’s maps no matter what they heard, then listed in advance the three defenses he said they would offer and called each one a lie.

“I think y’all hosting these public hearings is a little bit of a dog and pony show,” said Amir Badat, voting rights attorney and political strategist for Fair Fight Action, who said he was born and raised in Meridian. He argued that the first claim would be that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais compelled the state to act. “The decision doesn’t require Mississippi to do anything. Doesn’t talk about Mississippi. Doesn’t talk about our maps,” Badat said. The second, he said, would be fear of a lawsuit. He noted the state enacted a map in 2022 that Black voters warned would discriminate, was sued, and lost. “When white voters might sue you, you have to redistrict to take away Black political power. But when Black voters might sue you, who cares?” The third would be that the committee is weighing partisanship and not race. “You know full well that race and party are intertwined in Mississippi.”

Badat addressed the chair and vice chair by name. “Senator Kirby, Representative Sanford, if and when y’all get onto the floor of the House to defend new maps,” he said, “we want you to know that we know that you are lying to our faces.” He closed with local history, saying his parents came to Meridian almost 50 years ago and were taken in by Charles Young Sr., among the first Black Mississippians elected to the state legislature since Reconstruction, and elected from a Black-majority district a federal court had ordered the state to draw. “If the thinking that is motivating this redistricting process today were allowed to prevail back then, Charles Young would have never been elected.”

The hearing at Meridian Community College’s McCain Theater was the fifth of eight the Joint Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting is holding before the Mississippi Legislature takes up new maps. Sen. Dean Kirby of Rankin County, the chair, opened as he has at every stop, saying the panel had come to listen and would not answer questions. He added a request he had not made before, asking speakers to avoid federal issues and healthcare after earlier hearings drifted into them.

Meridian produced something the first four hearings had not, a substantial bloc of speakers asking the state to redraw its lines. Rosemary Robinson of Neshoba County said the Supreme Court had rejected the assumption that citizens of a race vote alike and said that new maps should establish race-neutral boundaries. Tamara Ward, an anesthesia provider from Neshoba County, argued that the current alignment erases individual voters, and asked whether the state might as well draw districts by height or by gender. “Don’t define us by our color,” she said. Beverly Maxwell Cotton, a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians speaking in her personal capacity, said tribal citizens hold a political relationship with the United States that should not be reduced to a racial category, and asked the committee to apply compactness, contiguity and respect for county lines consistently statewide.

Lucy Hurst Gordon, a retired Mississippi Department of Transportation engineer who said she was among the first women to work at the agency, told the committee the congressional map has been built around a racial target for decades and that Callais had removed the legal reason for it. She asked the committee to consider partisanship in place of race, and to show its work. “Don’t fold the map out there and say, this is it,” she said. “Show the people why you’re dividing it the way you’re dividing it.”

Speakers opposing a redraw returned to the 2025 maps. Carolyn Rash Hampton of Winston County, an NAACP member and interim president of her local voters’ league, listed a series of recent changes she considered needless and placed the maps among them. “Replacing the 2025 map is unnecessary and will have consequences,” she said, noting that her high school class will mark its 60^th graduation anniversary this weekend, one year after the Voting Rights Act became law. “Please don’t take us back to that era.” Ramona Sanders of Lauderdale County called the effort a power grab and said the state has never corrected itself without federal pressure.

State Rep. Cheikh Taylor, who chairs the Mississippi Democratic Party and whose District 38 covers Starkville, West Point and Columbus, posed an argument about the record of the majority that drew the maps. He said federal courts had to intervene in Mississippi’s congressional redistricting after both the 2000 and 2010 census cycles, that a federal court ordered a Senate district redrawn in 2019, and that a federal panel in 2024 found Section 2 violations in the 2022 maps and ordered additional Black-majority districts. When those districts went before voters, he said, Democrats flipped two Senate seats and a House seat and broke the Republican supermajority in the Senate. He then ran through the state’s poverty rate, median household income and rural hospital closures. “Mississippi doesn’t need safer districts,” he said. “We need safer hospitals.”

State Rep. Gregory Elliott of Lauderdale County, who officially welcomed the committee, told the audience the night belonged to them. “Tonight is the people’s night, because they will not have a chance to speak to the legislature after tonight,” he said, and yielded his time. Michael Roberts, a veteran from Lauderdale County, said the effort amounted to a war on Black political power. Johnny Henry of Laurel, who said he had run for office twice in a district that split the Black community, asked why the state would redraw before a census.

The committee took no questions and adjourned. Three hearings remain, in Hattiesburg on Sept. 17, Gulfport on Sept. 22 and Jackson on Sept. 24. Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: State Rep. Cheikh Taylor at the mic in Meridian (credit Derrion Arrington)

NATCHEZ, Miss.—The state’s redistricting hearings reached this Mississippi River city on Sept. 8, 2026, and the sharpest objection came from a Black legislator who told the committee its maps were indefensible even before their planned redrawing.

“This map ain’t worth a damn,” said state Rep. Robert Johnson III, the House minority leader, from the floor of the auditorium at Alcorn State University’s Natchez campus. “One congressional representative in a state that has 40 percent black population.”

Johnson said he opposed redrawing the lines now, before the 2030 census, then turned on the argument that the fight is partisan. He said he had been through three redistricting cycles and that in each of them white Democrats had told mapmakers the same thing Republicans did. “They tell you that this is about partisan politics. It’s not. It’s about race,” he said. He also disputed the premise that Black voters are the ones being packed into a single district. The 1st District is 73 percent white, he said; the 3^rd, 68 percent; and the 4^th, 78 percent; while the 2^nd is 61 percent Black.

The hearing was the fourth of eight that the Joint Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting is holding before the Mississippi Legislature takes up new legislative, congressional and judicial maps in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. It was the first held at a historically Black university, on a campus in Adams County at the southern end of the Second District. State Sen. Dean Kirby of Rankin County, the chair, opened the hearing as he has at every stop, telling the audience the committee came to listen and would not answer questions, and giving speakers five minutes to talk.

Speaker after speaker asked why the state is redrawing the maps at all. Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis of the Natchez NAACP asked whether Mississippi had ever engaged in mid-decade redistricting before and what the cost would be. “They do not heal, they reopen wounds,” she said of the older maps. She reminded the committee that it was in a city where George Metcalfe, then the local NAACP president, was maimed by a car bomb in 1965.

Walter Brown, a former legislator and Adams County supervisor, told the committee that seizing an opening to redraw lines mid-decade is “just bad policy,” whichever party did it. “I don’t think in the history of Mississippi since 1817 has there been a mid-cycle, mid-decade redistricting of the legislature,” he said.

Bob Strader asked the same question and added a request. If the committee does redraw, he said, “please make the legislature, Congress look like the face of Mississippi.”

Philip West, who was at one time president of the Natchez NAACP, an Adams County supervisor for 17 years, a state representative and later mayor of Natchez, told the committee he had nearly been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965. “I don’t want to go back,” he said. “We have to admit to our mistakes and overcome our mistakes.”

Ben Tucker of the Natchez NAACP said any map that reduces Black voting power is racial discrimination. “I’m not going back,” he said, “and we as a people, we are not going back.”

State Rep. Jeffrey Harness, who represents House District 85 in southwest Mississippi, addressed the committee as colleagues. He said he had read Callais, disagreed with it yet respected it as a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and noted that the decision did not order Mississippi to redraw anything. “If the purpose is political, we should not hide a political decision behind the language of a court decision,” he said.

He noted that state Rep. Willie Bailey had told the committee at its Cleveland hearing that the decisions had already been made, said he understood why, and argued the state should be spending its time focusing on beleaguered cattle producers, rural hospitals and schools. “Donald Trump does not live in Mississippi. We do.”

One speaker argued for redrawing. James P. McKinney, a retired U.S. Army Corps of Engineers mathematician and newly elected chair of the Warren County Republican Executive Committee, upriver in Vicksburg, said the Second District was created with race in mind and has grown from 22 counties to parts of 30 as the Black-majority Delta has lost population. He said conservatives that he canvassed across the district told him not to bother voting because the seat could not be won by a candidate of their choosing. “That is a form of voter suppression,” he said, and asked the committee to redraw the maps on race-neutral criteria.

Kathleen O’Byrne of Ridgeland delivered her entire statement in the form of sarcasm, saying it would be “fabulous” for Mississippi to gerrymander itself further and running through the state’s hospital closures, dismal farm economy and high infant mortality rate as evidence of what white lawmakers had already delivered.

Kathleen Bond, director of the National Park Service’s Natchez National Historical Park, who said she has lived in Natchez more than 30 years, took the opposite view of Johnson’s regarding the existing map and said the Second District had been good for the city, because it tied Natchez to Vicksburg, Greenville and Cleveland, and noted that the need to address racial injustice had prompted a recent local reckoning of the city’s dark history as the site of the second largest antebellum slave market in the Deep South.

Mary Jane Riggode, who said she taught at the segregated Sadie V. Thompson school in Natchez before it was integrated and whose father served in the legislature in the 1920s and 1930s, asked the committee why it was meeting at all. “Why, why waste one dime on a stupid redistricting in the middle?” she asked. Committee members did not respond, in keeping with Kirby’s comment about members not taking questions.

Kelvin Butler, a former state senator from southwest Mississippi, closed the testimony against redrawing. “The district belongs to the people, not the politicians,” he said.

The committee then adjourned. Four hearings remain, in Meridian on Sept. 10, Hattiesburg on Sept. 17, Gulfport on Sept. 22 and Jackson on Sept. 24. Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Attendees at the Natchez hearing (credit Derrion Arrington)

The joint legislative committee redrawing Mississippi’s districts is holding eight public hearings around the state, starting this summer and continuing into the fall, and at the first three the chair told each audience the same thing: the committee had come to listen and would not answer questions. Forty-five years ago, the legislature ran the same exercise, with the same number of hearings and much of the same types of testimony, and what moved the lines then is worth remembering now.

In the summer of 1981, following the 1980 census, a joint congressional redistricting committee held eight hearings across Mississippi. State Rep. Robert G. Clark Jr., then the state’s longest-serving Black legislator, reported afterward that the public had been strikingly consistent. “In most places we went, this is the one thing they suggested the committee look at,” Clark said, alluding to a district drawn to give Black voters a chance to elect a candidate of their choice. Clark sketched one himself, running from Wilkinson and Amite counties in southwest Mississippi and north along the river to Tunica County.

The committee rejected every plan that would have produced such a district. Its counsel, Jerris Leonard, told members that the Supreme Court had issued “no decision requiring this legislature to create a district for a minority group.” In August of that year, the committee approved what it called a least-change map, adjusting boundaries only enough to account for population shifts while preserving white majorities in all five congressional districts. The legislature ratified the districts with votes of 99 to 21 in the House and 42 to 9 in the Senate.

The sharpest exchange came at a hearing in Greenwood on Sept. 17, 1981. Clark appeared with David Jordan, Norman Smith, Willie Perkins and Owen Brooks. Jordan, then a science teacher and president of the Greenwood Voters League, accused the committee of having “wrongfully diluted thirty-six percent of Black votes in this state as though they didn’t even exist.” When Perkins challenged the committee’s chair, Rep. Tommy Campbell, directly, Campbell brought his gavel down hard enough to split it in two. Jordan won a seat on the Greenwood City Council four years later and went on to serve 32 years in the state Senate, retiring in June 2025 at age 92. He still lives in Greenwood. Sen. Justin Pope, who holds his old seat, sits on the committee running this year’s hearings.

What changed the map was federal enforcement. On March 30, 1982, the U.S. Justice Department rejected Mississippi’s congressional plan under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, finding that lines drawn horizontally across the Delta fractured Black communities and diluted their strength. Civil rights lawyers had already filed suit. Within two months a three-judge federal court threw out the state’s plan, adopted one that kept the Delta whole and ordered the 1982 elections held inside it. The new Second District ran from Tunica County south to Claiborne, following the river.

The hearings still mattered, though not in the way the committee described them. The record they produced, as well as who asked for what in which county and what the committee did with it, became evidence. Federal officials reviewing the plan under Section 5 could see that the public had asked for one thing and the legislature had done another.

The court-drawn district fell short at first. Frank Parker, the civil rights attorney who brought the case, called it a phantom majority-Black district. Its population was just under 54 percent Black, its voting-age population 48 percent, and whites remained a majority of its registered voters. Clark ran there in 1982 and lost. When the case returned to trial in December 1983, Tom Hofeller, the Republican redistricting expert testifying for the state, conceded that Black voters needed two more percentage points to balance the district. The state’s own witness had measured the disadvantage the state’s brief denied. On Dec. 21, 1983, a three-judge panel ordered the district redrawn, raising the Black share of the voting-age population to 52.8 percent and the total Black population to 57.8 percent. Clark ran again in 1984 and lost again. Mike Espy won the seat in 1986.

The pattern repeated following the 1990 census. The Justice Department rejected Mississippi’s maps, citing what it called clear evidence of racially discriminatory intent. The legislature deadlocked. White members dismissed the alternative as the Black Caucus plan, and a federal court ordered the state to run the 1991 elections under the old lines. Revised maps cleared federal review the following year. In special elections held under them in 1992, voters sent 33 Black members to the state House and 10 to the state Senate, roughly double the Black representation of two years earlier.

The most recent cycle is a close parallel. In 2021, the same standing joint committee, chaired by the same senator who chairs it now, Dean Kirby, held nine public hearings around the state between Aug. 5 and Aug. 23, 2021, and for the first time livestreamed them at Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann’s insistence. Hosemann later pointed to those hearings as evidence of an open process, saying the committee had met “in all regions of the state to hear from citizens about the map.” That December, as the committee approved new congressional lines, a coalition of groups filed a complaint with the state Ethics Commission alleging the committee had deliberated and made decisions outside properly noticed open meetings. The complaint said no public comment or citizen-drawn plan had been taken up in an open meeting.

The maps that emerged did not survive either. On May 7, 2025, a federal court ordered new state House and Senate lines after finding the 2022 maps diluted Black voting strength, which forced the special elections held that fall. The legislature had also failed to produce a congressional plan in the previous cycle, leaving a federal court to draw one on Dec. 30, 2011. Four cycles running, someone other than the Mississippi Legislature finished or fixed its maps.

Two things are different this time. The Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act’s coverage formula in 2013, leaving Section 5 with no states to cover, so no Justice Department review now stands between a Mississippi map and an election. And on April 29, 2026, the court decided Louisiana v. Callais, holding 6 to 3 that Section 2 imposes liability only where the evidence supports a strong inference that a state drew its lines intentionally to give minority voters less opportunity because of race. Discriminatory effect—the standard that governed Mississippi’s cases for forty years—is no longer enough.

Speakers at all three hearings so far this year have argued that Callais requires nothing of Mississippi. Others have argued it requires everything. The committee has not said which reading it holds, because it has said almost nothing at all.

The new standard changes what a hearing record is worth, though not in the direction the committee may expect. What the 1981 record showed was “effect,” which was the question Section 5 asked. “Intent” is the question Section 2 now asks. A transcript establishing that residents of named counties asked for a particular district, that the committee heard them and that the map came back otherwise is the kind of evidence the Callais standard demands of anyone who sues.

Rep. Willie Bailey of Greenville, a veteran 34 years in the House but is not part of the redistricting committee [correct?], told the crowd at Delta State on Sept. 1, 2026, that the maps were already being drawn and that the testimony would go no further than the room. In 1981, that was true of the hearings but belied the record they left behind. Whether it is true of this one depends on who is writing it down and where they can take it.

Note on URLs: Some sources cited here are not available digitally, including quotes from newspaper archives and the Robert Clark papers at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Image: Photo illustration featuring Robert Clark and attendees at recent hearings by Derrion Arrington

When Mississippi holds special elections to fill two seats in the state House of Representatives, on Nov. 3, 2026, the ballot in one will carry a familiar surname: Imelda Brown, widow of the late Rep. Bo Brown, who is among three candidates seeking to succeed her husband in House District 70, the Jackson seat he held until his death in June.

Seven candidates qualified for the two races by the Aug. 20, 2026, deadline. The winners will finish terms that run to January 2028.

Bo Brown, a Democrat, died June 8 at 81 after a long illness. He had represented the majority-Black northeast Jackson district since 2020 and spent a lifetime in the city’s public life before that, teaching and coaching in Jackson public schools, serving three terms as president of the Jackson City Council, and working for the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In the House, he sat on the Judiciary B, Medicaid and Transportation committees. Alongside his widow, two other candidates qualified for the seat, Marcus Cheatham and James Lott III. The race, like the other, is nonpartisan.

The second vacancy belonged to Rep. Price Wallace, a Republican from Mendenhall who died June 3 at 64, five days before Brown. Wallace, a poultry farmer, had held House District 77 in Rankin and Simpson counties since 2018 and chaired the House Constitution Committee, where he led an effort to restore the ballot initiative process that the state Supreme Court struck down in 2021. Four candidates qualified to succeed him: Christopher Dunn, Dianne Gaddis, Melissa Sullivan and Craig Williams.

Gov. Tate Reeves set both elections in June.

The districts sit on opposite sides of the state’s political and racial divide, and the contrast is old. District 77, in the suburbs southeast of Jackson, is majority white and reliably Republican. District 70, in the city, is majority Black and reliably Democratic. Brown succeeded Kathy Sykes, another Black Democrat, in 2020, and the seat has anchored Black representation in the capital city for decades. The pattern reflects a Jackson metro area sorted by race and party, the white suburbs of Rankin County on one side and the majority-Black city of Jackson on the other.

District 70 also sits inside the redistricting the legislature is now weighing. It is one of the majority-Black Jackson-area districts a joint committee is preparing to redraw following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this year in Louisiana v. Callais, and the winner of the special election could see the district’s boundaries change before the term ends. Whether that happens depends upon what the committee produces and whether Reeves calls a special session to adopt new maps before the end of the year.

Because both elections are nonpartisan, candidates appear without party labels, and a runoff on Dec. 1, 2026, would follow in either race if no one wins a majority. The elections fall on the same day as the federal midterms.

Image: Late state representatives Bo Brown (L) and Price Wallace (via their respective Facebook pages)

Candidates have until tomorrow to file with the State Board of Election Commissioners to qualify for a DeSoto County judgeship that Gov. Tate Reeves created—and made an interim appointment to—through his own state Supreme Court appointment, part of a chain of events that runs back to Washington, D.C.

Reeves has appointed a DeSoto County prosecutor and judge to a circuit court seat that came open after he moved its previous occupant up to the Mississippi Supreme Court. The DeSoto appointment is the latest link in a chain that began in Washington, D.C. and lands on a court system whose elections have been frozen for more than a year by a voting-rights case.

Reeves named Craig Treadway of Olive Branch to the 21^st Circuit Court District, Place 2, on Aug. 19, 2026. The district covers DeSoto County, the fast-growing, majority-white county in the state’s northwest corner. Treadway has served as a county and youth court judge there since 2017 and before that worked as a prosecutor and public defender. He earned his law and undergraduate degrees at the University of Mississippi. His term begins Sept. 1, 2026. Reeves also reopened the qualifying window for the seat, giving candidates until 5 p.m. on Aug. 25 to file for the Nov. 3 election that will fill it for the remainder of the term.

The vacancy traces directly to the governor. The seat came open on Aug. 1, when Celeste Embry Wilson resigned from the post following her July appointment by Reeves to the state Supreme Court. Wilson’s move to the high court was itself a consequence of decisions made in Washington, D.C. President Trump nominated two Mississippi justices, Robert Chamberlin and James Maxwell, to federal judgeships in 2025, and after the U.S. Senate confirmed them in December, both left the state Supreme Court. Reeves filled their seats by appointment, elevating Wilson to one and Amanda Jones Tollison of Oxford to the other, which opened up Wilson’s circuit seat and set up Treadway’s appointment to it.

The pattern in whom Reeves chooses for such posts is consistent. Mississippi elects its judges in nonpartisan elections, but the governor fills any vacancy that opens between elections, and Reeves has repeatedly used that power to place prosecutors on the bench. He moved district attorney Joel Smith to the court of appeals and district attorney Matt Sullivan to a circuit judgeship in 2021; appointed former prosecutor Thomas Michael Reed as a circuit judge in 2025; and named John Weddle and John Emfinger, both with prosecutorial backgrounds, to the court of appeals. Treadway, a former prosecutor, fits the line. Reeves cited his experience as an attorney, prosecutor and judge.

The appointments come while the courts are in the midst of an unresolved fight over how their districts are drawn. A federal judge, Sharion Aycock, ruled in 2025 that the state’s three Supreme Court districts, unchanged since 1987, dilute Black voting strength, and she enjoined them. The special elections meant to make the Supreme Court appointments permanent cannot be scheduled until the Mississippi Legislature adopts a new map, which it has not done, and the case has slowed further since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this year in Louisiana v. Callais raised the standard for proving a Voting Rights Act violation. For now, the northern district that includes DeSoto County holds one appointed justice, Wilson, and one seat still vacant, with no election in sight.

Circuit judgeships like the one Treadway was appointed to are not part of that litigation, and the election for his seat will proceed on Nov. 3. The winner will serve the remainder of the four-year term.

Image: State Supreme Court room (via Dale Partners Architects)

When a group of white DeSoto County residents asked a federal court to block a new judicial subdistrict drawn to give Black voters a better chance to elect a judge, arguing that it diluted their own votes by race, the case seemed to pose an unexpected test of the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial ruling in the landmark case Louisiana v. Callais.

Yet U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock denied their request, finding that they had “wholly failed to carry their burden” and were “entitled to no relief at this stage.”

The lawsuit ran the logic of Louisiana v. Callais in reverse. Callais hinged on white voters in Louisiana challenging a new majority-Black congressional district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In DeSoto County, four white residents borrowed the same theory to attack a majority-Black judicial subdistrict, and the judge used Callais’s own language to turn them down.

The subdistrict grew out of judicial redistricting that the Mississippi Legislature passed in 2025. Lawmakers made DeSoto County its own circuit and chancery court district and added a judgeship on each side, to be elected from a subdistrict of nine precincts around Horn Lake and Southaven. That subdistrict has a voting-age population that is 50.52 percent Black, in a county that is about 25 percent Black and 67 percent white. The judges elected from it will have authority over the entire county. Elections for the seats are set for Nov. 3, 2026, with the new judges taking office in 2027.

The plaintiffs, led by county supervisor and former gubernatorial candidate Robert Foster, argued the arrangement gave residents inside the subdistrict more votes for the county’s judges than those outside it. One plaintiff, Kirby Carter, is a white voter who lives inside the subdistrict and claimed her vote was “unconstitutionally diluted based on race.” They asked the court to strike the subdistrict and hold the elections countywide.

Aycock rejected the request on two independent grounds. The first was timing. Under the Purcell principle, federal courts are told not to change election rules on the eve of an election, and she found the case fell well inside that window, with the vote less than 90 days away when the hearing closed. She noted the plaintiffs had known about the subdistrict for more than a year before suing and observed that the white plaintiffs in Callais had challenged Louisiana’s map within nine days of its creation while the DeSoto plaintiffs waited 14 months. “The Plaintiffs’ conduct constitutes a textbook example of undue delay,” she wrote.

The second ground was the merits, and there Aycock turned Callais against the people invoking it. A one-person, one-vote claim fails because that principle does not apply to judicial elections, she wrote, citing decades of precedent. On the racial-gerrymander claim, she found the plaintiffs offered almost no evidence, no illustrative map, no proof of racially polarized voting, nothing to show white voters in DeSoto County face discrimination at the polls. Their own witnesses noted that the county elected a Black sheriff countywide with white support, which cut against their argument.

Even if the plaintiffs had shown race drove the map, Aycock wrote, that would not end the case. She quoted the Supreme Court’s holding in its Callais ruling that “compliance with the Voting Rights Act can indeed provide a compelling reason for race-based districting,” and pointed to the floor statement of state Rep. Kevin Horan (R-Grenada), chair of House Judiciary B committee, that the subdistrict would let an “increasing majority-minority population” elect a candidate of its choice. Creating that opportunity, she found, was a lawful reason grounded in the Voting Rights Act, and the plaintiffs offered nothing to rebut it. She invoked the presumption that legislators act in good faith.

The ruling is preliminary. Aycock was careful to say she was not foreclosing the plaintiffs’ claims, and that they “may very well eventually be able to prevail” after discovery and a full trial. The DeSoto County NAACP, the Delta Sigma Theta sorority and Malenda Harris Meacham, one of the candidates running from the subdistrict, intervened to defend the map.

For now, the November election will proceed as drawn. Two candidates have qualified for each of the two subdistrict seats. The case leaves standing, at least through the election, a majority-Black judicial district in one of the fastest-growing and whitest counties in the state, and it offers an early answer to a question Callais raised across the South. The decision that white plaintiffs have used to dismantle Black districts also, in its text, protects the ones the Voting Rights Act supports.

Image: Water tower in Hernando, seat of DeSoto County (via WikiMedia Commons)

“Mississippi is the new Georgia.”

That’s how U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Delaware Democrat and vice chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, characterized the state’s political trajectory during an appearance on MSNOW Monday night.

Rochester added that she is personally paying close attention to the state’s Senate race, suggesting national Democrats increasingly see Mississippi as an opportunity rather than safe Republican territory unworthy of investment.

Currently, incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Republican, faces tandem challenges from Democrat Scott Colom, a prosecutor from North Mississippi, and Ty Pinkins, an independent.

Rochester’s comparison is notable: Georgia spent decades as a reliably red state before demographic shifts, the building of progressive infrastructure—notably including the 2018 gubernatorial campaign of Mississippi native Stacey Abrams—sustained organizing and national investment made it into a perennial battleground.

In 2020, the state sent two Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, to the U.S. Senate and delivered its electoral votes to Joe Biden. Georgia subsequently became the epicenter of President Donald Trump’s unsuccessful effort to overturn that election, and this year is home to one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races as Ossoff seeks reelection.

Mississippi Democrats point to recent polling as evidence that Mississippi may be following that path.

An April survey by progressive polling firm Impact Research found Republican Hyde-Smith with 42 percent support, Colom at 39 percent and Pinkins at 6 percent, with 13 percent of voters undecided. The poll, conducted April 8-12, carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The survey also found just 33 percent of likely voters said they would definitely or probably vote to reelect Hyde-Smith, while 53 percent said they preferred someone else—an unusually weak reelection number for an incumbent in a state Republicans have comfortably carried for decades.

Those findings help explain why Rochester and national Democrats are increasingly talking about Mississippi in the same breath as the widely watched Georgia. The DSCC posted a graphic earlier this week highlighting Colom as a Democrat who could help the party retake control of the Senate this fall. The Mississippi Republican Party quickly seized on it as a fundraising opportunity.

It remains to been seen whether national Democratic dollars will flow into the state as a result. But so far, Mississippi Democrats are raising eyebrows with better-than-expected fundraising.

According to the latest federal campaign finance reports Democratic money is starting to show up in the state’s congressional races. District 1 U.S. House candidate Cliff Johnson cleared $500,000—an enormous jump from the recent baseline, and U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom has raised a record $1.6 million.

Image: U.S. Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Delaware (via official Facebook page)

When Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith reposted an editorial calling her Republican primary opponent a “Republican imposter,” she was amplifying an attack that applies to her own political biography.

The Madison County Journal editorial, published under the headline “Republican Imposter,” argues that Hyde-Smith’s challenger Sarah Adlakha—a physician from Ocean Springs—should disqualify herself from the GOP primary because she is a former Democrat. Hyde-Smith shared the piece to her Facebook page without comment.

Yet Hyde-Smith was herself elected to the Mississippi State Senate as a Democrat in 1999. She served in that capacity for more than a decade before switching parties in December 2010. The editorial acknowledges her party history but argues the two situations are different—Hyde-Smith has deep roots in the state, the piece contends, while Adlakha is a relative newcomer who registered to vote in Mississippi as recently as August 2024.

Adlakha disputed the editorial’s premise entirely.

“The editorial’s central claim is false—I have never been a Democrat, there was no party switch, and the only party switch in this race belongs to Sen. Hyde-Smith,” Adlakha told The Mississippi Independent.

Adlakha also pushed back on the outsider characterization. “I was raised and educated in Alabama and have lived in Mississippi for 14 years—where my husband and I chose to raise our family,” she said. “Sen. Hyde-Smith spent over a decade in elected office as a Democrat, voted in Democratic primaries, and switched parties in 2010.”

Jake Monssen, Hyde-Smith’s campaign manager, said he could not speak for the newspaper but offered the campaign’s own characterization of Adlakha. “Our guess is that her being from Chicago, only registering to vote in Mississippi in August of 2024, her recent history of working against Republican candidates, and her 2020 support for Kamala Harris all contributed to the characterization of her as an imposter,” Monssen told The Mississippi Independent.

Adlakha has publicly denied having supported Harris. Monssen did not provide evidence for the claim.

On the question of whether Hyde-Smith’s Democratic past undermines the attack, Monssen said, “One has served as a Republican and is endorsed by President Trump. The other has not.”

A familiar argument

Hyde-Smith’s political past was raised during the 2018 Republican primary, when challenger Chris McDaniel attacked her record as a former Democrat. Hyde-Smith responded that she had “always been a conservative.”

The reaction to Hyde-Smith’s repost of the editorial reflected that underlying tension. Several supporters argued the distinction between the two candidates was meaningful—that Hyde-Smith had spent her career in Mississippi while Adlakha had only recently put down roots. Others were less persuaded. “So neither one is a Republican!” one commenter wrote. Another offered a simpler rejoinder directly to the senator’s post: “So were you?”

“Cindy is a former Democrat,” another commenter wrote. “She was ushered in by former governor Phil Bryant. What legislation has she authored and passed since being a Senator?”

Hyde-Smith and Adlakha face each other in the Republican primary on March 10.

Image: Screencap of repost of Madison County Journal editorial on Cindy Hyde-Smith’s Facebook page

As chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Mississippi’s senior U.S. senator, Roger Wicker is navigating loyalty, dissent and congressional authority in response to President Donald Trump’s reshaping of executive power, raising questions about how much influence institutional Republicans can still wield.

Wicker pushed back recently against a proposed 8,500-bed immigration detention facility in the north Mississippi town of Byhalia, writing in a letter to the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, that the project raised serious concerns about public safety, medical capacity and economic strain. At a time when GOP lawmakers routinely rubberstamp Trump initiatives, Wicker’s intervention marked the latest instance in which he has publicly broken with the administration on a high-profile policy issue.

For much of Trump’s second term, and, at moments, during his first, Wicker has positioned himself as a selective counterweight to the administration and the broader MAGA agenda. He has questioned the legality of controversial and deadly military operations targeting alleged Venezuelan drug-cartel boats and criticized elements of the administration’s foreign-policy posture. After Trump reposted a racist meme depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle as apes, Wicker responded that it was “totally unacceptable” and wrote on X, “The president should take it down and apologize.”

Despite these departures, Wicker has largely remained one of Trump’s most dependable allies, advancing his defense priorities, praising the arrest of Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, and shepherding through contentious Pentagon confirmations.

That dual posture has placed Wicker in a unique position within today’s Republican party, allowing him to signal concern with aspects of the administration’s domestic and foreign policy while avoiding direct confrontation with a president who has shown little tolerance for dissent. The approach has also blurred the line between oversight and endorsement, intensifying debate over how far Wicker is willing, or able, to translate concern into concrete action to restrain executive power and protect Congress’s diminishing authority over the use of American military force.

“The way that Sen. Wicker is balancing praise and limited critique of the administration may give him access to the administration and more influence over the way his defense bill turns out,” observed Tori Bateman, director of advocacy at the Quincy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that specializes in U.S. foreign policy and strongly advocates for diplomacy over war. “But it isn’t having a material impact on the big U.S. foreign policy decisions that are rocking the global system: threatening Iran, grabbing Maduro, boat strikes in the Pacific and Caribbean. Congress has the constitutional power of the purse, and of declaring war, but most in Congress, including Sen. Wicker, have gladly surrendered their power on these fronts.”

Appeasement in practice

The political tension is not unique to Wicker. It reflects a broader dilemma facing Republicans, some of whom are uneasy with Trump’s consolidation of power but unwilling to risk excommunication from a party he dominates. Wicker’s approach may represent the outer boundary of institutional resistance, or just diplomacy during an unusually volatile period in the nation’s capitol.

“Washington, D.C. is a small town with long memories and no permanent victories for either political party,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right public policy research think tank based in the capital. “Professional relationships still matter in achieving policy goals. The tools available to members of Congress are many, including the soft skills of persuasion, coalition building, transparency and oversight, negotiation, and communication in a language other parties will understand and respect.”

Pros and cons

Wicker has helped advance many of the administration’s most consequential priorities, including backing a major increase in defense spending, supporting Trump’s executive-led invasion of Venezuela and Maduro’s arrest, and publicly dismissing allegations of war crimes tied to U.S. boat strikes against alleged drug traffickers. Arguably, his most controversial move was confirming Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, drawing serious consternation from a prominent former Republican advisor.

“Witnessing the debasing spectacle of Wicker’s support for Hegseth is like watching a friend drink himself to death,” Stuart Stevens, a former GOP political Consultant from Mississippi who worked with Wicker and Republican politicians at all levels of politics, wrote in a Jan. 2025 New Republic article. “The sadness and pain are only enhanced by the knowledge that there is nothing to be done to stop the self-destruction.”

Stevens is now a senior advisor with the Lincoln Project, a moderate conservative pro-democracy organization based in Dallas, Texas.

As this article was going to press, Wicker’s office supplied the following comment to The Mississippi Independent: “Chairman Wicker has been able to work productively with the Pentagon and the White House to advance historic reforms and fund the rebuilding of the American arsenal. As Chairman of the committee, Sen. Wicker has been able to confirm national security nominees at a record setting pace while also passing a landmark NDAA the president enthusiastically signed into law.” Due to the timing of the response, the comment was not included in a previous iteration of the story, which noted in error that Wicker’s office did not respond to requests for comment from The Mississippi Independent.

The senator’s record of dissent extends back to Trump’s first term. In 2019, he voted against the president’s use of emergency powers to fund a border wall and raised concerns about White House skepticism of NATO, and warned against a rapid military withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan.

During Trump’s second term, which is arguably a far more perilous environment for Republican dissent, Wicker has again stepped out of line at key moments. He rebuked Secretary Hegseth for what he called a “rookie” mistake in ruling out the return of Ukrainian territory seized by Russia, opposed proposals to restructure NATO and withdraw U.S. troops from Europe, urged the administration to abandon threats to annex Greenland, and called for an investigation into the use of encrypted messaging applications by Pentagon officials. He also expressed unease over a $400 million private jet reportedly given to Trump by Qatar.

And yet, somehow Wicker has managed to avoid a direct clash with the president.

“What you have to do when looking at issues today is ignore the media’s desire to force an us-versus-them construct and simply act on what you know is best,” said Hayes Dent of Hayes Dent Public Strategies, a public affairs and public relations firm based in Jackson, Mississippi. “Roger Wicker does that in an incredibly statesmanlike fashion. Where he can agree with the administration, he does… where they differ, he simply shows leadership that comes from a deep well of knowledge and smarts that he’s possessed over decades of political leadership for our state and nation.”

Though there is admiration aplenty for Wicker’s diplomatic style within the wider GOP family, questions remain about the effectiveness of his oversight, which, once launched, has often dissipated before it produces answers or actions. As chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he has the authority to compel testimony, demand documents and tie compliance to defense legislation. Yet the inquiry into the boat strikes, like other moments of apprehension with the administration’s conduct, stopped short of forcing a public reckoning over how and why American military power had been used without Congressional knowledge or approval—against people whose motivations were never proved, including the killing of survivors of one notable attack.

“If Sen. Wicker seriously wanted to take back these congressional powers, he could have supported any number of the War Power Resolutions or Joint Resolutions of Disapproval that came up in the Senate this past year,” Bateman argued. “He could have questioned, rather than praised, the insane suggestion that the military budget should be increased to $1.5 trillion despite the Pentagon’s continued failure to pass an audit. And he could have doggedly pursued real oversight and accountability on the boat strikes as he promised he would, rather than backing down after Administration briefings.”

However, Eaglen said, Wicker is operating within the narrow confines of what is politically viable. Angering Trump, in short, could leave him and Congress with even less influence.

“Choosing which battles to fight publicly versus privately often helps bolster one’s position for a more favorable outcome that endures,” Eaglen said.

Image: U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker (via Wicker.Senate.Gov)

With five weeks until the March 10, 2026, Republican primary, Dr. Sarah Adlakha is waging an uphill campaign against U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, pitching herself as an outsider fighting Washington corruption while facing questions about her own ties to Mississippi.

Adlakha, a physician, real-estate developer and author who lives in Ocean Springs, announced her candidacy in September, becoming the most visible Republican challenger to incumbent Hyde-Smith since being appointed to the seat in 2018. A second Republican, Andrew Scott Smith of Florence, who lost a Republican primary in the 2nd Congressional District in 2024, is also on the ballot.

The challenge comes as Hyde-Smith received endorsements from President Donald Trump, Gov. Tate Reeves, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, Speaker Jason White and the state’s entire Republican congressional delegation. No Mississippi incumbent U.S. senator has lost a reelection bid since 1942.

An outsider campaign with unique complications

Adlakha, 53, has centered her campaign on transparency and campaign-finance reform, pledging to reject lobbyist donations and co-sponsor term limits legislation.

“I stepped into this race because I see that corruption, especially in our current U.S. senator, Cindy Hyde-Smith, and I really want to bring some transparency and accountability to Washington,” Adlakha said in a recent television interview.

Her campaign has highlighted Hyde-Smith’s acceptance of more than $300,000 from registered lobbyists and their family members during the past four election cycles. Adlakha has also pointed to the senator’s low rankings from the Center for Effective Lawmaking, a nonpartisan research collaboration between the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University. The center ranked Hyde-Smith 46^th out of 49 Republican senators on legislative effectiveness in its most recent assessment.

But Adlakha’s outsider message is complicated by her own background. A Chicago native who moved to Mississippi 13 years ago, she did not register to vote in the state until August 2024—a point the Hyde-Smith campaign has emphasized.

“We are happy our primary opponent recently moved to beautiful coastal Mississippi and decided to register to vote here in August 2024,” said Jake Monssen, Hyde-Smith’s campaign manager. “We welcome her participation in this election. As conservatives, we believe competition is good.”

Adlakha’s past social-media activity has also drawn scrutiny from critics. Following the 2020 election, she reportedly posted a message celebrating Vice President Kamala Harris’s historic election, writing that as “a mom of Indian daughters, this moment is pretty special.”

Business entanglements

Adlakha and her husband, cardiologist Dr. Sati Adlakha, are developing Legacy Park, a $48 million mixed-use project in Gautier that includes an outpatient cardiac surgery center. The development has been the subject of a prolonged dispute with the Jackson County Board of Supervisors and Singing River Health System, the county-owned hospital network, over a certificate-of-need and public-financing requests.

The Mississippi Supreme Court recently upheld the certificate of need, but the Jackson County Board of Supervisors denied the developers’ request for approximately $1 million in tax increment financing. The dispute generated heated exchanges on social media, with some posts calling the board “corrupt” and “mafia.”

The local politics surrounding the development led Adlakha to back the incumbent independent Gautier mayor over a Republican challenger in last year’s municipal elections—an unusual choice for a candidate seeking Republican primary votes.

Hyde-Smith’s position

Hyde-Smith enters the primary with significant advantages beyond her endorsements. Federal Election Commission filings show the incumbent with nearly $2.5 million in cash on hand compared with Adlakha’s approximately $122,000. Adlakha seeded her campaign with a $201,000 personal loan.

The senator has locked up support from the state’s Republican establishment, with endorsements from dozens of state legislators in addition to the statewide and federal officeholders.

Trump’s endorsement, announced in March 2025, called Hyde-Smith “100% MAGA” and praised her work on border security and agriculture.

Yet Hyde-Smith’s electoral history suggests she has vulnerabilities. In 2018, her special election victory over Democrat Mike Espy—53.6 percent to 46.4 percent—was the closest non-primary U.S. senate race in modern Mississippi history. In 2020, she won reelection by 10 points but underperformed Trump’s Mississippi margin by approximately six percentage points.

In December 2025, Hyde-Smith voted to table an amendment that would have banned senators and their spouses from trading stocks, blocking a debate on the ethics measure without a vote on its merits. The senator’s 2018 campaign was marred by controversy after a video surfaced in which she said of a supporter, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be in the front row.” The comment drew national criticism and prompted several corporate donors to request refunds.

The general election field

On the Democratic side, three candidates are competing in the March 10 primary: Lowndes County District Attorney Scott Colom, military veteran Albert Littell, and Priscilla Williams Till, a cousin of Emmett Till. Ty Pinkins, who lost a senate bid in 2024 as a Democrat and sought the secretary of state position in 2023, is running as an independent and will appear on the November ballot regardless of the primary outcomes.

National Democrats have identified the Mississippi seat as a potential target, though the state’s Republican lean—Trump carried it by 17 points in 2024—makes any Democratic path to victory narrow.

If no candidate receives a majority in the March 10 Republican primary, a runoff will be held on April 7, 2026. The general election is Nov. 3, 2026.

Image: Sarah Adlakha (via her campaign Facebook page)