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)