Matt Shinners
Independent voters now represent the largest share of the American electorate, and yet they remain mostly unrepresented in federal office. Both major parties have spent decades optimizing for their bases, almost always leaving the near majority of Americans who identify as independent with the choice of either voting for a party candidate they don't fully support or staying home.
A handful of high-profile independent candidates for the US Senate are trying to change that. 2026 is seeing one of the largest surges of interest in independent candidates in recent memory. However, these candidates are often covered as fringe candidates, and stories about them focus more on how they'll impact the outcome of the election between a Republican and Democrat than they do on the substance of the candidate's campaign.
This series exists because the independent electorate deserves better than that. Over the coming months, IVN is conducting in-depth interviews with independent Senate candidates across the country — not just horse-race conversations about polling and fundraising, but substantive discussions about the issues independent voters actually care about.
In Mississippi, that candidate is Ty Pinkins.
I. The Candidate
Ty Pinkins grew up in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, the son of a tractor driver. His family moved from plantation to plantation depending on where his father found work, and, at 13, Pinkins started working to help his family make ends meet.
He was the first in his family to graduate high school and go to college. He attended Tougaloo College before enlisting in the US Army, serving on active duty for 21 years. After retiring, he earned an LLM in national security law and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center.
He moved back to Mississippi with his degree to “help underserved communities…navigate the justice system.”
His reform credentials are not rhetorical. He has worked to draw fairer maps at the county level, and he co-filed a federal Voting Rights Act lawsuit alongside the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center successfully challenging Mississippi's gerrymandered state Supreme Court districts.
Pinkins has run as a Democrat on several occasions (see more on his decision to leave the party and run as an independent below). He was the Democratic candidate for Mississippi secretary of state in the 2023 election after replacing a candidate who dropped out for health reasons, ultimately losing to the Republican candidate 59.5-40.5.
He was then the Democratic candidate for US Senate in 2024, gaining the nomination after running unopposed in the primary. He ultimately lost to Republican Roger Wicker, 62.8-37.2.
On July 1, 2025, he left the party and announced he would run for Senate again as an independent.
II. The Race
Incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) is seeking her second full term. First appointed in 2018 to fill the seat of retiring Sen. Thad Cochran, she has won two general elections against Democrat Mike Espy, both by about 10 points.
She slightly underperformed Pres. Trump in the 2020 election, who received almost 58% of the vote share. She won her primary in March with 81% of the vote with Trump’s endorsement.
The Democratic nominee is Scott Colom, district attorney for four northeast Mississippi counties, who won his primary with 73% of the vote.
Mississippi Senate elections have been dominated by Republicans for much of recent memory—Democrats haven't won a Senate race in Mississippi since 1982. All major firms that rate the lean of the electorate in elections say that the Mississippi Senate election is safe/solid Republican.
And the fundraising totals highlight the difficulty that any challenger will have in unseating the incumbent. Sen. Hyde-Smith has raised over $5M, with around $2.5M cash on hand (as of 3/31). Democrat Scott Colom has raised $1.6M, with $560k cash on hand; Pinkins has spent down his $90k raised to $632 cash on hand.
However, voter registration numbers paint a different picture. While Republicans do outnumber Democrats (29-23), independents make up a near majority of registered voters in the state (48%). The most recent poll on the race (conducted by Impact Research for SPLC Action Fund) sees the incumbent’s popularity sagging, with a 10% decline since June of ‘25.
Fifty-three percent (53%) said they planned to vote for someone besides the incumbent, as opposed to 33% stating that they would vote for reelection. It’s important to note, however, that when asked about voting between Colom, Hyde-Smith, and Pinkins, respondents were still 42% in favor of Hyde-Smith, compared to 39% for Colom and 6% for Pinkins.
The path, then, for the independent needs to go through picking up the 14% undecided voters and then convincing the independent voters that they should vote for him over one of the party options.
III. Why Independent, and Why Now
Pinkins was a lifelong Democrat before his decision to leave the party. What changed was the experience of actually running. "I really got an inside look at how much both parties have their hands stuck in the big money cookie jar," he said. "Both parties are tainted by that money and they can't get their hands out."
His July 2025 open letter drew significant attention. In it, he alleged that when he first entered the 2026 race, Democratic officials didn't ask him about health care, jobs, education or veterans. "[T]he first question, over and over and over again, was, ‘How much money do you have? How much have you raised?’ Not values. Not vision. Just dollars."
His critique isn't a conversion of his own values or policy positions. He still agrees with most Democratic policy positions, such as universal health care, universal child care, reproductive rights. His argument is that the money flowing from the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries into both parties makes it structurally impossible to act on those positions.
He has a data point he emphasizes: since 1977, both parties have had total unified control of the federal government on six separate occasions, and across all of that time healthcare costs have risen every year, as have the costs of groceries, education, and housing.
"The problem isn't that the solutions aren't there. The solutions are there. The problem is the people that failed to pass the legislation to bring those solutions to everyday Americans," he said.
IV. Running Against Corruption
Running against corruption is a throughline connecting most, if not all, of the independent Senate candidates running this cycle. Pinkins backs this position with action: he claims to be the only candidate in the race who does not own stock—an intentional choice he’s made to send a clear message. "If a candidate is serious about trying to rebuild trust with voters, something has to be sacrificed."
He asks voters who care about this issue: "Who is more likely to put forth legislation to ban the buying and selling and trading of stock—the guy who doesn't own stock, or the people who do?"
Pinkins' anti-corruption argument runs deeper than the stock trading pledge, highlighting the corrupting influence he believes money has had on politics (a sentiment that 72% of Americans across political identifications share).
His framing is transactional and deliberate: millionaires, billionaires, super PACs, and lobbyists aren't donating to candidates out of civic spirit. "They’re not donating that money to those candidates out of the kindness of their heart. That's an investment," he said.
"And when [the candidates receiving these donations] win, those millionaires, billionaires, super PACs, lobbyists, they expect a return on their investment that does not coincide with what voters want."
The result is a trust gap between elected officials and the people they represent that he argues is entirely the fault of elected leaders, not voters. Overturning Citizens United is the structural fix he returns to most often, paired with what he describes as "real strong guardrails that protect our democracy against the infiltration of big money."
What gives the argument teeth, beyond the policy positions, is the consistency between what he says and how he runs. He says he doesn't take money from millionaires, billionaires, super PACs, or lobbyists, and he explicitly notes his non-affiliation with major lobbying organizations on both sides of high-profile foreign policy debates (J Street and AIPAC being the two main ones named).
In a race where Hyde-Smith held a six-figure fundraising event at Mar-a-Lago and the DSCC is investing in Colom, Pinkins is running on small-dollar, grassroots support—which costs him in resources but reinforces the central argument of his campaign.
He frames the choice deliberately: you cannot credibly legislate against the funding model that put you in office.
"Both parties have had an opportunity to do it. A lot of these issues that we're facing, they've had an opportunity to fix. And every election cycle they come back and tell the American people about the same issues that they failed to fix."
V. Reform: Where He Has Done the Work
Pinkins speaks from a position of expertise and experience on reform issues. He speaks with nuance on the differences between closed, open, and semi-open primaries, and the benefits and downsides he sees in each. His experience is grounded in actual litigation.
The redistricting lawsuit he co-filed in 2022 is one of if not the most concrete reform credential of any candidate in this series. His preferred model for primaries is a top-four open primary feeding into a ranked-choice general election: one ballot, every candidate regardless of party, top four advance, and everyone ranks those four on their general election ballot.
He points to Mississippi's participation numbers as evidence of the current system's failure—1.9 million registered voters, roughly 90,000 participated in this year's Democratic primary. (Ed. Note: Final counts have the total at 150,641 voters in the Democratic Senate primary.)
His framing of why the Senate specifically matters to this effort is sharp: you cannot gerrymander a Senate seat. Both senators run statewide. "The United States Senate is the last guardrail standing." Independent redistricting commissions and open primaries, he argues, have to be forced through the Senate and then the House.
VI. The Fulcrum Caucus
Pinkins will not caucus with the Democrats. "If I were going to caucus with the Democrats, I might as well run as a Democrat." He extends that to both parties. His reference point for how he’d engage in the Senate isn't independent Senators Sanders or King, both of whom caucus with the Democrats—it's the group text he shares with other independents running for Senate.
The collective goal is to deny either party a working majority, then set terms before helping anyone organize the chamber. Pinkins offered a specific account of what those terms would look like.
On January 3, 2027, Congress writes the rules it will operate under for two years—and that rule-writing process, before any legislation or committee assignments, is where Pinkins argues the leverage lies.
To reform the chamber and get work done for his constituents, he rattles off a list of non-negotiables to get his and the other independents’ support for forming a majority: a single-issue bill banning congressional stock trading; a single-issue bill addressing campaign spending / Citizens United; independent redistricting commissions; universal health care; universal child care; an independent Senate leader with the same floor access and resources as the party leaders; rules protecting independent bills from partisan poison pill amendments; and ethics enforcement with actual teeth for both the Supreme Court and the Senate.
"The Democrats and Republicans now have to negotiate even before they start. They have to come and find enough independents to give them a majority. And that is not free," he said.
VII. Assessment
As with all independent campaigns, the obstacles are real. His fundraising pales in comparison to both the Republican and the Democrat; the race is rated Safe Republican across the board; and he will continue to face questions about his previous affiliation with the Democratic Party, even as that party tries to paint him as a spoiler in the election.
However, what distinguishes him from other candidates and even the other independent Senate hopefuls is the combination of genuine reform credentials and Fulcrum Caucus specificity.
He sued Mississippi over gerrymandering and won. He has a concrete list of procedural demands for Day One of a new Congress, many of which are popular with voters and unlikely to be agreed to by the party candidates. And he is part of a coordinated network of independent candidates running the same play in six states simultaneously.
Whether that network produces enough wins to matter is the variable none of them can control individually—but the specificity and passion with which Pinkins makes the case for what independent leverage in the Senate would actually look like in practice could certainly galvanize the independent near-majority in the Magnolia State.
This interview was conducted May 29, 2026.