Ty Pinkins, independent candidate for U.S. Senate from Mississippi in the 2026 midterm elections.
Rogelio V. Solis | P.A.
Longshot’s Mississippi Senate candidate Ty Pinkins said he wanted to win first — but stayed to spoil.
Pinkins told a local television station that after an April poll showed he had no chance of winning, he stayed in the race to increase Democratic candidate Scott Colom’s chances of beating incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.
Pinkins’ so-called strategy could pay off.
Colom narrowly leads Hyde-Smith in the current count by just 1,936 votes, a margin of just 0.2 percentage points, with 96.2% of the votes counted, according to the Associated Press. That margin equates to about a tenth of Pinkins’ vote share, or 2.1 percentage points.
Pinkins has so far only won 20,010 votes out of the nearly 952,000 votes already counted.
“The only thing I did was stay in the race and let people shoot arrows at me,” Pinkins said in an interview Thursday with WTVA in Mississippi. “That’s it. And it’s a… small price to pay to get someone into this race who I think can help people in the Delta and across the state.”
“The part of the vote that I got — and people were concerned about splitting the black vote — what I actually did was split the Republican vote,” he said.
Pinkins told the Tupelo station that he intentionally avoided campaigning in areas with large black populations to avoid reducing the vote share of Colom, who, like Pinkins,, is black.
That tactic worked, he said, because election results show he got most of his support in areas with relatively small black populations.
“I’ll be the bogeyman,” he said. “But I will tell you this: In this race, the independent got most of his votes from a Republican, and for the first time since Reconstruction, a black Democrat is leading.”
Pinkins, a lawyer who previously ran for Mississippi secretary of state, was the Democratic nominee for Senate in 2024. He was crushed by Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, who won nearly 63% of the vote, to Pinkins’ roughly 37%.
Despite this performance, the US army veteran decided to try his luck again in the Senate in 2026.
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., and District Attorney Scott Colom, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Mississippi in the 2026 midterm elections.
Rogelio V. Solis | Getty Images
But in the spring, he saw that his candidacy was being prepared.
“I entered this race to win,” Pinkins told WTVA. “In April, I knew I was going to lose, but I also knew I would get 70% of the Republican vote based on the (SPLC Action Fund and Impact Research) poll.”
The SPLC Action Fund, when it released the poll, said: “A decline in the numbers favoring Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith could pave the way to victory for Democrats.” »
“Independent Ty Pinkins has the potential to play a disruptive role for either candidate,” the SPLC Action Fund said in April.
In the WTVA interview, Pinkins said, “I probably went to maybe six events over the summer” as part of his campaign.
“Six events. I don’t have to do it,” Pinkins said. “Why? I’m not going to win. So why go to these black communities where he’s going?”
Pinkins said all he had to do was visit counties that have relatively low black populations and “talk to some Republicans who said they were going to vote for me.”
“They were literally calling me and emailing me, ‘We’re going to vote for you because we don’t want to waste our vote on Cindy Hyde-Smith, we don’t want to hold our noses and vote for her, so we’re going to vote for you. Please stay in the race,'” he said.
Colom and Hyde-Smith’s campaigns did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Gn headline
