Republican · Mississippi Senate · 2026
Cindy Hyde-Smith
Hyde-Smith's family has farmed in the Brookhaven area for five generations.
Biography
Cindy Hyde-Smith comes from a farming family that raises beef cattle and helps run a stockyard auction in Brookhaven.1 She and her husband Mike have a daughter, Anna-Michael, and their family's farming roots stretch across five generations.1 She grew up in Monticello, a small town she has cited when explaining her interest in rural health care.2
She spent 12 years in Mississippi's Senate, including eight chairing its Agriculture Committee, before serving as agriculture and commerce commissioner.1 She began her legislative career as a Democrat before joining the Republican Party.3 Appointed to the U.S. Senate in 2018, she became the first woman to represent Mississippi in Congress and won a full term in 2020.1
Hyde-Smith joined Democrat Jeff Merkley in pressing for a CDC Office of Rural Health, established through a spending law signed in December 2022.4 She opposed the larger funding package on final passage.2 Her waterfowl hunting provisions also became part of a 2019 law, allowing longer duck seasons and additional hunting opportunities for veterans and active military members.1
She opposes abortion and supports restrictions on abortion medication sent by mail.1 Completing the Yazoo Backwater flood control project and funding rural health services remain priorities.5 She faces Democratic district attorney Scott Colom, whose federal judicial nomination she opposed.6
Record and controversies
Judicial nomination dispute
About both candidates: Cindy Hyde-Smith and Scott Colom
In 2023, Hyde-Smith withheld the approval known as a blue slip for Colom's federal judicial nomination, citing concerns about female athletes and support from George Soros; Senator Roger Wicker supported the nomination.7 The prosecutors' letter Colom signed opposed criminalizing transgender people and gender related healthcare, rather than setting athletic eligibility rules.8 Soros supported an outside political committee in Colom's 2015 race, rather than donating directly to his campaign; Colom said he neither requested the support nor knew about it until news coverage appeared.9 Later reporting described Hyde-Smith's action as having blocked the judgeship, not as a judicial finding against Colom.10
Public hanging remark and apology
During her 2018 campaign, Hyde-Smith said she would sit in the front row of a public hanging if a supporter invited her, prompting criticism that she trivialized Mississippi's history of lynching.11 She described it as an exaggerated expression of regard for a friend and later apologized to anyone offended, saying she had intended no ill will while arguing that opponents had twisted her words.11