I did not expect Mississippi to produce one of our more difficult Senate endorsements.

Cindy Hyde-Smith was the easy part. Her vote to reject valid electoral votes after the 2020 election, her record on Ukraine, and her repeated willingness to defer to Donald Trump when Congress should have been defending its own constitutional powers convinced us that Mississippi would be better served by someone else.

The harder question was Scott Colom or Ty Pinkins.

Pinkins gave us something we genuinely like. He is running as an independent and says he would caucus with neither party. More importantly, he has been discussing the creation of a bloc of independent senators—a Fulcrum Caucus—that could potentially hold the balance of power in a closely divided Senate.

We have supported that idea in other races. A handful of senators who could bargain over committee organization, amendment rights and other Senate procedures might loosen the grip of the two parties and make Congress work a little more like the institution the Constitution intended.

But there is an important distinction.

I am enthusiastic about using that leverage to reform the Senate. I am much less enthusiastic about using it to make enactment of a substantially left-wing policy agenda the price of organizing the chamber. Pinkins has suggested both. His support for universal health care and other economic policies goes considerably beyond our own approach to health care.

If Pinkins were proposing to reserve the leverage of a Fulcrum Caucus primarily for institutional reform—and if he appeared to be the stronger candidate against Hyde-Smith—I think we would have endorsed him.

Neither appears to be true.

Colom, meanwhile, has a record that is unusually attractive for a Democratic candidate in a deeply Republican state. As a district attorney, he has combined aggressive prosecution of violent crime with diversion and rehabilitation for first-time nonviolent offenders. He has earned respect from Republican officials as well as Democrats and has demonstrated a willingness to pursue wrongdoing by members of his own party.

He also presently has something Pinkins does not: a plausible, although still difficult, path to defeating Hyde-Smith.

There are positions where we disagree with Colom, and I remain particularly interested in hearing a clear statement from him on Ukraine and NATO. An endorsement is not a declaration that a candidate agrees with us about everything.

It is a choice among the candidates actually running.

In Mississippi, after giving Ty Pinkins considerably more thought than I initially expected, we chose Scott Colom.

Read our full endorsement of Scott Colom for U.S. Senate.

See all of Centrist Independent Voter’s 2026 U.S. Senate endorsements and races under review.