‘Where is Cindy Hyde-Smith?’: In a nail-biter Senate race, the incumbent stays out of view in Mississippi

As the Mississippi Senate race still remains too close to call, Democrat Scott Colom and GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith have taken completely different approaches towards the public.

Since Election Day, Colom has held at least eight events and capitalized on the national attention of the race to flood the airwaves and make his case for why Democrats should no longer count out a state historically considered a Republican stronghold. Meanwhile, Hyde-Smith has not been seen publicly since she left her election night watch party just outside of Jackson after declaring that she would remain her state’s junior senator.

While Colom has appeared at local universities, a Black-owned bookshop, a vinyl record store, a diner, and a senior citizens center and sat for multiple interviews with the media, Hyde-Smith has made her statements solely on X, including posting a Bible verse about hope on Sunday.

“Ultimately, at some point, the senator needs to speak out. Where is Cindy Hyde-Smith?” Colom told reporters on Friday at the senior citizens facility in Jackson. “We want to hear from her. She needs to answer questions. What is her path to victory? She doesn’t have one.”

Hyde-Smith’s campaign manager Jake Monssen said in a statement to CNN, “Senator Hyde-Smith and our team are working around the clock across Mississippi to protect the integrity of this election and to ensure every legal vote is counted.”

Hyde-Smith is expected to appear in Washington on Monday as the Senate returns to session after a six-week recess.

The divergent strategies speak to a dynamic that played out across the country this election cycle where Republicans in GOP strongholds like Hyde-Smith, who did not work to get ahead of the worsening national political landscape, were caught flatfooted and now find themselves in a once-unthinkable position.

Now, Colom leads the incumbent senator by 2,500 votes in a race that could come down to thousands of provisional ballots, which election officials will vet in the coming days. If he wins, he will be Mississippi’s first Democratic senator in nearly four decades and its first Black senator since the Reconstruction era.

Hyde-Smith’s campaign refused Colom’s invitations to debate prior to Election Day and did relatively few campaign events even as Colom was frequently on the trail and appearing with top Democrats like Kamala Harris and Bill Clinton.

Even some of Hyde-Smith’s supporters have noticed their senator’s absence and how Colom has filled that void.

John, an insurance adjuster from Hyde-Smith’s hometown of Brookhaven who declined to disclose his last name, is disappointed the Republican senator did not win in a landslide. Describing his community as the buckle to the Bible Belt, a county where Hyde-Smith outperformed Colom nearly 2:1, it’s hard for him to picture his home state turning blue. But John said he wished Hyde-Smith matched the television ads that he was inundated by from the Colom campaign.

“I would like to personally have seen more campaigning from Cindy,” he told CNN. “I would like to have seen more ads for Cindy and put her name out there a little more. And it may be because she’s an incumbent and maybe didn’t feel like the need was there. I’m not sure. I don’t know.”

For F.B. Warren, who has served on school boards with Hyde-Smith, Colom’s campaign should be a wakeup call for Republicans about how to not take Mississippi for granted.

“It’s kind of like the team that plays a game of football, baseball, basketball, and they never have competition,” Warren told CNN. “So, in Mississippi and across the country, from the Republican Party standpoint, they got pushed. They now got pushed, so they’re going to have to get better. They’re going to have to campaign better. They’re going to have to have better candidates. They’re going to have to work harder, and that’s the big wake-up call.”

His wife, Angie Warren, who owns two small stores in Hyde-Smith’s hometown, reflected on how Democrats did more to capitalize on voter enthusiasm this election season.

“I do think that the Democratic Party has a better turnout for elections than the Republican Party. I don’t know why that is. I don’t know if they speak closer to the people and they get out and vote more. But for some reason, the Republican Party doesn’t always have the voter turnout that it needs,” she told CNN.

While Mississippi has long been Republican territory, Colom and other Democrats have argued that the headwinds against the party in power and the state’s significant Black electorate made the state fertile ground for a flip this cycle. Further, Hyde-Smith, who was first appointed to the Senate in 2018, underperformed Republicans in 2020 as well, winning a full term by 10 points even as Trump won the state by 16.

The early lack of national attention to the race gave Colom a long runway to capitalize on Hyde-Smith’s uneven campaign performance.

It wasn’t until late October that the Senate Leadership Fund, the leading GOP super PAC focused on Senate races, made an initial reservation of about $160,000 in Mississippi, according to AdImpact data. That reservation was in response to Senate Democrats announcing that they would spend roughly $1 million on ads for the race. By that time, Colom had started to galvanize the party behind what was once considered a long-shot bid in a state Trump won two years ago by 23 points.

Hyde-Smith has posted on social media since Election Day, including a statement on November 6 stating, “we are not backing down. This election is not over” and vowing to “see this through to the very end!”

Mississippi GOP Chair Michael Hurst held a press conference last week to tout the 50-plus volunteer attorneys and observers Republicans had sent across the state, with many more are prepared to jump in to help.

“Our attorneys and observers will continue to be in different parts of Mississippi – watching as election commissioners review and process these outstanding ballots, ensuring that our elections are followed and that only ballots which have been legally cast are counted,” he said.

Mississippi Republican Party Chairman Mike Hurst tells CNN's Jake Tapper as many as 28,000 ballots in the closely watched Mississippi Senate race may still be uncounted.

Even as both sides prepare for a potential legal battle over the results, Democrat Phillip Rollins told CNN that Colom’s nonstop style channeled the frustration that he and others were feeling in the lead up to the election.

“People are fed up,” Rollins, who owns the comic book and record shop where Colom recently campaigned, said. “They need to see the change happen during their lifetime and not have to wait.”