Within the Margin

Our September Senate check-ins continue with the second set of Southeastern states – to divide this group into manageable pieces, we’re using the old east and west divisions of the venerable Southeastern Conference (SEC). By the way – you’ll notice recent SEC addition Oklahoma in this piece, but not Texas – there’s a reason for that. Don’t worry; we’ll be covering Texas in plenty of depth later in the week.

I’ll summarize each race in a sentence first, then link to the longer write-up further down the page.

Previous posts in this series:
Senate Week Overview
The Big 10 (Great Lakes/Midwest)
The SEC (East)

Alabama
Incumbent: Tommy Tuberville (R – retiring)
2026 matchup: Everett Wess (D) vs. Barry Moore (R)
In a sentence: Lightning is not going to strike a second time in an Alabama Senate race, like it did for Doug Jones in 2017…but at least he’s back on the state’s ballot – this time for governor. Read more.

Arkansas
Incumbent: Tom Cotton (R – elected 2014)
2026 matchup: Hallie Shoffner (D) vs. Tom Cotton (R)
In a sentence: If an upset ever happened here, it wouldn’t actually be hard to understand why. Read more.

Louisiana
Incumbent: Bill Cassidy (R – defeated in primary)
2026 matchup: Jamie Davis (D) vs. Julia Letlow (R)
In a sentence: Davis is just about the best candidate Dems could nominate here…and the same goes for Letlow and the Republicans. Read more.

Mississippi
Incumbent: Cindy Hyde-Smith (R – appointed & elected 2018)
2026 matchup: Scott Colom (D) vs. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R)
In a sentence: I’m always more bullish on Democratic chances in the Magnolia State than perhaps I should be, but I think both candidates here give me good reason. Read more.

Oklahoma
Incumbent: Alan Armstrong (R – appointed 2026)
2026 matchup: N’Kiyla Jasmine Thomas (D) vs. Kevin Hern (R)
In a sentence: It’s hard to tell if the Democratic nominee here is truly interested in the kind of broad church required to win in Oklahoma, but if so she could be building something interesting for the future. Read more.

Alabama: This seat was actually held by a Democrat for several years, when Doug Jones won a November 2017 special election against the deeply problematic Roy Moore. It was the first win for a Dem in a U.S. Senate race in Alabama since 1992. Jones served out the remainder of Jeff Sessions’ term before facing college football coach Tommy Tuberville in 2024; Tuberville won decisively but is departing the Senate to run for governor. I should note here that current Alabama senator and likely future Alabama governor Tommy Tuberville actually lives in Florida, which is not Alabama. Anyway, the race to replace him is between three-term Congressman Barry Moore and attorney Everett Wess, who also serves as a municipal court judge in Midfield. While the Roy Moore example demonstrates that Alabama is not automatic, it probably takes a candidate as bad as Roy Moore for a Senate race here to even be competitive. Barry Moore is a pretty standard 2020s-era Trump Republican; unlike some of their candidates this year, he hasn’t scrubbed his website of references to being a “Trump conservative” who hails how he was the first elected official in the country to endorse Trump, as a state rep back in 2015. Let’s put it this way: if Moore joins the Trump-scrubbers, we’ll know we’re in for a historic election.
Rating: Safe Republican (hold)
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Arkansas: Arkansas took longer than most of the South to realign to Republicans below the presidential level. As late as 2008, Democrat Mark Pryor was running without GOP opposition. And Democrats came out of the disastrous 2010 midterm elections still holding most statewide offices along with majorities in both houses of the state legislature. That ended quickly in the years that followed, and in 2014 Pryor lost re-election to Tom Cotton by 17 points. Cotton faced only Libertarian opposition in 2020 (winning 67% to 33%). He has a Democratic challenger this year in rice farmer Hallie Shoffner, a sixth-generation farmer. She scored an endorsement from Jon Tester, a fellow farmer who served three terms in the Senate from Montana and does not enthuse over just anyone, so that’s somewhat meaningful. Cotton is not a charismatic personality; he exudes the abrasive negativity of contemporary politics and it wouldn’t shock me if Shoffner can win some people over with an active campaign. He also doesn’t live in Arkansas or spend much time in the state. That’s the sort of thing that damages an incumbent. Enough to endanger one of the reddest seats in the country? I wouldn’t think so.
Rating: Safe Republican (hold)
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Louisiana: Bill Cassidy defeated a prominent three-term Democratic incumbent in 2014, cruised to re-election in 2020, and voted to convict Donald Trump on charges of incitement of insurrection following the events of January 6 in 2021. That was effectively the end of Cassidy’s electoral career, as Trump deemed him a “disloyal disaster.” Louisiana Republicans then abandoned the state’s all-party “jungle primary” to ensure Cassidy could not rely on support from Democrats and independents to make it to the general election. He drew two serious Republican challengers in this year’s primary and finished a distant third. Cassidy is a confusing figure at this point. He is a doctor who raised countless concerns about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s fitness to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services, then voted to confirm him anyway…and has spent the year and a half since lamenting Kennedy decisions that fly in the face of medical science. Cassidy – now owing absolutely nothing to Trump from a political or electoral perspective – raised an assortment of major concerns about Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general…before providing the decisive vote to confirm him.

The new Republican standard-bearer in this seat, three-term Congressmember Julia Letlow, will not be difficult to figure out: she is a committed Trump loyalist who will not be in the business of occasionally charting a more independent course. She has a strong electoral track record – admittedly from a safe district, but the precinct-level data indicates that she performs better among Black voters than most Louisiana Republicans. Her ideological positioning satisfies the base of her own party while her demeanor dos not inspire much vitriol from across the aisle.

The Democratic candidate has an intriguing profile: he’s a third-generation row crop farmer in Tensas Parish, working the same land his grandfather did as a sharecropper. A self-described country boy, he’s a competitive bass fisherman and campaigns with a rifle in his truck. He has an easygoing air about him. He’s focused on the economy and affordability, as any candidate should be this year, but is able to speak to these issues as a business owner. I don’t think there’s a world where Democrats are competitive in a Louisiana Senate race right now, even in a friendly national environment. And Letlow is a better than average candidate – certainly the best statewide prospect Republicans had in their Congressional ranks. But Davis is a charismatic fellow with some chops – keep an eye on him.
Rating: Safe Republican (hold)
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Mississippi: Pundits and national Democratic leadership are starting to catch onto something I’ve been saying all year: Mississippi is a race to watch this year. It requires several things to be in place, and even then it’s a longshot. But those things are in place: a lackluster GOP incumbent, a talented Democratic challenger, and a deep-blue national environment. Mitigating against the state’s competitiveness is one constant of Mississippi politics: a lack of swing voters. There are still many parts of the South – particularly in less-suburbanized sates like Mississippi without a large metro area – where voting remains racially polarized to such an extent that each party’s vote share moves within a very narrow band of potential outcomes. There’s just enough room for movement that the state has seen some close gubernatorial races in recent years: Republican Tate Reeves defeated longtime attorney general Jim Hood 52%-47% in 2019 and held on narrowly (51%-48%) against public service commissioner (and second cousin to Elvis) Brandon Presley in 2023. Recent Senate races have either been blowouts in favor of the state’s senior senator, Roger Wicker, or narrower victories by junior senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. Originally a very conservative Democratic state senator – as remained customary in the state into the 2010s – Hyde-Smith eventually switched parties in late 2010. The next year, she was elected Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce, the first woman to hold the position in Mississippi history. When longtime senator Thad Cochran resigned due to health issues in 2018, Governor Phil Bryant appointed Hyde-Smith to the seat. She faced a special election later that year to serve out the rest of Cochran’s term, and by Mississippi Republican standards, it did not go well. Not helping matters? Her history of posting gleefully about the Confederacy. During the campaign, she joked about her enthusiasm for attending a hypothetical public hanging…in a state with a dark history of lynching its Black citizens. She had attended a segregation academy replete with Confederate symbols, which is one thing in the 1970s…but sending her own daughter to one decades later raised some eyebrows. And she faced an accomplished foe in Mike Espy, a moderate former Congressman and the nation’s first Black Secretary of Agriculture during the Clinton administration. Hyde-Smith prevailed by seven points – a nailbiter by the standards of a U.S. Senate race in this state. Two years later, they faced off again for a full term, with CHS winning by ten points this time – still far less than Wicker’s typical margins.

This time, her opponent is considerably younger than Espy was during his campaigns and can point to very recent accomplishments in office: Scott Colom is 43 and currently serves as the district attorney for the 16th Judicial District in east central Mississippi. His office has secured high-profile convictions and he was nominated by Joe Biden as a federal district court judge. Armed with support from Wicker along with the state’s two previous Republican governors, Colom’s confirmation had momentum…until Cindy Hyde-Smith refused to return her blue slip, dooming his nomination under the Senate’s arcane and clubbish customs. Now he’s trying to unseat her. As is always the case in Mississippi, there is a dearth of public polling so it is hard to assess the state of the race. But we know that CHS chronically underperforms in her elections, and we know that the Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, is fundraising for Coluom and talking up his chances. Schumer’s political instincts aren’t what they once were, but this is still an indicator that Colom is at least competitive.

We’ll hear loads about how Colom took Soros money in his DA campaign and how coastal elites are propping him up. But I think Mississippi is going to deliver a statewide Democratic win one of these days. The last one was Jim Hood’s final re-election as attorney general in 2015. The candidate factors in play here – against the backdrop of Trump’s declining support and the real impacts on health care in a poorer rural state like Mississippi from Hyde-Smith’s votes to let health insurance subsidies expire – tell me that this could be the year.
Rating: Likely Rep (hold)
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Oklahoma: The last truly competitive Senate election in the Sooner State was in 2004, when the previous two representatives from the state’s 2nd Congressional District faced off. The race pitted a moderate Democrat, Brad Carson, against a conservative firebrand in Tom Coburn. At that point, Democrats were still the stronger party in state-level races but had lost tremendous ground in the state’s federal contests. Polling showed Carson competitive or even leading through the summer, before fading in the fall and losing 53%-41% with a seemingly-paranoid left-leaning independent grabbing 6%. Carson ran seven points ahead of John Kerry at the top of the ticket, but that still left him far short. Carson wrote an essay after the race that I read at the time and still find value in 22 years later.

Democrats haven’t come anywhere near as close to winning a Senate race in Oklahoma as Carson did that year. They no longer control any statewide offices. They lost the state House that year and the state Senate four years later, never to return (yet). They did briefly flip a Congressional seat in the 2018 Democratic wave, and Republicans used the 2022 re-mapping to split Oklahoma City three ways to mitigate against it happening again.

There’s an outside chance that 2026 will test the solidity of that map; there is no chance that it will test the solidity of the GOP hold on the Class II Senate seat. It was vacated when Trump appointed Markwayne Mullin as the new Secretary of Homeland Security earlier this year. Williams Companies CEO Alan Armstrong was in turn appointed to serve out the remainder of Mullin’s term and Republicans nominated Tulsa congressman Kevin Hern to run in this November’s election. Democrats chose first-time candidate N’Kiyla Jasmine Thomas, a nurse with a fascinating background – see also this interview – but who remains the longest of long shots. My guess is that quite a few Oklahoma voters would choose her background and profile – as a nurse, as an active-duty military spouse, as a parent of a child with autism – over Hern’s, if you removed party from the equation. That is, of course, not how politics works, and her campaign does not yet include something for more conservative voters – the majority of Oklahomans, in other words – to grab onto if they’re considering crossing over.
Rating: Safe Rep (hold)
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