Ty Pinkins grew up in the Mississippi Delta, in poverty and with a young mother. He found purpose and structure in the U.S. military that has shaped his life and led to various pursuits, including his current campaign to represent his home state in the United States Senate.
Pinkins, who served 21 years in uniform, is running as an independent candidate—one of a handful of veterans running this election cycle without an ‘R’ or ‘D’ behind their names. It will be an uphill battle, however, considering that Mississippi has long been a Republican stranglehold. The last Democrat in Mississippi to be victorious in a U.S. Senate race won in the early 1980s.
But it’s also not Pinkins’ first foray into politics. In 2023, he ran as a Democrat for Mississippi Secretary of State and lost to Republican Michael Watson, Jr., by roughly 20 percentage points. In 2024, he ran again as a Democrat against Republican Sen. Roger Wicker and lost by a 63-37% margin.
This November’s three-way race includes incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, the incumbent, and Democrat Scott Colom.
Pinkins spoke to Military.com as part of an exclusive interview, saying he remains confident that years of campaigning, door knocking and meeting people where they are will finally pay dividends when voters hit the polls come November.
Pinkins’ Upbringing
Pinkins’ mother dropped out of school at age 15 to give birth to him, and she never went back.
His biological father also left while she was pregnant. Shortly thereafter, she met another man who became Pinkins’ stepfather.
“But he had left school in the sixth grade, so I became the first person in my family to graduate high school, attend college, and then join the military,” Pinkins said.
“I served those 21 years, three combat tours, which culminated in me working at the White House as a communications aide to the president, and then subsequently, when I retired in D.C. I went to law school and earned my J.D. and my LLM from the Georgetown University Law Center,” he added.
After graduation, he returned to Mississippi and the delta where he grew up many years earlier, working in low-income communities.
“[Those were] 21 years that I would not change for anything,” he said about his service. “Some of the best years of my life, serving in uniform, wearing the flag of our country on my shoulder.”
Values Instilled in Two Decades of Service
He went to Tougaloo College in Jackson, a private Black college, after high school and spent three years there, admitting he “wasn’t in the right place at that point in my life.”
One day, while debating the next chapter of his journey, he walked into a shopping mall in Vicksburg, Miss., and walked past a Navy recruiting window and an Army recruiting window. He walked in the latter and had an epiphany.
“I realized that’s what I wanted to do,” he said. “I realized I wanted to see the world, I realized I wanted to serve my country. So, I signed up that day. And a few weeks later, a recruiter pulled into our mobile home in Rolling Fork, Miss., in a van, loaded me up, and I vanished. I was gone.”
He served at Fort Jackson for basic training, and then Fort Riley, Kan. He later spent roughly 14 years in Europe, a couple of years in Asia, in addition to the time he spent in Iraq.
“I wouldn’t change that for anything,” he said. “For me, serving in the military, it’s a personal thing and love of country, wanting to give back to something bigger than yourself—wanting to be part of something that really means something to not only you but to American citizens, to this country.”
I say it all the time: I would not change it for anything in the world. And if I had to do it again, I’d do it again.
As far as what he gained on a personal level, one of the things that was “hammered to us throughout my military career” was an acronym known as LDRSHIP, intentionally excluding vowels to spell “Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage.”
Pinkins said those are the values he’s carried with himself since exiting service.
“But also, I think those are values that are missing in Washington D.C. right now…and they’re missing in a lot of leaders in Washington,” he added, saying it’s “one of the reasons that we find ourselves in the situation we are in right now.”
Uphill Political Battle, Running as an Independent
The odds Pinkins faces in his current race are not lost on him, though he gleans a different outlook due to this not being his first campaign.
He told Military.com the experiences helped prepare him for the current election iteration, so to speak, and he’s ran against Hyde-Smith before.
“I think what really helped me out was being able to travel all across Mississippi to all 82 counties twice,” he said. “Now, this is my third go-round traveling around this country, and being able to meet with people and talk to people about the issues that are important to them.”
That includes having access to quality, affordable healthcare and housing, making sure that children receive a good education, and ensuring that people can afford their groceries, gas and utilities.
“What I find is that regardless of whether you’re on the left or the right, Democrat or Republican, most people want the same thing,” he said. “They want to raise their kids. They want to be able to make enough money to take care of their families, and they want to live in peace.
“I think we get torn between these two political parties, and that hurts everyday citizens overall—which is why I’m running as an independent.”
Growing up in a Democratic household influenced Pinkins’ worldview for decades. That was, however, until a couple years ago when he became an independent due to getting tired of the red and blue “teams” and the binary choices every cycle.
“You either choose to be on the left or you choose to be on the right, and I thought that was so limiting intellectually—where out of everything that exists on that spectrum, people are told that you don’t have the intellectual capacity to be anywhere else on the spectrum except for the left or the right, and I always disagree with that,” he said.
More recently, he feels even comfortable in his political stance due to how both parties “have failed” the American people. He pointed to how since 1977, and on six different occasions under almost every president, that one of the two major parties have controlled the executive and legislative branches.
In turn, he said the proof is in the results or lack thereof. He openly wonders why, after roughly 50 years of inter-party rule, issues like immigration, housing, health care and affordability are not getting fixed or cheaper but actually the opposite: more expensive.
“The cost of housing didn’t just start rising this year, and the cost of health care didn’t just go up this year, and the cost of our kids’ education didn’t just explode this semester,” he said. “These are issues that have been going on and getting worse, decade after decade.
“The only common denominator is the two political parties have traded power in Washington throughout this debacle, and the only way that we get out of it is by sending independents to Washington who are not tied to all the big money that’s caused the problems that we’re in today.”
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