In 1881, Noel was elected to a seat in the
Mississippi House of Representatives. In 1887, he was elected as a district attorney. In 1890 the Democratic-dominated legislature passed a new constitution with provisions that
disenfranchised most African Americans by raising barriers to voter registration. White Democrats maintained this exclusion of blacks from politics through much of the 1960s in the state. These actions crippled the Republican Party in the state, whose members had been primarily made up of newly enfranchised African-American
freedmen after the Civil War. In 1895 Noel was elected to the
Mississippi State Senate. He served in the U.S. Army in the
Spanish–American War (1898). He was re-elected to the state senate in 1899. By the turn of the 20th century, Mississippi was a
de facto one-party state under the firm control of the
Democratic Party. With no meaningful opposition in general elections from the
Republican Party, who held public office was effectively determined by who was nominated by the Democratic Party. Such nominations were decided in party conventions, which tended to be dominated by wealthy planters, bankers, and traders. Upon joining the State Senate, Noel began advocating for a law requiring party's to employ
primary elections to select their candidates, as such a reform would ensure more popular participation in the political process. He also later stated that he feared public discontent with the convention system would destabilize
white supremacy in Mississippi's political system. In
1899,
Andrew H. Longino was elected
governor of Mississippi. He advocated for the adoption of a primary law in 1900, and while a bill to that effect passed the Senate, it did not succeed in the House. At the beginning of the 1902 legislative session, Noel introduced a bill which required all party nominations to be determined by primary elections, and called for a run-off contest to be held in the instance of no contender garnering a majority of the votes on the first ballot. The bill was successful and signed into law in March. The law also allowed a party's leadership to determine who was eligible to vote in their primaries, and in 1903, the
Mississippi Democratic Party's Executive Committee voted to restrict eligibility to include
only white voters. Accordingly, the law led to the exclusion of blacks from meaningful input in Mississippi's politics while also driving future candidates to appeal more to regular white voters. In 1903, Noel retired from the State Senate and launched a campaign for the office of governor. In the Democratic primary he faced F. A. Critz, a Civil War veteran, and
James K. Vardaman, a newspaper editor. Vardaman and Critz advanced to the primary run-off, which the former won. In
1907, Noel won the Democratic primary and was elected Governor of Mississippi. He achieved numerous progressive reforms, including in education. These reforms included consolidation of the state's rural school districts, the establishment of agricultural high schools for whites, and the founding of a teacher's college in
Hattiesburg (restricted to white students). Noel's administration also gained passage of laws regulating
child labor, establishing statewide
prohibition of alcohol, founding of a state charity hospital, and establishing pure food laws. The business community in Jackson had recommended that both the 66-year-old
Governor's Mansion and the
Old Capitol be demolished and the sites redeveloped for commercial use. Noel and his wife
Alice worked together to promote the preservation and renovation of the mansion. Through their efforts, it received its first major renovation and was updated for continued use. After the end of his term, Noel continued to be active in state politics. In
1918, he was unsuccessful in his run for the
United States Senate, which was newly based on popular voting. Since the adoption of the 17th Amendment in 1913, U.S. senators were elected for the first time that year by popular vote rather than by state legislatures. Noel ranked third; both he and the incumbent, populist U.S. Senator
James K. Vardaman, lost to
Pat Harrison. Blacks were still effectively disenfranchised and excluded from voting. In 1920, Noel was elected again to the Mississippi State Senate, serving until he died in 1927. ==Personal life and death==