Hyatt won the Democratic nomination, but lost to then Lieutenant Governor of Ohio Michael DeWine in the general election, in a campaign year in which Republicans swept all twelve of the Senate vacancies and unseated many incumbents.

In 1990, Hyatt Legal Services paid a $157,000 settlement for having illegally fired an attorney in their Philadelphia offices, Clarence B. Cain, in reference to his AIDS diagnosis.

[5] Hyatt served as National Finance Chair for the Democratic party in 2000, and is a business partner of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore In 2004, Hyatt and Gore purchased Newsworld International, a cable news channel, programmed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which aired news programming from around the world.

[6] Hyatt and Gore later sold the channel to Al Jazeera Media Network on January 2, 2013 for a reported $500 million.

In August 2014, Hyatt and Gore sued Al Jazeera for fraud and breach of contract in connection with a residual payment of $65 million that remained unpaid.

[8] Hyatt was an investor in and chairman of VideoSurf, a computer vision search engine that was acquired by Microsoft in 2011.

[9] Globality Inc, based in Menlo Park, California, is Joel Hyatt's current business venture.