Dr. Annie Andrews — the unsuccessful congressional candidate, pediatrician and founder of the PAC “Their Future. Our Vote.” — announced Thursday she’s once again running for Congress. This time, she’s challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham.
“I never thought I’d end up in politics,” Andrews told NOTUS in an interview before her campaign’s launch. “But after spending nearly two decades in the children’s hospital, I started to understand the way in which broken policies coming out of Washington, D.C., were hurting kids and families before they even got to me in the hospital.”
Andrews has centered her launch around children’s issues, playing up her profile as a mother of three and a practicing pediatrician. In her video announcement, she called out Graham’s support of Trump administration policies like cutting cancer research grants from the National Institutes of Health, removing gun violence from being classified as a public health crisis and cuts to vaccine programs like measles.
“We need a patient-centered health care system, not a profit-motivated health care system,” Andrews told NOTUS. “And I wish that more of our elected leaders had the experience that I have in the health care system to understand what’s working and what’s not working and what barriers we face as physicians to providing the best possible care to every patient that walks in the door.”
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Andrews first ran for Congress in 2022, when she lost a House race to GOP firebrand Nancy Mace. But Andrews is now joining a Democratic field that already includes 2022 Senate candidate Catherine Fleming Bruce, engineer Lee Johnson and logistics specialist Kyle Freeman.
Mark Knoop, Graham’s campaign manager, told NOTUS in a statement that Andrews “pushes a radical liberal agenda.”
“The more effective you are in helping enact President Trump’s agenda, the more Democrats want to take you down,” Knoop said.
The 2026 Senate map for Democrats is already looking rough. Flipping seats in red states may be one opportunity to cut their losses, but it’s an uphill battle. President Donald Trump won South Carolina by 18 percentage points in 2024, and Graham won reelection in 2020 by 10 percentage points.
Andrews said she hasn’t yet thought about whether she would back Sen. Chuck Schumer as party leader if she was elected senator. But she acknowledged that the Democratic Party is complicit like Republicans in treating this moment “as politics as usual.”
“We all need to stop looking for someone to come save the day,” she said.
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Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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