This seat wasn’t on even the most optimistic of Democrats’ wish lists at the start of the cycle.
Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, is projected to unseat South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham, sister of the late Lindsey Graham, in a shocking upset. This gives Democrats a Senate seat in South Carolina for the first time in decades.
Andrews ran on lowering costs, tying Graham to President Donald Trump’s war in Iran and high prices for gas and groceries. She promised to stand up to Democrats when she disagreed and to work with Republicans to cut taxes.
Graham was appointed to the Senate after her brother’s unexpected death. Republicans knew little about her even as Trump and many party members quickly lined up behind her. Andrews painted her as the president’s “puppet.”
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National Republicans tried to go to Graham’s rescue with more than $5 million from the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune. It was a surprising move to shore up a Senate seat in a state that supported Trump by 18 percentage points two years ago, as were the trips in the final weeks of the campaign that Trump took to the state to try to rally the base.
Those efforts fell short.
Katon Dawson, a strategist and former chair of the state GOP, said before Election Day that a more established candidate wouldn’t have struggled against Andrews.
“If it had been Mark Sanford or if it would have been Ralph Norman, I don’t think there’d be a contest,” Dawson said. “Those were professional politicians ready to go, ready to debate, ready to do everything.”
“She’s a sweet person,” Dawson said of Graham. “She’s not a politician. She never wanted to get in the limelight.”
Still, Dawson predicted a narrow Graham victory ahead of Election Day.
“In ruby red South Carolina, people are pissed off at Donald Trump,” Dawson said Tuesday night, shortly before the race was called for Andrews. “And we didn’t see that one coming.”
New to politics, Graham had to go through a late-summer special primary and an Aug. 25 primary runoff, only narrowly defeating Rep. Ralph Norman to clinch the nomination. Her inexperience showed throughout the campaign, epitomized during a primary debate gaffe in which she admitted she was “not that informed on national security” when asked about Taiwan.
Andrews was also far more successful in the fundraising race. Her campaign raised $24.2 million through mid-October, while Graham’s campaign raised just $1.9 million.
Andrews distanced herself from national Democrats, at one point telling reporters that she didn’t want any of them to head there to campaign for her.
She also took out an ad saying she opposed gender-affirming surgery for minors and that transgender athletes should play on teams based on their sex assigned at birth — Trump and Graham both cast Andrews as a candidate supportive of transgender rights, and Trump incorporated a transphobic slur into his nickname for Andrews.
Speaking before Election Day, Trav Robertson, former chair of the state Democratic Party, said he saw a lack of enthusiasm for Graham and predicted the race would boil down to economic issues.
“[Voters] understand what’s happening to this economy, and the overarching issue is we are in a war that we didn’t need to be in,” Robertson said. “South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, they are not immune to the high prices of diesel. They’re not immune to the high price of gas.”
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