Candidate selection, fundraising and voter anger drew scrutiny after Graham’s defeat
Political observers in South Carolina were trying to explain how Democrat Annie Andrews was elected to the U.S. Senate seat previously held by the late Republican senator Lindsey Graham, defeating his younger sister by a comfortable five-point margin. The result did not extend across the state’s executive offices: voters also elected a Republican governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, treasurer, attorney general and other statewide offices by similar margins, according to The Guardian. Republican leaders described the Senate outcome as a turnout and candidate-selection problem rather than evidence of a broad shift toward Democrats.
Graham, 62, was appointed by South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, to serve out the remainder of her brother’s term after his sudden death in July. Though initially viewed as a caretaker, she was publicly urged to run for office by President Donald Trump, upending the contentious Republican primary to replace her brother. Her primary opponent, U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman, mounted a low-key write-in campaign that The Guardian reported fueled conservative skepticism about Graham’s candidacy, and party activists remain bitter about the primary.
Tyson Grinstead, Republican national committeeman for South Carolina, put turnout at the center of the postmortem. “I think there’s one stat of the day,” he said. Comparing 2024 with 2026, Grinstead said, “there were 500,000 people who voted in the 2024 presidential election who did not come back in the midterm.” “Of that 500,000, 400,000 were Republicans,” he said.
Grinstead also said more Black voters and other traditionally Democratic voting groups showed up than would otherwise be expected, while more Republicans stayed home. Midterm elections are historically lower-turnout affairs than presidential elections, and in most midterm elections the drop-off in voting numbers is larger in South Carolina, The Guardian reported.
Grinstead rejected an interpretation that South Carolina had become materially bluer. “The story of the night isn’t that South Carolina is getting materially bluer; it’s that we weren’t able to turn out the statewide vote we normally do,” he said.
His diagnosis was echoed by state Sen. Shane Massey, the majority leader of the Republican caucus in the South Carolina Senate. “South Carolina is not a Democratic or purple state; South Carolinians remain a conservative lot,” Massey said. “But they were upset with how some elected officials handled their work.”
Massey said, “Senator-elect Andrews’s victory shouldn’t be confused with broad ideological support for her platform.” He added, “It was primarily a rejection of the alternative and a desire to send a message. Voters expect their officials, Republican or Democrat, to address real problems rather than just screwing around.”
County-level results showed a larger change than the statewide vote. Berkeley County, which The Guardian described as one of South Carolina’s fastest-growing counties in the fastest-growing state, voted for Trump by a margin of about 16 points in 2024. On Tuesday, Andrews drew a nine-point victory margin there — a shift of 26 points toward a Democrat and among the largest swings in the state.
The Guardian attributed some of that shift to the congressional race to fill the seat vacated by former U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace. Retired admiral Nancy Lacore, whom Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired in what The Guardian described as a purge of female and nonwhite general officers, won the race and flipped its partisan control, goosing Democratic turnout across the First Congressional District.
The Guardian also attributed part of the shift to Graham’s weakness as a candidate. Voters said they felt as though Graham had been selected for them, and that they had seen that play before.
The voters who stayed home included Shane Brown, who typically votes Republican. Brown knew about the U.S. Senate election in South Carolina, and he knew the race between Sen. Darline Graham and her Democratic challenger, Annie Andrews, was shockingly competitive. He refrained from voting on Tuesday. The campaigns would not let him forget it.
“Oh, text messages, phone calls, TV, you name it: it was everywhere,” Brown said of the advertising he endured. “Like, the joke at work was the first person who stops texting me is the one we’d probably vote for.”
No one stopped texting Brown. By election day, he said, “Nobody really won me over.”
Brown traced his frustration to how candidates were presented to him. “I only voted Trump, honestly, because I couldn’t vote for Kamala because she was forced. We didn’t get a choice,” he said. “That was my issue with Darline, too. It was the same exact thing to me … They selected her. The powers that be said: ‘This is the person you guys get to vote for.’ And that’s not the way it should be.”
The Guardian reported that Graham had to dig out from under a series of public gaffes that called her competence into question, beginning with her comments during an August primary debate against Norman that “national security is not my thing” and “I’m not that informed on national security.” Norman picked at Graham as the campaign wore on. As the campaign became more competitive in the final stretch, Graham’s aides increasingly limited her availability to the press and the public, pulling her abruptly from the spin room after her sole general election debate with Andrews. Andrews’s campaign pounded Graham with advertising, bought with donated money from around the country.
Randal Wallace, a South Carolina real estate professional, Republican political commentator and former Myrtle Beach city councilman, blamed the party’s failure to support Graham. “You know, here’s this woman who was most likely at Belk buying a pocketbook on 10 July, and she gets put in the Senate,” Wallace said. “And then they asked her to run. And who’s going to turn the president of the United States down when he asks you to run? And our party couldn’t get behind her to help her through this whole thing?”
Wallace also said Norman discouraged his supporters from helping Graham. “Norman does this little wink and nod, ‘Well, my family’s not going to vote for her,’ and then he called her a fraud,” Wallace said. “He sent a signal to everybody up there and to all of his people not to help her. And they didn’t. And they succeeded. Annie Andrews is your senator. But I promise you, I’ll never forgive this.”
Andrews raised $24.2 million for her campaign. Graham raised only $1.9 million.
“Following Lindsey Graham’s death, we had a chaotic sprint primary format,” Massey said. “The nominee was selected in mid-September, leaving Darline Graham only six or seven weeks to run as a first-time candidate, compared to nominees in other states who had months. Lindsey had spent most of his campaign funds in the primary under the assumption that he could easily raise whatever general election money he needed.”
South Carolinians had weathered a deluge of political ads before: Jaime Harrison lit $130 million on fire trying to beat Lindsey Graham in 2020, and the result was a 10-point loss. “But this time, there was no Lindsey Graham to raise money,” Massey said.
The underlying anger of the electorate also contributed. At a Publix in Moncks Corner on Wednesday afternoon, Derek Rosado loaded $450 worth of groceries into the back of his truck and said he found Andrews’s victory delightfully surprising. “I mean, something’s got to change,” Rosado said. “And I think with the Democrats finally taking over again, I think they’ll bring the prices down. They see what’s going on, and it’s not just South Carolina, it’s the world.”
He also questioned the continuing conflict in Iran and military spending: “I mean, let’s be real: why are we fighting over in Iran? Why are we in a war there? Still going on with the Middle East stuff, spending trillions of dollars for a war that’s not even ours.”
The accounts pointed to several overlapping factors: lower Republican turnout, dissatisfaction with Graham, a compressed primary schedule and a substantial fundraising gap. Grinstead framed the unresolved postmortem this way: “The post-mortem really will be: why did that happen, and what can we do about it moving forward?”