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South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham won Tuesday’s primary for a full term, riding President Donald Trump’s endorsement to a narrow victory after a quick special election.
“Our victory would not have been possible without you, and we are truly grateful,” Graham said of Trump at her victory party in Columbia. She immediately pivoted to the general election against Democrat Annie Andrews, warning that she advocates “turning confused little boys into little girls and vice versa.”
Graham, who’d never sought office before being appointed to replace her brother Lindsey in the Senate, was backed by most of the state’s GOP leadership, and her allies — including MAGA Inc., the president’s super PAC — outspent her primary competitor, Rep. Ralph Norman.
“We had $8 million spent against us,” Norman told his supporters, bemoaning the president’s decision to endorse Graham. “His policies are good. I never understood why he got in this race. It is what it is.”
Graham built an insurmountable lead in the 7th Congressional District in and around Myrtle Beach, where Rep. Russell Fry endorsed her after losing his own Senate bid, and where the president flew in for a weekend rally. Norman carried his district and the upstate, where the Grahams were raised and where conservative voters had been most critical of the late senator.
In the rest of the state, Graham prevailed — including in the Charleston area, where former governor and congressman Mark Sanford endorsed Norman after his own Senate campaign faltered. She linked herself directly to the president, telling voters that, unlike her brother, she’d get rid of the filibuster to pass Trump’s voter ID law, and said she’d never support amnesty for undocumented immigrants.
The president was on the verge of getting another endorsee over the line in Oklahoma, where former state Sen. Mike Mazzei beat Attorney General Gentner Drummond in the runoff for the GOP nomination for governor. Mazzei did best with votes cast on Election Day, after Drummond had criticized the president’s plan to import beef to ameliorate the effects of his tariffs.
“When he gets it wrong, I will speak up,” Drummond said of Trump.
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David’s view
Graham’s campaign, powered by her brother’s old political operation, impressed Republicans. Graham’s candidacy sometimes didn’t. After last week’s only runoff debate, where the senator punted a question on Taiwan and explained that “foreign policy” wasn’t her expertise, Republicans upped their expectations for Norman, a House Freedom Caucus member who ran to Graham’s right.
But she won, and the president got to claim another victory, which she was happy to attribute to him. His intervention in Oklahoma was just as impressive: Mazzei, whose top issue is ending the state income tax, didn’t have a political legacy to run on like Graham’s.
Notable
- Ben Jacobs covered the final days of the South Carolina runoff for Slate, including the in-person Myrtle Beach rally that the president attended: “It’s never an ideal sign when a candidate’s support at an election-eve rally is less than unanimous.”