South Carolina chooses Darline Graham as Republican nominee for US Senate

South Carolina voters have chosen Darline Graham as the Republican nominee for US Senate, the seat formerly held by her late brother, Lindsey, on November’s ballot.

Darline Graham, with Donald Trump’s full-throated support, overcame concern about her lack of legislative experience to beat five-term congressman Ralph Norman in Tuesday’s Republican special primary runoff.

With nearly all of the ballots counted, Graham had received 52.4% of the vote, according to the Associated Press, ahead of Norman’s 47.6%.

Lindsey Graham, a US senator for more than two decades, won the party’s primary in June, but died the next month. Days later, Darline Graham, was appointed to serve out the remainder of her brother’s Senate term. “The critics say I shouldn’t run for the Senate,” she told a rally audience Friday. “They say I’m not a politician. You know what I say? Guilty as charged.”

Graham will face the Democratic nominee Annie Andrews, a Charleston-area pediatrician, in November. Andrews faces steep historical odds; the last Democrat to win a statewide race in South Carolina was state superintendent Jim Rex in 2006.

Trump recommended the appointment of Darline Graham, a career civil servant who was head of South Carolina’s Commission for the Blind, then encouraged her to run for a full term – upending a Republican scramble to select a new Senate nominee. She advanced to the runoff election after emerging as the top vote-getter in a 10-candidate field that included two congressmen and a former South Carolina governor.

“What I really want you to do is pretend – please – that I’m on the ballot,” Trump said at a rally in Myrtle Beach on Friday. “Just come and vote.”

Trump’s Maga Inc Super Pac spent more than $800,000 in support of Graham during the campaign.

Graham spent the last week of the unusually short campaign digging out from a gaffe made at a debate. Asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea are national security issues, she replied that she was “not that informed on national security … but I do support the military”.

Some Republican voters saw that as evidence that she was not prepared for the role. Others dismissed the perceived effect as media spin.

“Who is going to back Trump?” said Bill Bullard of Conway who, along with his wife, Linda, voted for Graham on Tuesday. “Who is going to support Trump? It’s just that simple.”

Horry county, home to Myrtle Beach, proved decisive in the race. Though Norman won the northernmost counties of South Carolina – his political base – he did not win them by enough to counter the strength of Myrtle Beach and the coastal communities that have been surging in population and have less political loyalty to the state’s political apparatus than they have to Trump.

Norman, a member of the far-right House Freedom caucus is ranked by Heritage Action and other conservative organizations as one of Congress’s most conservative members. In the days following the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, Norman texted Trump’s chief of staff, urging Trump to declare martial law to prevent Joe Biden from taking office.

In the whirlwind campaign to replace Graham, Norman leaned into hard-right themes on the US Senate campaign trail, calling for Anthony Fauci, the former National Institutes of Heath director, to be jailed.

His campaign sought to cast Graham as a creation of the Washington elite and himself as the true heir to South Carolina’s Maga legacy. But many of Trump’s most ardent supporters in South Carolina remember that, in 2023, Norman endorsed Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, over Trump in her candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

A deluge – by South Carolinian standards – of negative advertising suggested that Norman had bucked Trump on border security votes, a charge he says mischaracterized his long holdout on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to strip subsidies for electric cars and renewable energy.

“I would do that over again,” he said in a debate. “I don’t apologize.”