Last week brought the kind of opportunity Lindsey Graham used to live for: a hostile witness in a Senate hearing, a national audience, the chance to rough somebody up for the cameras. The witness was former special counsel Jack Smith, and the senator doing the questioning was still named Graham. But as CNN reported, it quickly became clear this would not be a Lindsey Graham-esque moment. Sen. Darline Graham, appointed to finish her brother’s term after he died unexpectedly in July, read her questions from notes. She scolded Smith for collecting her late brother’s phone data as part of his investigation into President Donald Trump’s conduct around the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot — a sweep of GOP lawmakers’ records that the late senator had loudly criticized while he was alive.
The exchange had its moments, on paper. “Do you really believe that Lindsey was going to destroy evidence that was not even in his possession?” she asked. Smith’s reply was almost tender: “No, I believe your brother was a patriotic public servant. He was not a target of our investigation, and in fact he likely would have been a witness in our case.” Graham read a few follow-ups, then cut him off: “Do you know what I think? I think you are just trying to bully my brother and other allies of President Trump. You caused my brother and a lot of other senators a lot of stress, and that makes me sick. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
The punch did not land. CNN notes that a colleague’s basketball-related gaffe consumed the headlines that day, and whatever sympathy the moment was meant to conjure for the Graham family failed to resonate back in South Carolina. Which is, in miniature, her whole problem.
Here is the situation. Less than a month from Election Day, an appointed senator who had never run for anything is defending a seat in a state Donald Trump won two years ago by 18 points, against a Democratic nominee, Annie Andrews, who is newly competitive. A Democrat has not won a Senate seat in South Carolina since 1998. The Republicans around Graham sound like people who have done the math and do not love it. A top staffer on a different statewide GOP campaign told CNN: “The only real concern for us, statewide, is Darline’s race. And I still think she’ll win. If the election were held today though, I think she’d only win by like two to maybe three points. I don’t think that will be the case come Election Day” — with the reminder that South Carolina has straight-party voting, which is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Republicans complain she is being outworked into October. “I would not be surprised if we saw (GOP candidate for governor) Alan Wilson win by 10 to 12 percentage points and Darline win by two to four,” Dorchester County GOP Chairman CJ Westfall, a vocal critic of her campaign in the special primary, told CNN. “She doesn’t have the fundraising, she doesn’t have the energy, and she doesn’t have the enthusiasm behind her.”
Her campaign pushes back: she has endured “more than a month of nonstop misleading ads,” says spokesperson T.W. Arrighi, and “South Carolinians are now beginning to learn the truth. Sen. Graham is winning and will win in November.” Graham herself, to CNN affiliate WYFF: “We are going to keep fighting, keep plugging ahead, and I’m still cautiously optimistic, you know? I’m not going to take anything for granted; that’s why I’m trying to hit every voter that I can, every corner of the state.”
Darline is not Lindsey
That phrase is repeated often around South Carolina, as observation and as indictment, and it is worth taking seriously because of what the original model was worth. Lindsey Graham was a force on the trail and an absolute machine at fundraising; he held court with reporters, candidates and constituents, let criticism roll off him — from those who found him not conservative enough and those who found him too loyal to Trump — and kept winning. In June he spent millions dispatching multiple primary challengers, comfortably. In 2020, more than $280 million was spent on his race against Democrat Jaime Harrison at a time when polling suggested it was tight; Graham won by 10 points. That is the asset the seat came with.
The current occupant describes campaigning as “grueling” and “brutal,” reads frequently from notes, and keeps a lighter, more orchestrated schedule of appearances. She has pitched herself as more conservative than her brother — for eliminating the filibuster, harder-line on immigration, aligned with Trump — and cheerfully concedes his obsessions are not hers: he loved foreign policy, she cares about grocery prices. Asked about Taiwan at a shaky August debate against Rep. Ralph Norman, she answered, “National security is not my thing,” a line that was lampooned widely enough that President Trump had to defend her by complimenting her honesty.
People close to the family call the comparison unfair, and structurally it is: she is a married mother of two and a grandmother; Lindsey was single. Both went into public service, but he chose the Air Force and politics while she spent decades helping people with disabilities find jobs, serving as commissioner of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind from 2019 until her appointment. “They had the same hardscrabble upbringing in the back of a bar, back of a pool hall. They are cut from the same cloth,” a Graham campaign source said, while conceding “she’s not a part-time stand-up comedian like Lindsey was” — and noting she has been learning the Senate, campaigning and grieving her brother, simultaneously.
The cavalry, and what it costs
Washington has noticed the two-to-four-point scenarios and responded the way Washington responds: the Senate Leadership Fund, the top Republican super PAC, has committed $5 million, and Trump is expected to return to the state to campaign for her before Election Day. Trump-allied Rep. Russell Fry is featuring her at his “Freedom Fry” event at the end of the month. Ralph Norman, who lost to her in the special primary runoff, has endorsed her and backs the ticket, though some of his supporters have organized a write-in campaign for him, which is the kind of sentence you do not want written about your own party with weeks to go.
Westfall remembers the alternative arrangement. “When Lindsey was our senator, he helped a lot of the down-ballot people in tough races. He’d come campaign for them. He would overlap the get-out-the-vote efforts, even the door-knocking efforts. He was writing checks to the SCGOP. Her campaign has kind of disappeared.” He plans to vote for her anyway. Her campaign attributes the lighter schedule to a jam-packed Senate calendar and says her appearances and local-media interviews have picked up markedly since the recess.
Graham tells voters she plans to earn the seat, and that no one can ever fill her brother’s shoes. In 2020, South Carolinians spent $280 million on the question of whether they wanted Lindsey Graham and answered by 10 points. The question this November is cheaper and more awkward: what the name is worth without the man. Early estimates run two to four points.