Five days before Election Day, one of the most reliably Republican states in the country is producing one of the closest Senate races in America. A New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters in South Carolina, released on October 28, found Republican Senator Darline Graham and her Democratic challenger, Dr. Annie Andrews, tied at 48 percent each — a statistical dead heat in a state that President Donald Trump carried by nearly eighteen points just two years ago. South Carolina has not sent a Democrat to the United States Senate since 1998. This year, remarkably, it might.
A seat shaped by grief and appointment
The race exists because of a death. Senator Lindsey Graham, a dominant figure in South Carolina politics for three decades, died on July 11 of an aortic tear, and the state’s governor appointed his sister, Darline Graham, to fill the seat — an appointment that drew bipartisan support at the time. She then had to win the seat in her own right, defeating Representative Ralph Norman in an August 25 Republican runoff by 52.4 percent to 47.6 percent, with Trump’s endorsement behind her. Graham, who previously led the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, is now seeking a full six-year term.
Her opponent is a Charleston pediatrician who has built her campaign around a single theme: affordability. Andrews argues that Republican policies have worsened the financial position of families and children, and frames her candidacy as “building a South Carolina that we can all afford.” It is a message calibrated for an election year in which the cost of living dominates voter concerns nationwide — and, on the evidence of the polling, it is working even in conservative terrain.
What the numbers say
The Times/Siena survey is not an outlier. A South Carolina Policy Council/Targoz poll released on October 26, covering 895 likely or already-voting respondents, put Graham ahead by a single point, 47 to 46. The Trafalgar Group’s October 19 poll had Graham leading 49 to 46. A Citadel poll of registered voters released the same day as the Times survey showed Graham up 43 to 39, with a large bloc of 15 percent still undecided. Libertarian Kasie Whitener and Constitution Party candidate Mark Hackett are also on the ballot and together draw a small but potentially decisive share.
The nonpartisan forecasters have moved accordingly. The Cook Political Report shifted the race from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican” on October 20, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball and Inside Elections have made the same move — a striking trajectory for a seat that was rated safely Republican not long ago. CNN’s analysis of the Times/Siena data explains why. Likely voters said by thirteen points that Andrews, a physician, has the “right experience to be an effective senator,” while saying by seven points that Graham does not. Among independents, 59 percent credited Andrews with the right experience, against just 31 percent for Graham, and Andrews leads among independents by 57 to 37 percent. She is even drawing 7 percent of Republican likely voters. Republican efforts to brand her an extremist appear to have fallen flat so far: only 39 percent of likely voters in this conservative state say she is too far to the left.
The case each side is making
Graham’s campaign has leaned on her path to the seat and on the president. Trump endorsed her in the primary, campaigned for her in Pendleton on October 21, and returned to the state on Thursday, October 29, to headline a rally for her at the Rock Hill Sports & Event Center — his third campaign trip to South Carolina this cycle. “Everybody respects her. She’s smart and incredible. She’ll never let you down,” Trump said of Graham at a Wednesday rally, according to The Boston Globe. Graham, asked about the questions surrounding her readiness, has answered with her biography: serving while grieving her brother, she said, demonstrated “just how strong I am.”
Republicans have attacked Andrews aggressively, with party groups characterizing her as a “radical liberal” and accusing her of supporting surgeries for transgender minors — claims she denies. Trump has attacked her on social media, saying she does not represent “the Values of the Great People of South Carolina.” Andrews, meanwhile, received an unusual cross-party boost on October 26, when former governors David Beasley, a Republican, and Jim Hodges, a Democrat, both endorsed her — a signal of how unsettled the state’s political establishment has become by the contest. Andrews’ side has hammered at Graham’s experience, seizing on a debate moment in which the senator acknowledged being “not that informed on national security” when asked about United States policy toward Taiwan, and calling her unqualified for the office she holds.
The contest has also exposed a quieter anxiety inside the Republican Party about how its candidate was chosen. Graham arrived in the Senate through appointment and inheritance rather than a conventional political career, and the Times/Siena finding that only 35 percent of Republicans strongly agree she has the right experience for the job — compared with 62 percent of Democrats saying the same of Andrews — suggests her own base remains unconvinced even as it prepares to vote for her. Cook’s analysts, in moving the race, wrote that Graham remains the favorite but that Andrews is running a “real race.” In a state where early voting has been under way since October 19, both campaigns are now focused less on persuasion than on turning out the voters the polls say they already have.
The presidential attention has itself become a campaign issue. At Trump’s October 21 rally in the Upstate, the stage filled with the state’s Republican establishment — Governor Henry McMaster, Representatives Russell Fry and Sheri Biggs, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent among them — while dozens of protesters gathered near the arena with signs reading “liberty and justice for all” and “stop corruption, stop Trump.” “The president is here, and I would like him and the residents of South Carolina to know that we’re not happy,” said Clemson student Yeraldin Simon, who attended the counter-rally. “A lot of us are not happy with the way things are going, and we want something done about it.” Nor is South Carolina an isolated tremor: the same round of Times/Siena polling found a dead heat in Kansas, a state Trump won by sixteen points, reinforcing the sense of a Senate map expanding in directions Republicans did not budget for.
Why one red-state race matters nationally
The stakes extend well beyond Columbia. Republicans hold the Senate 53 to 47, and Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take control — a map that requires them to win races in states exactly like this one, where their candidates were not supposed to be competitive. USA Today noted that South Carolina is merely the latest in a series of states Trump won where Republicans now find themselves on defense, alongside Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Ohio and Texas, in a cycle where the president’s approval rating has sunk to record lows in its final weeks. A Democratic victory in South Carolina would not by itself flip the Senate, but it would signal a wave; a narrow Republican hold would demonstrate the limits of the Democratic map.
For Darline Graham, the final days bring the full weight of her party’s machinery — presidential rallies, treasury secretary appearances at earlier events, and the organizational advantages of incumbency. For Annie Andrews, the polls say the race she was never meant to contest is, with five days left, a coin flip. On November 3, South Carolina will decide whether the seat Lindsey Graham held for a generation stays in his family, or makes history instead.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from CNN, USA Today, Greenville News and Midterm Election Tracker.