South Carolina Is Redoing Its Primary Election Today. This One Will Be Extremely Telling.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/08/lindsey-graham-south-carolina-senate-2028.html
South Carolina Is Redoing Its Primary Election Today. This One Will Be Extremely Telling.
They’ll be some of the most influential voters in the 2028 GOP primary. On Tuesday, we’ll find out what they’re looking for.
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Exactly one month after Sen. Lindsey Graham’s death, GOP primary voters will head to the polls on Tuesday to vote for his replacement. It’ll be their second try this summer to pick a nominee—and it’s unlikely to be their last.
The party’s voters nominated Graham in June, shortly before his unexpected death in early July. In theory, the race to nominate his successor could end Tuesday, should one candidate win an outright majority. But with 10 contestants running, it’s more likely that the contest will narrow the field to a two-candidate runoff to be held Aug. 25.
The race is unlikely to affect the Senate’s balance of power next year: This is South Carolina, and even if the national environment favors Democrats come November, the GOP nominee is a heavy favorite to win Graham’s old seat. (Democrats have nominated Annie Andrews, a pediatrician from Charleston who lost a House race in 2022.)
But that doesn’t mean that the primary is without national importance: It represents not just a rare Senate opening in South Carolina (in the past hundred years, only four men have been elected to this seat) but a rare opportunity to discern the shape of the Republican primary electorate in a key 2028 primary state. It’s an opportunity to observe not only the continued power of Trump’s endorsement but also how much a particular flavor of MAGA-inclined Republican is popular among the party faithful.
Of the 10 contenders, four are considered to have a real shot at the nomination. Newly minted incumbent Darline Graham, the sister of Lindsey, was appointed to the seat initially as a placeholder. A political novice, Darline is a blank slate and has been notoriously press-shy since taking office. Although she did interviews with primetime Fox News hosts, she steered clear of local media initially. She has been a halting candidate who has wholeheartedly embraced Trump’s endorsement of her and has differentiated herself from her deceased brother only in loud support of getting rid of the Senate filibuster—one of Trump’s many demands of his party’s Senate caucus.
Then, there is former Gov. Mark Sanford, who gained fame as a budget hawk and infamy for his extramarital adventures on the “Appalachian Trail.” After leaving the state House, Sanford served several terms in Congress before losing reelection in his primary after Trump endorsed his opponent. Sanford very briefly mounted a 2020 primary challenge to Trump as well.
Finally, there are two sitting congressmen, Reps. Russell Fry and Ralph Norman. Fry was first elected in 2022 as the Trump-backed primary challenger to Tom Rice, a longtime back-bench conservative who voted to impeach the president for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The 41-year-old Fry has become a loyal Trump ally since and represents the steady merger between MAGA and the traditional Republican establishment. However, as an incumbent congressman running for reelection, he would leave his House seat vacant for months if elected to the Senate. The result has fed concern that if Republicans somehow manage to win a slim majority in the midterms it would immediately be imperiled by a monthslong vacancy.
Norman is a more curious character. A Freedom Caucus member who mounted a losing gubernatorial bid in 2026 before switching to the special Senate election, he seems to have all the qualifications to appeal to the MAGA right. However, he is missing one key asset. Norman endorsed Nikki Haley, a longtime friend and ally, in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. It’s not the type of move that endears a politician in Trump’s orbit.
The conventional wisdom is that Darline Graham will likely make the runoff and then the second spot will be a competition between Fry and Norman. However, it’s hard to have good polling in such a race with no way to predict turnout for an unusual August special primary. Further, given the sprint of the race, there is not a ton of ability for candidates to make themselves known. There’s a sense that there will be geographic strengths—Fry will do well in his Myrtle Beach–based congressional district, Norman will do well in his home district around the Charlotte suburbs, and Sanford in his former congressional district in Charleston. But it is hard to predict.
Whoever wins, it’ll be a coda to a long-standing push and pull between Graham, whose extensive Senate tenure saw him become a relic of a previous iteration of the GOP, and the populist right. The Reagan/Bush–era GOP that Graham came up in is now little better than a memory in Trump’s Washington. The result is that while Graham has been a larger-than-life figure in national politics, he was far more divisive among South Carolina Republicans.
Even before his death, outside spending was required in Graham’s primary against his long-shot far-right opponent Mark Lynch in order to ensure that the incumbent got above the 50 percent mark needed to avoid a runoff. A pro-Graham super PAC spent millions of dollars attacking Lynch for having “a rap sheet fit for a convict, not a U.S. Senator.” Graham’s own campaign simply ran ads attacking Lynch for wanting to legalize cocaine.
In contrast, Lynch pledged that if elected, he would pass legislation to force Turkey to make Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia a church again. Lynch insisted that it was Graham’s fault that the Hagia Sophia had become a mosque, seemingly confusing the South Carolina senator with Sultan Mehmed II, who ruled in what was then Constantinople after it was conquered on behalf of the Ottoman Turks in 1453.* With this opposition, Graham barely managed 56 percent of the vote.
Lynch is running again in the special election but is not expected to be a major factor.
In a mark of the race’s importance to the party’s future, donors are making their influence felt via super PACs. Darline Graham’s allied super PACs—as well as her campaign—have outspent her rivals. Of the nearly $4 million spent so far in the special primary on paid media, about $1.8 million has been spent by pro-Graham forces. Fry and his allies have spent just about $1 million and Sanford’s campaign has spent about $640,000.
While the candidates themselves have run positive ads, their super PACs have gone negative. A pro–Darline Graham super PAC has run an ad depicting Fry as a piece of greasy meat being cooked by Trump and shaking hands with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In contrast, Fry’s super PAC has attacked Norman as “a career politician who hired illegal immigrants.”
It’s all about positioning for who can get into the runoff, and once they are there, anything can happen. But regardless of which combination emerges of the Trump-anointed cipher Darline Graham, the Freedom Caucus stalwart Norman, and the MAGA loyalist Fry, it will set the stakes for a dramatic runoff that will help determine the post-Trump future of the GOP.
Correction, Aug. 11, 2026: This article originally misidentified Suleiman the Magnificent as the ruler of Constantinople in the 1450s. It was Sultan Mehmed II.
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