Lindsey Graham’s Senate Seat Handed to His Sister

Lindsey Graham dies on July 11. Two days later, on July 13, Gov. Henry McMaster appoints Graham’s younger sister Darline to fill the seat. Now she’s in a runoff for the full term, backed by Donald Trump, and the whole thing is being treated like a normal Tuesday in American politics.

Let me walk you through the timeline, because the timeline is the story.

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Lindsey Graham wins his Republican primary on June 9 with 57% of the vote. He’s the nominee. Five weeks later, he’s dead at 71. Within 48 hours, McMaster, a Graham ally, installs Darline Graham as the replacement senator. She is, per Ballotpedia, the first sibling appointed to succeed a senator since the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913. Over a century of direct Senate elections and this is the first time a governor handed a dead senator’s seat to his own sister. Funny how that works.

Then the special primary gets scheduled for August 11, exactly one month after the death. One month. You usually get more lead time for a zoning board hearing. But the machinery was already greased. Trump endorsed Darline. McMaster endorsed Darline. Senate Majority Leader John Thune endorsed Darline. The governor who appointed her, the president who wants her vote, and the Senate leader who needs her vote all lined up before the body was cold. Ask yourself who benefits from a compressed timeline where name recognition is the only thing that matters.

Darline Graham, a political outsider who ran a state agency, has been in the Senate for roughly three weeks and already claims credit for being “the deciding vote on Todd Blanche as attorney general” and passing a Russia sanctions bill. Three weeks. She walked in with no electoral mandate, no primary victory, no votes cast in her name by any citizen anywhere, and she’s already casting deciding votes on the attorney general. But sure, let’s call this representative government.

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The runoff on August 25 will pit her against Rep. Ralph Norman, who actually ran a real campaign with a real organization and has served in Congress since 2017. Norman carried his Charlotte-suburb district’s Republican votes and has a statewide apparatus left over from his gubernatorial bid. He’s a real candidate who earned real support. Darline Graham is a senator because her brother died and his friend the governor picked her.

Rep. Russell Fry, another contender, called her appointment what it plainly was: a DEI hire. Not diversity, equity, and inclusion in the racial sense, but in the dynastic, nepotistic, “this seat belongs to my family” sense. He got attacked for saying it. But he’s right. The Republican Party that spent years railing against dynastic politics and swamp behavior just watched a governor hand a U.S. Senate seat to the deceased incumbent’s sister, and the president of the United States blessed the whole arrangement.

Mark Sanford, the former governor who actually challenged Trump in 2020 and campaigned on the national debt, finished out of the runoff. He was the only one talking about the $36 trillion problem nobody wants to solve. He got nowhere. The guy who ran on math lost to the woman who ran on her last name.

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The winner faces Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, in November. In a state Trump carried comfortably, the Republican nominee will almost certainly win. So this runoff is the real election, and the real election was decided by a governor’s phone call on July 13.

Funny how these things work out for the people already in power. Every single time.