“Trump hammers culture war attacks on Andrews in final rally for Graham”, 29 October 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)
As it ran on the front
South Carolina's safe Republican Senate seat died this week at the hands of its own pollsters, and was eulogized Thursday afternoon in Rock Hill, where the subject at the microphone was not money.
It was twenty-eight. It was born in 1998, the last year the state sent a Democrat to the Senate, and it had an easy life after that. Donald Trump carried South Carolina by nearly eighteen points in 2024. The seat was Lindsey Graham's; his sister, Darline Graham, holds it now, with the president's endorsement. For years nobody wrote anything about it, because there was nothing to write.…
…(cont) The decline is in the paperwork. On September 23 the Cook Political Report shifted South Carolina toward the Democrats, the same notice that moved Kansas. On October 20 Cook moved the race again. On October 26 two Republican former governors of the state endorsed the Democrat, Dr. Annie Andrews. Then Fox News' own power rankings called the seat a toss-up, which is the sort of thing a family hears from the second opinion.
The president came three times. The third and final visit was Thursday, in Rock Hill, and The Hill counted a barrage of culture-war attacks on Dr. Andrews; Graham, the president said, is "running to save you from a radical left." A closing argument is the best thing a campaign has left. This one did not open on groceries, or rent, or what a hospital visit costs here.
The turn had shown up on October 5, as the race tightened, when the president began calling Dr. Andrews by a penny-ante nickname built out of a slur, posted it several times, and invoked Graham's late brother in the same breath.
The healthcare argument, such as it was, had been made back on August 26, when Graham attacked her opponent's support for what she called government-run healthcare and then told the story of her parents' early deaths. Observers could not agree on what the point was. The woman she is running against is a pediatrician.
So the economy was available. It is always available. It did not come up, and anybody who has worked a shift sick in this state knows that is not an oversight. It is a subject change, and the subject it changed away from is the shit people carry to the mailbox on the first of the month.
The seat is survived by a toss-up rating, two former governors, and eighteen points of 2024 margin that now sit in the archive like a folded flag. It was preceded in death by the notion that a late-October rally is a victory lap.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you vote on November 3, and that before you do you make somebody answer the question the last rally skipped: what a sick child costs in South Carolina, and who pays it.
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“They had an eighteen-point state and they spent the last week of it on a nickname for a pediatrician. That tells you what came back in the numbers, and it tells you what they've got instead of a plan for your hospital bill — the closing pitch in August was that her folks died early and government healthcare is the danger. Nobody skips the economy in Rock Hill unless they already know what the economy did to the people standing there.”
“Look, the president is talking about the issues South Carolinians actually care about, and if one of those issues happens to be what you call a slur — did I say that? That doesn't sound like me. A toss-up rating is just Fox News selling rankings, and three rallies isn't panic, it's enthusiasm; you don't fly to Rock Hill for a seat you're losing, you fly there because the crowds are tremendous.”
President Trump launched a barrage of culture war attacks Thursday against Democratic Senate nominee Annie Andrews during his third and final campaign rally for Sen. Darline Graham (R) in South Carolina. “Darline Graham has devoted her entire life to the people of this state, and now she's running to save you from a radical left...
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
