Darline Graham won South Carolina's Republican Senate runoff on Tuesday, beating Representative Ralph Norman by roughly 52 percent to 48 with nearly all the votes counted. NBC News called the race itself; NPR reported the Associated Press's call.
She had never held or run for elected office. She was appointed to the seat six weeks ago by Governor Henry McMaster after the death of her brother, Senator Lindsey Graham, on 11 July — from what doctors preliminarily described as a tear in the aorta, NBC News reports — and was sworn in three days later. Her one previous executive job was leading a 130-person state agency serving blind people. In the first round of the primary earlier this month she came first with 33 percent, short of the 50 needed to avoid a runoff.
The two weeks that followed were shaped by a single answer. Asked at the runoff's only debate, hosted by NewsMax, about the importance of Taiwan and the South China Sea, she said she would be honest: she was not that informed on national security. It is not her thing, she said. The audience booed. Her brother had spent his career on foreign policy and more than three decades in the Air Force.
The president spent the closing days on her side of it. He held a rally in Myrtle Beach on the 21st — "I'm doing this to honor Lindsey," he said there — and a telephone rally on Monday evening. His aligned super PAC put in more than $827,000 late, a figure NBC News rounds to $830,000. NPR notes that the same PAC's spending has mostly been closed in tight Republican primaries this cycle, and that his endorsements have lost prominent races this year in Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Minnesota.
Norman had not written a concession speech. He said he accepted the result and would call Graham, and that Trump had every right to get involved — "that's his prerogative" — before adding that he had never understood why he got into the race. He had first irritated the president in 2024 as the only House Republican to endorse Nikki Haley in the presidential primary, and last year initially opposed the administration's tax-and-spending package before voting for it, having negotiated faster work requirements for Medicaid recipients and the end of Biden-era wind and solar tax credits.
The county numbers show where the rally landed. Two weeks earlier Representative Russell Fry had taken Horry County, where Myrtle Beach sits, with nearly 14,000 votes. On Tuesday Graham took it with more than 26,000 to Norman's nearly 10,000. Norman held the upstate around his district; Graham took the coast and the area around Columbia.
Graham, 62, faces the Democratic nominee, the paediatrician Annie Andrews, in November.
Why it is on the board
Fourth on NBC News's most-read list when we collected and thirteenth on the New York Times's, with the results page itself at seventeenth.
The three items above it on the list were all the death of Dolly Parton, which our editorial scope leaves off the board. This runoff is the most-read American item that is not that.
확인: NBC News · NPR