In a shocking upset, pediatrician Annie Andrews has claimed the South Carolina Senate seat once occupied by the late, staunch Trump ally Lindsey Graham — and, before him, the infamous segregationist Strom Thurmond. The seat has not been held by a Democrat since 1964.
Several outlets called the race for Andrews just after 10:00 p.m. ET.
Andrews declared her candidacy in 2025, motivated, she’s said, by Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who she named her “professional arch-nemesis,” to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
She had already been running against Lindsey Graham for more than a year when he died unexpectedly in July. His sister, Darline Graham, was appointed to fill his seat, and later won the GOP nomination.
Graham mounted a campaign seeking to capitalize on her political inexperience, declaring, for instance, “I don’t speak politician,” and famously admitting, on the primary debate stage that she was “not that informed on national security … national security is not my thing.”
Andrews, like other Democrats across the nation, remained laser-focused on cost of living and quality of life issues like healthcare, data centers, and the price of diesel.
Speaking to Rolling Stone earlier this year, Andrews emphasized her focus on healthcare, data centers, and the price of diesel. ”I’m in this race because of my experience working within America’s broken healthcare system,” she said. “I started to realize what I was seeing from hospital room to hospital room were the impacts of broken policies coming from Washington, harming my patients and their families.”
Andrews also spoke of the potential to collaborate with her GOP colleagues, particularly on data centers. “Republicans and Democrats are completely united in their opposition to this unchecked data center development in our rural communities. It’s not just one part of the state where we’ve had these conversations. It’s community after community after community,” she said. “These companies swoop in to these rural communities, dangle a few carrots in front of local elected officials, and then these communities get steamrolled and they’re not getting transparency about the economic impact or the environmental impact, and then these huge facilities are just being built in their backyard.”
Her victory on Tuesday — one of a slough of Democratic wins — brings to mind the words of her late opponent, Lindsey Graham, when Donald Trump was running for the Republican nomination for president in 2016. “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed,” Graham wrote. “And we will deserve it.”
