South Carolina, which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1998, is getting renewed attention as Sen. Lindsey Graham‘s challenger’s eye-popping fundraising provides hope to Democrats that 2020 may represent a sea change for Southern politics.
On Tuesday, Democrat Jaime Harrison announced that he raised over $13.9 million from April to June, nearly double the amount he raised in the first quarter of this year. Harrison’s fundraising in 2020 sits at over $20 million.
Harrison, the former Democratic Party chairman of South Carolina and a senior official in the Democratic National Committee, is challenging Graham, an incumbent Republican, for his Senate seat in November.
“After 25 years in Washington, Lindsey Graham has lost all idea of the most basic challenges facing South Carolina families, and voters know it,” a spokesman for Harrison said in a statement.
Despite those impressive numbers, Graham still holds a financial edge, raising $26.1 million as of June 20. Graham’s campaign has not released his second-quarter fundraising totals yet.
But despite Harrison’s impressive war chest, Democratic hopes of slowly turning the state blue remain slim. Graham won reelection in 2014 by just under 15 points. President Trump won the state in 2016 by a similar margin.
Polling remains sparse in the Senate race, although one survey from March bolstered Democratic hopes that Harrison has a shot at unseating Graham. That survey found Graham and Harrison tied at 42%, with Trump leading presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 10 points.
Although most Republicans and election forecasters dismissed the poll as an outlier, there are early signs that Graham believes the president is dragging his numbers down. Throughout the past few weeks, Graham has notably broken from Trump on a number of issues ranging from a U.S. attorney nomination, masks to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and a temporary freeze on work visas for foreigners.
When Trump attacked NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace for the allegation that someone placed a noose in his garage — an FBI investigation later determined that no hate crime was committed — Graham said Wallace had nothing “to apologize for.”
“You saw the best in NASCAR. When there was a chance that it was a threat against Bubba Wallace, [the drivers] all rallied to Bubba’s side,” Graham said on Fox News Radio. “I would be looking to celebrate that kind of attitude more than being worried about it being a hoax.”
The last Democrat to win a Senate seat in South Carolina was Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, whose final term ended in 2005. A conservative Democrat and a personal friend of Biden, Hollings died in 2019. He was succeeded by Republican Jim DeMint, who retired in 2013.
