Is Lindsey Graham Actually in Trouble in South Carolina?
"That ad should be playing in S Carolina a lot"
Sure should be.
Anger at his support for Trump and a strong Democratic challenger have some wondering if the three-term Republican is in real jeopardy of losing in November.
Jaime Harrison Sean Rayford for POLITICO
By LISA RAB
08/11/2020 04:30 AM EDT
Lisa Rab is a journalist in western North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Harper's and The Washington Post Magazine. Reach her at lisarab.com.
Michael Quattlebaum was just 10 years old when he attended a high-dollar Republican fundraising dinner in South Carolina’s state Capitol. His father was active in his local chapter of the GOP and eager to pass on the tradition. They were a Southern Baptist family from Anderson County, where Donald Trump won nearly 70 percent of the vote, including Quattlebaum’s. “It’s pretty deeply ingrained in my lifeblood,” Quattlebaum said of his conservatism. He’s now married with five children, including a son in the National Guard who just returned from Afghanistan.
But George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer and the protests that followed pushed Quattlebaum to examine a conflict between his political and moral beliefs. “I’ve never considered myself a racist, but I have been complicit in it because of my silence,” he said. He wants the elected officials that represent him “to be angry about this situation,” but the politicians he has voted for—like Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham—are not. “It makes me embarrassed to be a Republican.”
At 51, the software consultant is planning to vote Democrat for the first time. “I think Lindsey Graham, to a large degree, has been a talking head for Trump,” Quattlebaum told me recently. “I know in his heart he doesn’t support everything that Trump represents, yet he does it anyway. And I have a problem with that.”
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Donors and political experts agree Harrison’s path to victory is a narrow one. “If Graham’s fortunes are closely tied to Trump’s ... then, for Graham to lose, you either have to predict a Trump loss in South Carolina (which would precipitate a Graham loss) or a situation in which Trump wins in South Carolina and many Trump supporters either vote against Graham, or don’t vote in the Senate race,” Scott Huffmon, political science professor and executive director of the Center for Public Opinion & Policy Research at Winthrop University, said in an email.
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On his desk, Jaime Harrison keeps a quote from Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, the former South Carolina governor and senator who, in 1876, led a white paramilitary gang that murdered six innocent African Americans in what was known as the Hamburg Massacre. “We have done our level best,” Tillman said of the state’s efforts to disenfranchise Black voters. “We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed.”
A statue of Ben Tillman outside the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia, S.C. | Jeffrey Collins/AP
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“Justice is not just. Unless you have money, unless you have privilege, it doesn’t work for everybody.” Jaime Harrison
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Harrison could not have foreseen that things in his state would get even worse because of the coronavirus pandemic. In early July, the New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/briefing/arizona-mary-trump-facebook-your-wednesday-briefing.html .. reported that, adjusted for population size, South Carolina had the third-worst outbreak in the world, with 2,300 confirmed new cases per million residents over the preceding week.
[...]
Not everyone in the crowd was familiar with Harrison. MaKenzie Donald, 27, and Heather Nasuti, 30, were seeking shelter from the rain shortly after the festival began. Both women said they are registered but don’t regularly vote. Neither had decided on a Senate candidate. When I mentioned that an African American man was hoping to unseat Graham, their first question was whether he was a Democrat. “If I had to pick one today, it wouldn’t be Lindsey Graham,” said Nasuti, who is white. “I’m more left-leaning I guess,” she added. “It’d be nice to see some Southern states leaning in that direction.”
Donald, who is Black, said she accompanied her father to the polls when she was too young to vote. Now, she admits, voting is “something I want to get better at.”
Voters like her are part of the reason Harrison is facing such an uphill battle. According to Vinson, the Furman University professor, the “real place he stands a chance is independent voters and getting young people to the polls.” But there’s no guarantee either group—or voters of color—will turn out in large numbers in November.
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The question remains whether Harrison can turn the anger at Graham into votes for him. That will mean flipping independents and moderates who have historically had no trouble voting for a Main Street conservative who worked across the aisle on issues like immigration and climate change.
Andy Savage, who leans Democrat but has donated to candidates in both parties, said he supported Graham from his first election because “I just thought he was a really good person. I still think the world of him, I just don’t understand what’s happened to him.”
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