Darline Graham won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in South Carolina on Aug. 25, defeating Rep. Ralph Norman in a runoff to hold the seat previously held by her brother, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. Decision Desk HQ and NBC News projected her victory on Tuesday night.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham to fill the vacancy at Trump's direction. She entered the race as a political novice with no prior elected office. Trump traveled to Myrtle Beach last week to campaign for her, telling the crowd, "This is the easiest race that I've ever seen. We have a great candidate."
Her path included rough patches. During a debate with Norman, Graham acknowledged she is "not that informed on national security" — a concession that critics said made her vulnerable against a veteran legislator. Norman has served in Congress for years and ran with backing from former Gov. Nikki Haley and former Gov. Mark Sanford, two prominent South Carolina Republicans who have clashed with Trump.
Norman did not concede quietly. In a pointed speech to supporters, he repeatedly said, "I hate it for the state," and attacked the outside PAC money that flooded the race. He said of Trump's involvement, "The president got involved. He has that right, that's his prerogative," as some in the room booed. Norman then added, "His policies are good, I never understood why he got in this race." He also revealed he had not written a concession speech, saying, "That was not in the cards."
The South Carolina result puts Trump back in the win column after a string of primary setbacks. Republican voters rejected his gubernatorial endorsees in Minnesota, Iowa and Georgia, and his House picks in at least one Florida race. The losses had fueled questions about whether his endorsement grip on the party was slipping ahead of November's midterms.
Trump has publicly pushed back on that narrative. He has pointed to a tally of 254 backed candidates who won earlier in the primary season as evidence his endorsement operation remains effective.
In Oklahoma, Trump's candidate also held. Former state Sen. Mike Mazzei defeated Attorney General Gentner Drummond for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, with Decision Desk HQ calling the race at 10:52 p.m. ET and the Associated Press following at 11 p.m. ET. Mazzei's margin sat at just over 50 percent, making it a victory of less than one percentage point — the narrowest result of the night.
Drummond, the sitting attorney general, was the establishment choice in the Oklahoma race and mounted a credible challenge. The closeness of the result means Mazzei enters the general election with a divided Republican base to unify, and Drummond's supporters — many of them aligned with the party's traditional wing — are not guaranteed to consolidate around the nominee.
On the Democratic side in Oklahoma, the Senate primary to replace Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin produced a clear contrast: voters nominated N'Kiyla Jasmine Thomas, a self-described democratic socialist. Oklahoma has not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in decades, and Thomas faces a steep climb in November regardless of which Republican ultimately captures that nomination.
Norman's concession remarks — and the boos that greeted even a mild defense of the president — show the fault lines inside the South Carolina GOP have not closed. Graham now faces a general election in a state that Republicans have held reliably, but she enters it as an untested candidate on national security issues in a cycle where foreign policy has become a first-tier debate topic.
