Darline Graham Nordone beat Ralph Norman 193,486 votes to 175,412 in South Carolina's Republican Senate runoff on Tuesday 25 August, taking 52.45 per cent across all 46 counties.1 The contest fills the seat left by Lindsey Graham, who died on 11 July; Graham Nordone, his sister, was appointed to it two days later by Governor Henry McMaster and carries the president's endorsement. She fought both rounds as the sitting senator rather than as a challenger.2 A nine-candidate scramble reads differently once you notice that one of the nine already had the office, the staff and the letterhead.
Nobody cleared fifty per cent on Tuesday 11 August. Graham Nordone led on 32.75 per cent, Norman took 24.62, Russell Fry 19.66 and Mark Sanford 14.94, from the twelve who filed and the nine the Commission certified.3 Turnout then rose by 33,343 between the rounds, from 335,555 to 368,898. South Carolina runoffs normally shed voters rather than gain them, so the second round drawing a bigger electorate than the first is the unusual number in the certified result.
Fry and Norman had entered without giving up their House seats, and this briefing warned that a win by either would strand a South Carolina House seat until well into 2027. Neither won. No seat is vacated, the delegation goes into November intact, and the warning comes off the board.4
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) put $165,205 behind Graham Nordone on Wednesday 29 July, two buys of $76,135 and $89,070 through the payee Medium Buying, filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) under transaction type 24C, the code for a party committee spending in concert with its own candidate.5 That channel only opened on 30 June, when the Supreme Court struck the coordinated-spending caps. Set it against the outside money: all spenders together reported $21,459,150 of independent expenditure in this race across 176 filings.6 The party's newly legal buy amounts to 0.77 per cent of what was already being spent around it, which means the new channel changed the paperwork here rather than the airwaves.
