Sen. Darline Graham will seek full term to her late brother's seat

Sen. Darline Graham (R-South Carolina) said Monday that she will seek a full six-year Senate term after President Donald Trump urged her to run.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) appointed Graham last week to succeed her brother, Lindsey Graham, who died July 11.

Trump on Friday encouraged Darline Graham to run for a full term after initially saying he expected her to serve only on an interim basis — and Graham said Monday that she’s in.

“He’s worked so hard for so long,” she told Sean Hannity of Fox News. “I just — I can’t just let that die. I’ve got to step in and carry on his legacy.”

Graham will face a competitive Republican primary in South Carolina despite Trump’s endorsement. Reps. Russell Fry and Ralph Norman have also said they will run in the Aug. 11 Republican primary.

“Make no mistake: I will be President Trump’s favorite U.S. Senator, and you will have a MAGA fighter you can count on,” Fry wrote on X.

Another Republican, Rep. Nancy Mace, said Monday that she would not run for the seat.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) described Graham on Monday as “a strong candidate” but stopped short of endorsing her.

“She’s obviously carries on Lindsey’s legacy, but I think she’s a very accomplished person in her own right,” Thune told reporters. “She has a right, like anybody else, to get into that race. It sounds like there are a number who are moving forward with campaigns.”

The filing period opens Tuesday. The primary will go to a runoff Aug. 25 if no candidate wins a majority of the vote.

The winner will face Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who won the Democratic nomination last month.

The Republican nominee will be heavily favored in the deep-red state in November. No Democrat has won a Senate race in South Carolina since 1998.

Darline Graham, 62, previously led the South Carolina Commission for the Blind and worked as a vocational rehabilitation counselor.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) and Graham last week introduced a revised version of legislation that Lindsey Graham had championed to impose new sanctions on Russia and said they would work to pass it to honor his memory.

She said Monday that she brought up the bill last week when she met with Trump in the Oval Office.

“I went on to mention that there were some things that I felt like were very important to Lindsey — Russia sanctions — and that I really wanted to push those across the finish line," she told Hannity.

Still, Graham suggested that she might focus more on domestic issues and less on national security than her brother did. She told Hannity that she had encouraged Lindsey Graham to talk more about ”what matters to the average person: the price of groceries, the price of gas, health care, insurance."

“I think that’s important, too,” she said.