For the first time this century, South Carolina has elected a senator whose last name isn’t Graham.
Darline Graham, the Republican incumbent, lost her bid to win the seat that for 23 years belonged to her brother Lindsey, until his death in July. Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democratic nominee, will instead head to Washington.
It’s a devastating defeat for the Republican Party, which hasn’t lost a Senate campaign in South Carolina since 1998. It’s a rebuke of President Trump, who urged Ms. Graham to run for a full six-year term after her brother’s death and visited South Carolina three separate times to galvanize voter support for her campaign.
But it also will be remembered as the race that dismantled Mr. Graham’s legacy as one of the most influential lawmakers in modern American political history — a stalwart conservative career that has endured a series of indignities in the less than four months since he died.
His sister’s campaign ran into trouble straightaway. In August, Ms. Graham struggled to answer a debate question about America’s national security interests in Taiwan and the South China Sea. It wasn’t a curveball — it’s a standard foreign policy question — but she fumbled it, confessing that “national security is not my thing.” In that moment, she exposed the stark contrast between her and the lawmaker she was seeking to replace. South Carolinians know Mr. Graham as a foreign policy specialist who made frequent overseas trips and knew world leaders by their first names.
As her inexperience became ever more evident, Mr. Graham’s own achievements began to unravel in Washington. On Oct. 9, Mr. Trump announced he struck a deal to purchase diesel from Russia, effectively nullifying measures established in a bill that bore Mr. Graham’s name. And the president continues to withhold support for Ukraine while publicly pressuring the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to curb attacks on Russian infrastructure — two stances that Mr. Graham would find unconscionable.
Now, not only has Ms. Graham lost her brother’s seat, she also has been defeated by more than 20 percentage points in around a dozen counties. This is due in no small part to Mr. Trump’s miscalculation; there were other candidates, people who were not political novices, nor in mourning, whom he could have turned to after Mr. Graham’s death.
Wherever the blame lies, the result is the same: Ms. Graham will not carry Mr. Graham’s policy positions into the future, particularly involving support for Ukraine and on the Iran conflict, which likely Democratic majorities in the House and Senate would surely push to end. Here, again, is a dismaying twist for Mr. Graham, who was an unabashed war hawk who championed military intervention against Tehran for years.
Mr. Graham recognized early on that Mr. Trump was the future of the Republican Party. By 2018, he had shifted from an early critic to an ardent public supporter of the president. Over time, he became a frequent visitor to the White House and lent credibility to many of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy decisions.
For years, Mr. Graham was chastised by Republican and Democratic colleagues alike for holding his nose for a seat at the table — or, as he told my colleague Peter Baker over dinner in Washington, playing “the hand we’re dealt.”
On Tuesday, as many of Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidates face defeat, it appears that Mr. Graham’s choice to stay close to the president was a liability — and perhaps the true beginning of the end of the politician’s legacy.
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