Pediatrician Annie Andrews flips South Carolina Senate seat for Democrats

Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who built her campaign around making healthcare affordable, has won South Carolina's US Senate race. She becomes the first Democrat to represent the state in the Senate in over 25 years. Her opponent, Darline Graham, conceded a contest that polls had teetering on a knife's edge right up to election week.

Graham, 62, was appointed by South Carolina's governor to finish out her brother Lindsey Graham's term after the longtime Republican powerbroker died in July at 71. Trump urged her to run, campaigned enthusiastically and attacked Andrews with a transphobic slur. But Graham's thin national résumé hurt her — she admitted during an August debate that she was 'not that informed on national security' when pressed on US policy toward Taiwan, which the Guardian reports made the race far more competitive than expected.

The numbers tell the story of a state that suddenly wobbled. South Carolina last sent a Democrat to the Senate in 1998. A New York Times/Siena poll released the week before the vote had Andrews and Graham deadlocked at 48% each.

Graham stuck tight to Trump's platform, saying she fully trusts him on tariffs and the war with Iran — a conflict that is deeply unpopular with most Americans. Andrews went the other way, calling the war 'illegal' and blasting what it's doing to gas prices. Back in September, she said she wanted to 'find our way out of this illegal, unconstitutional billion-dollar-a-day war overseas.'

Andrews also worked to put daylight between herself and other Democrats, and it cost her. LGBTQ+ advocates slammed an ad she ran in the campaign's final month, in which she called trans women 'biological men' and said she doesn't 'support and haven't ever performed gender surgery for minors.' That marked a sharp turn from 2022, when she called South Carolina's Save Women's Sports Act 'actively harmful' and wrote on X, 'I will always support trans youth.'

The win writes a new line in the history books: South Carolina has never before sent a woman to the Senate. It comes nearly a century after Hattie Caraway of Arkansas became the first female US senator in 1932. As of October, 15 states still had never elected a woman to the chamber — including reliably liberal spots like Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey and Vermont.