THE FIELD IS CLOSING RANKS: RUSSELL FRY BACKS DARLINE GRAHAM — AND RALPH NORMAN’S MATH JUST GOT BRUTAL

ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
OPINION / COMMENTARY

Eight days out from South Carolina’s Senate runoff, the holdouts are running out of runway.

On Friday, Rep. Russell Fry — the man who finished third in the Aug. 11 special Republican primary with 20% of the vote — endorsed Sen. Darline Graham. No hedging. No “let’s see how it shakes out.” He turned around and asked every voter who backed him to go do the same thing on Aug. 25.

“On August 25, I’m asking everyone who supported our campaign to join me in supporting Darline Graham for the United States Senate,” Fry wrote on X. “Campaigns are temporary. The cause is bigger than any one candidate. Now let’s get it done.”

That is not a concession speech. That is a man reading the room and putting the movement ahead of his own ambition — and it ought to embarrass a few consultants who spent the last week telling anybody who would listen that this seat was still up for grabs.

Do the math

334,880 South Carolinians voted on Aug. 11 in a ten-candidate field. Darline Graham took 33%. Rep. Ralph Norman took roughly a quarter. Fry took 20%. Former Gov. Mark Sanford — remember him? — took 15%.

Nobody cleared 50%, so we go to a runoff. Fine. But Graham’s 33 plus Fry’s 20 is 53, and Fry just handed her the Grand Strand and the rest of the 7th District he represents. Norman carried ten Upstate counties. Graham won everything else in the state.

You don’t need a modeling firm to see where this is going.

The whole party is lining up

President Trump gave Graham his “complete and total endorsement” last month — a move that blindsided the political class — and he has not backed off an inch. Friday, on Truth Social: “SOUTH CAROLINA: GET OUT AND VOTE FOR DARLINE GRAHAM ON TUESDAY, AUGUST 25TH. DARLINE HAS MY COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT — SHE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”

Sen. Tim Scott — who happens to chair the National Republican Senatorial Committee — endorsed her the day after the primary and called her “the real deal.” When the man whose literal job is winning Senate seats tells you who wins this Senate seat, that is worth something.

Norman’s counter? Mark Lynch, an Upstate businessman who finished fifth. That is the trade.

And here is the part Norman cannot spin

In the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Ralph Norman endorsed Nikki Haley over Donald Trump. His relationship with the President has been rockier ever since. Now he is asking a South Carolina Republican runoff electorate to hand him a Senate seat over the candidate Trump personally picked.

Compare that to Fry. Fry got to Congress in the first place by taking out Tom Rice — the incumbent who voted to impeach Trump — and beating him by more than 26 points in 2022 with the President’s endorsement behind him. Fry knows exactly what this base rewards and exactly what it punishes. On Friday he told you which side of that line he is standing on.

They said she was an unknown. The voters did not care.

Norman and Fry both went after Graham before the primary for being untested — no Statehouse years, no Capitol Hill résumé. She won anyway, in a field of ten, over two sitting congressmen and a former governor.

Because the base is not shopping for a résumé. It has seen what a couple decades of résumés produced.

Darline Graham spent her career in disability services and most recently served as commissioner of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind. She stood beside her brother on the trail for years and never once put her own name on a ballot — until Gov. Henry McMaster appointed her, at 62, to finish out Lindsey Graham’s term after his death in July. She is the first woman South Carolina has ever sent to the United States Senate.

Fry put it plainly: “Darline knows what it means to struggle, persevere, and keep fighting when life deals you a difficult hand. Those experiences shaped her, and I believe they give her a real understanding of the challenges families across South Carolina face.”

Graham’s answer was just as plain. She is, she said, “excited to continue building a conservative force to fight for President Trump’s America First agenda.”

Eight days

This is the first open U.S. Senate race South Carolina has had in twenty-two years. Whoever wins on the 25th faces Democratic nominee Annie Andrews in November, and the Palmetto State is in no mood to gift this seat to the other team.

The field is closing ranks. The President is all in. The NRSC chairman is all in. The third-place finisher just pointed his own voters at the door and told them to walk through it.

Ralph Norman has eight days to explain why he is still standing in the doorway.

Sources: