According to the Cook Political Report, the South Carolina U.S. Senate race in which Lindsey Graham is running for re-election is now a toss-up. Graham is running against Democratic challenger and former state Democratic party chairman Jaime Harrison, who has raised huge sums of money, leaving Graham to repeatedly plead with Fox News viewers to send money to his campaign. In a recent Data for Progress survey, Graham led Harrison by a mere 1 percent. In a late September poll from Quinnipiac University, Graham and Harrison were tied.
At one point, Graham was a vocal Trump opponent, but he has since avidly shilled for the controversial president at just about every possible turn. He has, for instance, used his status as the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to help lead a punitive investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, which the president and his political allies have routinely alleged was meant to unfairly target Trump. As it turns out, Graham’s public allegiance to the president and his team might not be enough to save his political career, according to the Cook Political Report — although FiveThirtyEight, which is another prominent election forecasting site, disagrees. They give Graham a 76 percent chance of victory, as of early Wednesday.
As of early Wednesday, the Cook Political Report has a total of six currently GOP-held seats in the toss-up column, including seats that are on the ballot in Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Montana, North Carolina, and South Carolina. They also have two currently GOP-held seats that are on the November ballot in the “lean Democratic” column, including seats in Colorado and Arizona.
Jessica Taylor, the Senate and governors editor for the Cook Political Report, commented:
‘Many Republicans have privately voiced frustrations that Graham’s campaign didn’t take the challenge from Harrison — a charismatic 44-year-old African-American former state party chairman who tells a compelling story of growing up with a teen mother and being raised by his grandparents in impoverished Orangeburg — seriously enough from the get-go.’
Harrison and Graham recently faced off in a debate, and Harrison showed a level of attention to the needs of South Carolina-ins — and Americans at large — that Graham simply did not. At one point, for example, Graham proclaimed that current Democratic leaders are “nuts.” Harrison countered that “the first step in terms of working with the other side is not to call the other side nuts.” Discussing the debate overall, Taylor noted that even “some Republicans privately concede it was Harrison, not Graham, who came out looking stronger from that showdown.”
Trump’s own struggles on the national level may be exacerbating the problems for Republicans in races elsewhere on the ballot. A CNN survey came out this week that showed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with a staggering 16 percent lead among likely voters on the national level, and other surveys have shown similar huge Biden leads — a Rasmussen survey had a 12 percent Biden lead, for example. Trump has routinely refused to acknowledge his campaign’s polling struggles. He calls polls that show him losing “fake,” but they’re definitely not.
