Not My Thing

The paper will begin where the campaign began, which is with a death. Senator Lindsey Graham died in Washington late on Saturday, July 11, at 71, of what the District's medical examiner called an aortic dissection, three weeks after winning his primary for a fifth term. The President posted at 3:21 in the morning that he was "one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known." On Monday at 10:43 he posted that he had recommended to Governor McMaster "Lindsey Graham's wonderful sister, Darline, to serve as interim Senator," and the Governor appointed her that afternoon, saying, "It is my honor to ask his little sister, Darline, to finish his work." Senator Tim Scott said she "would be a wonderful placeholder." On July 17 the President posted that he had asked her "for the Good of our Nation" to run for the full term, and on July 20 she told Sean Hannity, "I'm in." The paper does not doubt a word of her grief, which she has carried in public with more dignity than the men around her have shown, and it has no quarrel with a sister finishing a brother's year. Its quarrel is with the rest of the sentence, in which a placeholder became a candidate because the President asked, and the President has been running the seat ever since.

Here is the woman. Darline Graham is 62, from Central, South Carolina, where her parents ran a bar and liquor store and the family lived in the rooms behind it; her mother died when she was 11 and her father fifteen months later, and her brother, nine years older, became her legal guardian at 22. A degree from the College of Charleston, a master's from South Carolina State, thirty years in state government, the last seven as commissioner of the Commission for the Blind, "a state agency with a $90 million budget and 130 employees," as she puts it. She had never run for anything. Time magazine, on the day of the appointment, found "scant public record of her political views." The paper has now read all of the record there is, which is three and a half months long, and it begins on August 18, at the primary runoff debate, when she was asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea were national security issues for the United States. "My brother was in the Air Force for 33 years, so I will do everything I can to support the military," she said. "I'm not a polished politician up here; national security is not my thing." She won the runoff anyway, 52 to 48, over Congressman Ralph Norman, with the President's rally in Myrtle Beach and the Governor's endorsement; Mr. Norman said this week that he will not campaign for her, that the election "is about attempts to 'force' a candidate on the voters," and, "Elections have consequences." He was not invited to Thursday's rally in his own hometown, said he would not have come, and called her, to FITSNews, "a fraud of a candidate." A state party official told a reporter, "It's political malpractice that we're even having to spend money in the state."

The record in the Senate is short, and the paper will give her its one real achievement. On July 16 she introduced her brother's bill, the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act; it passed the Senate 86 to 11 on August 7 and the House 262 to 159 in September, and the President signed it in the Oval Office on September 18 with her beside him. "I wish Lindsey were here to celebrate this historic day," she said. The paper ran its test on her, the one it has run on every Republican this month, which is to find one time the President did something because the candidate asked, and for the first time it found one: she told Hannity in July that she had raised "Russia sanctions" with him as "very important to Lindsey," and he signed the bill. Then, on October 9, he made his diesel deal with Mr. Putin, and on Friday, October 16, two days before her brother's law took effect, he signed an order waiving it. The next morning at 12:58 he posted that she had his "Complete and Total Endorsement" and "WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!" Her response, in an interview: "It's up to him whether or not he chooses to use it." And: "Personally, I would choose to keep the pressure on Russia to end the war and get the gas prices low, because I don't trust Putin and I don't trust Russia." Twelve senators of both parties had already written the President that the deal was a betrayal of allies; she did not sign. Senator Shaheen wrote the banks and the ports on October 26 with one Republican, Senator Tillis; she did not sign. On October 21 she flew with the President to his rally in Pendleton, and the next day, asked whether she had raised the waiver with him on the plane, she said, "There were several other people around, so I have not had a chance to speak with him specifically about that." So the paper's test, in South Carolina, produced the one ask that was granted, and the one grant that was revoked, and a senator who flew ninety minutes beside the man who revoked it and found no moment to mention her brother's name. On Thursday he came back, to Rock Hill, and she had the microphone before he did. She used it to call her opponent, "like they say out in the country," "just plain old batshit crazy," and to tell him, "You will always be part of the Graham family." The bill with her brother's name on it did not come up. Her opponent's statement that afternoon said she had "promised to raise Russia sanctions with him" on the last visit and "broke her word"; the paper cannot find the promise in her words, only "I look forward to talking to him," which is a lesser thing, and also unkept.

On the war she voted no on September 24, the only vote on it she has had, and at the October 11 debate she said it started "under Democrats, with Iran almost having a nuclear weapon," which the intelligence assessment of 2025 does not support, and that "No one will trade with them," which China does. Diesel in South Carolina this morning is $5.79 against $3.42 a year ago; regular is $3.70 against $2.72. "Gas prices are high right now," she told the debate. "I feel the pain, too." On the big bill, which cut Medicaid, her answer was that it "requires able-bodied people to work or train." Her campaign's money is $1.9 million raised against her opponent's $24.2 million, which is not a misprint, and the race is being run for her by other people: the Senate Leadership Fund with more than $6 million, a group called Security Is Strength with $4.7 million since October 1 for advertisements about transgender children, a new data-center super PAC with undisclosed donors that has chosen her as its first candidate, and a President who, on October 5, at 5:23 in the afternoon, posted a message calling her opponent, a pediatrician and a mother of three who is not transgender, "Annie 'Trannie' Andrews," in Pendleton called her "a mutilizer," and on Thursday, from the Rock Hill stage, at the rally held for the Senator, used the nickname again. In one week in October the Republican side bought $132,500 of television about LGBTQ issues and $24,000 about the economy. The Senator's campaign has not responded to the post. She has said, "Nobody is going to own me when I get up there," and the paper, which has read the filings, would like to know who she thinks is paying.

Annie Andrews is 45, from Paducah by way of Indianapolis, a pediatric hospitalist for fourteen years at the Medical University of South Carolina's children's hospital, who lost to Nancy Mace in 2022 by 14 points after Ms. Mace ran advertisements accusing her of child abuse over her views on transgender care, and who announced against Lindsey Graham in May 2025, while he was alive and had $20 million. The paper will give the reader the worst of her. Her advertisements this year say she opposes "biological males playing in girls' sports" and surgery for minors; in 2022 she called the state's Save Women in Sports Act shameful and said she would "always support trans youth," and her explanation now, that the legislature was "using vulnerable children in their political games," is a change of emphasis she should own more plainly than she has. Her surprise-billing pledge promises a thing federal law has done since 2022. She told the debate that "unlike my opponent, I haven't changed my name recently," which was cheap, since the Senator's legal name includes her husband's and the name she has always used is Graham. And two Republican former governors and George Will have endorsed her, which the paper reports as a fact about the Senator and not about her. What she is for: reversing the Medicaid cuts, restoring the insurance credits, a public option, no corporate PAC money, and a two-year moratorium on data centers, which the Senator calls "her Bernie Sanders plan." Her line on the Senator, at the debate, is the one the paper would have written: "If your surgeon said that appendectomies aren't really his thing, would you still hand him a scalpel?"

The Daily Buffoon endorses Annie Andrews for Senate from South Carolina. The Siena poll released Wednesday has the race 48 to 48. East Carolina's, released Thursday, has the Senator up 51 to 47; the Policy Council's has it 47 to 46; the Citadel's has her up four with 14 percent undecided; every average is a Graham lead of one to three. South Carolina had cast 753,108 early votes by Wednesday night, already a third more than the whole of 2022's record for a governor's year, and early voting runs through Saturday. The paper's forecasts, dated October 30, so that they can be checked: Senator Graham will not ask the President, before the polls close, to lift the waiver on her brother's law, and will not say she has. She will sign nothing about the diesel. The President will not withdraw the slur, and she will not ask him to. And the margin, whichever way it goes, will be under three points, in a seat Lindsey Graham held by ten.

Four clowns, and the paper will say where they go, because it does not rate a grieving sister a buffoon for taking the seat she was handed. Two are the President's, for the post of October 5 and for the waiver of October 16, which together are the whole of what he has given South Carolina for its loyalty: a slur for the doctor and a pardon for Mr. Putin, on a bill with a dead friend's name on it. On Thursday he added a promise of $5,000 to every adult in the country if the Republicans hold both chambers, which he priced at a trillion dollars, and the observation that "if you're president, Republican or Democrat, for whatever reason, you don't win the midterms." Two are the Senator's, for "It's up to him," said of the one thing she told the nation she went to Washington to finish. The President told Pendleton that Lindsey "respected Darline more than any other person alive. That includes me." The paper believes him. It would only note that respect is not the same as a vote, and that Lindsey Graham, whatever else he was, would have signed the letter.