Tomorrow, August 11, 2026, South Carolina Republicans pick a nominee for the U.S. Senate seat Lindsey Graham held until his death in July. Russell Fry is on that ballot.

It's worth remembering how he got to Congress in the first place, because it is the single most important fact about him — and it is not a policy position. It's a job he was hired to do.

The seat he took

Tom Rice represented South Carolina's 7th District for five terms. He was, by his own account and by his voting record, a conservative who backed Trump's agenda.

On January 13, 2021, he was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump over January 6.

Rice never took it back. He explained it this way:

"I'm all about Trump's policy. But absolute pledge of loyalty, to a man that is willing to sack the Capitol to keep his hold on power is more than I can stomach."

And, more simply: "Republicans are supposed to protect the Constitution. We take an oath to protect the Constitution, not a man."

The job Fry was hired for

On February 1, 2022, Trump endorsed Fry with a statement that named the assignment out loud:

"Congressman Tom Rice…the coward who abandoned his constituents by caving to Nancy Pelosi and the Radical Left, and who actually voted against me on Impeachment Hoax #2, must be thrown out of office ASAP."

Fry's response was not "here is my agenda for the Pee Dee." It was:

"Radical Leftists, enabled by RINOs like Tom Rice, are trying to erase President Trump's legacy."

He was also candid about what the race was actually about. He told Fox News: "the impeachment is the big elephant in the room and the voters are incredibly frustrated by that."

He was right about that. On June 14, 2022, Fry beat Rice 51% to 24% — clearing the field outright, no runoff needed. He won every precinct in the district.

Fry became the first Trump-endorsed challenger of that cycle to unseat a Republican incumbent who had crossed him.

Trump took the credit himself, posting that Fry "beat Impeach Master Tom Rice with a Vote of more than 51%, therefore WINNING OUTRIGHT with no need for a run-off." Matt Moore, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, agreed: "Donald Trump powered Russell Fry to victory. There was no doubt about it."

Dr. David White, a political scientist at Francis Marion University, watched the returns and summarized the race in five words: "This was about Donald Trump and Tom Rice."

Rice's own last word on it: "I know I did the right thing. I know I defended the Constitution."

Why it still matters four years later

Congress works on a simple incentive. A member decides whether to check a president partly by asking what happens to members who do.

Tom Rice is the answer everyone in the House Republican conference learned. He voted his oath, said so out loud, refused to walk it back, and was removed by his own party's voters with a 27-point margin in a race his replacement openly described as being about the impeachment.

Russell Fry is not a bystander to that lesson. He is the instrument of it. His seat in Congress is the reward for administering it.

That's not an inference — it's the campaign he ran and the endorsement he sought.

What he does with the seat

The record since is what you'd expect from someone who got the job that way.

He voted for the budget blueprint ordering $880 billion in cuts from the committee that runs Medicaid, and then for final passage of the bill that made them law — a law projected to take health coverage from 37,124 people in his own district, the most of any district in South Carolina. He then told constituents on a telephone town hall that "there are a lot of people who are on it who quite frankly shouldn't be."

He voted twice to hand the president the power to cancel spending Congress had already approved — in June 2025, when the $9 billion package passed by two votes, and again in July.

He would not attend a constituent-organized town hall in Myrtle Beach, telling the local ABC station it was a "sham 'town hall'" run by "a partisan, liberal organization." When constituents heckled him at a March 2025 wildfire press conference, he accused them of being funded by George Soros.

And this summer he filed for the Senate while also filing to keep his House seat — an arrangement under which he cannot lose his job, and his district could lose its congressman until May.

He is not the only one

The party spent four years turning those ten votes into a cautionary tale — and the accounting for January 6 got buried along with them.

In Florida, Scott Franklin said a week after the attack that Trump bore "some responsibility" and called for a bipartisan investigation, then voted against creating one four months later. In Alabama, Robert Aderholt voted to throw out two states' electoral votes hours after the Capitol was cleared, and then voted twice against investigating why it was attacked.

Those are members who moved with the current. Fry is something else: a candidate recruited to punish the man who didn't.

Tom Rice is out of Congress. Russell Fry is running for the Senate.

Tomorrow

Fry goes into the primary in third place. An Emerson College poll taken July 28–29 had Ralph Norman at 22%, interim Sen. Darline Graham at 19%, and Fry at 12%, with a quarter of voters undecided.

Whatever happens, the record stands. Four years ago, South Carolina's 7th District had a congressman who said an oath outranked a man. It replaced him with one whose entire path to Washington ran through proving otherwise.

We deserve better.

Source

Split decision for Trump in high profile South Carolina GOP congressional primaries — Fox News, June 2022; Tom Rice's impeachment vote draws Trump-endorsed primary challenger — Ballotpedia News, May 24, 2022; and "This was about Donald Trump and Tom Rice": Professor says Fry won from Trump endorsement — ABC News 4, June 2022. Photo: ABC News 4.