On Tuesday, November 3, South Carolina did something it hadn't done in 28 years. It elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate.

The Republican who lost that race, Darline Graham, was President Trump's pick. Republicans also lost a congressional seat on the coast and 10 seats in the state House. Some of their winners barely won. One won by fewer than 3,000 votes out of almost 297,000.

But Republicans still hold the governor's office, every other statewide job, and five of the state's seven seats in Congress. Part of the reason is a map they drew in 2022. Two courts have let it stand.

Here's the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good: Trump's pick lost the Senate seat

Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician from the Charleston area, beat Darline Graham 51.1% to 46.6%, according to NBC News. More than 91,000 votes separated them. She will be the first Democrat South Carolina has sent to the Senate in 28 years, and the first woman the state has ever elected to the Senate.

Six years ago, Graham's brother, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, won this seat with 54.5%.

Here's how Darline Graham got on the ballot. Lindsey Graham died on July 11. His sister was appointed to the seat, and she ran for the nomination with Trump's encouragement and endorsement. She beat U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman in an August runoff, helped by a Trump rally. Her nomination angered many Republicans. Andrews used that. "This Senate seat belongs to South Carolina. It does not belong to one family," she said at an October rally.

Critics on the left and the right called her unprepared. In the only runoff debate, she was asked about Taiwan and said "national security is not my thing". Andrews brought that moment up in their own debate in October.

Andrews ran on prices and health care: an OB-GYN in every county, families being able to pay for their prescriptions, and ending the war in Iran to bring gas prices down. Graham, meanwhile, had called government health care "bad idea after bad idea" in her runoff victory speech.

Trump came to South Carolina twice in the last two weeks to save her. "I got you into this thing," he told her on stage in Rock Hill.

It didn't work. An SC Daily Gazette analysis found:

• Graham ran behind Trump's 2024 share in every one of the state's 46 counties. In 30 of them, she was at least 10 points behind him. In Spartanburg County, her winning margin was 15.3 points smaller than his. In her home county of Lexington, the drop was 13.5 points.
• Andrews won 25 counties, including Greenville and York, two traditionally deep-red counties.
• Republicans split their tickets. Seven counties voted for Republican Alan Wilson for governor and for Andrews for Senate, and Wilson got a bigger share of the vote than Graham in every county. In a state where voters don't register by party, the Gazette called that "clear evidence" of Republicans crossing over.
• Turnout broke records. About 60% of registered voters cast a ballot, the highest ever for a year with no presidential race.

Norman refused to campaign with Graham. His son, Warren Norman, endorsed Andrews. Some of Norman's backers pushed a "write in Ralph" campaign, but fewer than 4,900 people statewide wrote in anyone.

A Democrat took the 1st District

On the coast, retired Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore flipped the 1st Congressional District. She beat Republican Jenny Costa Honeycutt by a little more than 3,300 votes, a margin of 1.01 points. That was just above the line that triggers an automatic recount. The AP called it for her on November 6.

Lacore ran the Navy Reserve until Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed her from the job, with no reason given. She moved to South Carolina last year. The seat was open because Nancy Mace made an unsuccessful run for governor.

The state House supermajority is gone

Democrats flipped 10 seats in the state House, according to unofficial results. Their goal had been six. That ends the Republicans' two-thirds supermajority in the House, which they had held since the 2022 election. Republicans now hold 79 of the 124 seats.

"It's the largest single net pickup that we can find in modern history," Jay Parmley, the state Democratic Party's executive director, told the Gazette.

Some of the wins:

• The House majority leader is out. Rep. Micah Caskey, a 10-year incumbent whom Republicans had picked as their caucus leader in August, lost to Democrat Joe Madge by 106 votes after an automatic recount. On election night he had written, "To be honest with you, there isn't much reason to expect a change."
• A Freedom Caucus member lost. Freshman Rep. Jackie Terribile of Fort Mill, a member of the hard-line caucus, lost to Democrat Heather Hart by nearly 3 points. Democrats never expected that, because the caucus's members usually hold deep-red districts.
• A rematch went the other way. In Summerville, Rep. Greg Ford lost by 10 points to Sonja Ogletree Satani, 11 months after he narrowly beat her in a special election.
• The biggest margin came in McCormick and Greenwood counties. Rep. Daniel Gibson, who ousted longtime Democrat Anne Parks four years ago, lost by nearly 10 points.

Democrats found a candidate for every one of the 124 House districts, a first in decades, and didn't lose a single seat they already held.

Even Republicans said their voters didn't turn out. "There's not a new wave of Democratic voters," said House budget chairman Bruce Bannister, whose own race came down to 5 points. "There's a big wave of Republicans choosing not to vote."

The bad: they won, by less

Alan Wilson, the state's attorney general and Joe Wilson's son, is South Carolina's next governor. He doesn't have a report card on this site, but the drop is worth noting. He beat Democratic state Rep. Jermaine Johnson 51.6% to 47.1%. Four years ago, Henry McMaster won with 58.0%. It was the smallest win for a Republican candidate for governor since 2010.

All four House Republicans on this site who were on the ballot won. Every one of them did worse than in 2024, according to NBC News:

• Joe Wilson won the 2nd District by 2,840 votes out of almost 297,000, a margin of 0.95 points after an automatic recount, according to the SC Daily Gazette. Two years ago he won with 59.7%. His opponent, Zyon Khalifa, is 25 years old. He finished law school in May. As of mid-October, he had raised less than $30,000 and spent about $22,000. Wilson spent about $924,000. It was the closest Wilson has ever come to losing the seat he has held since 2001. He called the nationwide Democratic wave "an aberration." This is also the congressman whom a defense contractor's CEO told the FBI wanted as much campaign money as Jim Clyburn was getting, in exchange for his support. That investigation died when Trump's FBI fired the agents.
• William Timmons won the 4th District, Greenville and Spartanburg, with 51.7%, down from 59.9%. In January he told a chamber of commerce crowd he was "very excited to be done with it" after one more term. His constituents have spent years trying to get an in-person town hall out of him.
• Russell Fry won the 7th District, Horry County and the Pee Dee, with 56.7%, down from 65.0%. That was after he ran for the Senate at the same time and lost the primary. He once told his district that a lot of people on Medicaid "quite frankly shouldn't be," then voted for the cuts. His district is projected to lose more health coverage than any other in the state.
• Sheri Biggs won the 3rd District, in the Upstate, with 63.7%, down from 71.8%. More on her below.

The ugly: the map they drew, and the map they wanted

The two closest congressional races in South Carolina were decided by about 1 point each. One of them was in a district Republicans redrew to favor themselves.

How the 1st District was drawn

The 1st District runs along the southern coast. In 2018, Democrat Joe Cunningham flipped it. Mace won it back two years later by about 1 point.

Then, after the 2020 census, the Republican legislature redrew it, and McMaster signed the map in January 2022. A panel of three federal judges later found that lawmakers had moved about 30,000 Black voters in Charleston County out of the 1st District and into Clyburn's 6th District. The judges ruled that this was an illegal racial gerrymander.

What the courts said

In May 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that ruling, 6 to 3. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the people who sued had to "disentangle race and politics." They had to prove the lines were drawn because of race, not to help Republicans. The court ruled they hadn't proved it. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent that the majority "stacks the deck against the Challengers."

Then the League of Women Voters sued in state court, using the Republicans' own argument. If the lines were drawn for party, it said, that breaks the state constitution. In September 2025, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled unanimously against that claim too. "There are no constitutional provisions or statutes that pertain to, prohibit, or limit partisan gerrymandering in the congressional redistricting process in South Carolina," Justice George James wrote. A gerrymandering claim, he said, is a "political question" that courts can't decide.

Chief Justice John Kittredge agreed the court couldn't decide this one, but he warned about where things were heading. "We are seeing — and will continue to see — state legislatures race to further minimize and perhaps erase the representation of the state's minority political party in Congress," he wrote.

Put the two rulings together. The map couldn't be thrown out as a racial gerrymander, because the state said it was about party. And it couldn't be thrown out as a party gerrymander, because the state court said nothing in South Carolina law forbids one. The only body that could change that is the Legislature that drew the map. Voters can't change it themselves, because South Carolina doesn't let voters put an amendment on the ballot.

Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey celebrated the ruling. "We worked hard to ensure that South Carolina's districts reflected the politics of South Carolina's voters," he said. With six of the state's seven seats in Congress already Republican, his statement added: "So much winning – and we're not tired of it yet."

What it was worth

For two elections, the new lines held. Mace beat Annie Andrews by 14 points in 2022 and won by 17 in 2024. This year, in a nationwide Democratic wave, Lacore won it by only 1.01 points.

The map they wanted in May

Six of seven wasn't enough. In May 2026, with Trump pushing, Republicans tried to redraw the map again before the midterms. This time the target was Clyburn's 6th District, where Black residents are the largest group, and the only one Democrats held.

Sheri Biggs went on Newsmax to make the case. "I think a 7 and 0 would definitely reflect our values," she said.

Republicans in the state Senate wouldn't do it. On May 26, the first day of early voting for the June primary, senators declined to advance the map. "Neither my conscience or common sense is going to let me stop an election that is already underway," said state Sen. Richard Cash, a Republican whose state Senate district sits inside Biggs's congressional district.

And under the state Supreme Court's 2025 ruling, a lawsuit saying new lines were drawn for party advantage would have gone nowhere in state court.

The rest of the ugly

• Two days after the election, Biggs introduced a "catch kit" bill. Her Don't Flush Babies Act would require every patient who takes an abortion pill to get biohazard containers and bring the remains back to a clinic in person, never by mail. Any provider who skips the kit could face up to five years in prison.
• The Freedom Caucus chairman says the lesson is to compromise less. Rep. Jordan Pace held his own seat by fewer than 400 votes. He told the Gazette that the low Republican turnout was a rejection of working across party lines, and that conservative voters don't want politicians who are willing to compromise.
• One Republican survived by 32 votes. Simpsonville Rep. David Vaughan held his seat against Democrat John MacCarthy by 32 votes out of almost 18,300 after an automatic recount. Two years ago he beat the same Democrat by more than 20 points.

What the results show

Annie Andrews beat Darline Graham, the Trump-backed sister of the late Lindsey Graham, 51.1% to 46.6%. Graham ran behind Trump's 2024 share in all 46 counties. Democrats flipped the 1st District by 1.01 points and 10 state House seats, which ended the Republican supermajority there. Joe Wilson kept his seat by 2,840 votes after a recount, two years after winning it with 59.7%. William Timmons, Russell Fry and Sheri Biggs each fell about 8 points from 2024. The 1st District was redrawn in 2022 after lawmakers, a federal panel found, moved about 30,000 Black voters out of it. The U.S. Supreme Court let that map stand because race and party couldn't be separated. The state Supreme Court then ruled that nothing in South Carolina law forbids drawing districts for party advantage.

Source

SC elects first Democrat to US Senate in 28 years in stunning win over Trump's pick, Jessica Holdman, Katharine Wilson and Seanna Adcox, SC Daily Gazette, November 3, 2026.