Darline Graham is Ruining South Carolina. Download and share her report card.

Was Never Elected — She Got the Seat Because of Who Her Brother Was
Says Her Job Is to Do Whatever Donald Trump Wants
Voted Twice to Keep Us in the Unnecessary War in Iran
Used Her First Health Care Vote to Let a Company Overrule Your Doctor
Wants the Government to Control Women's Bodies
Is Trying to Take Away Our Voting Power
Voted to Let Child Care Get More Expensive for Working Parents
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South Carolina Report Card

Was Never Elected — She Got the Seat Because of Who Her Brother Was

A U.S. Senate seat is one of one hundred. It is the most powerful job most Americans will ever get to vote on. South Carolinians did not get to vote on this one.

Lindsey Graham died in office on July 11, 2026. Two days later, Governor Henry McMaster appointed his sister to the seat — after President Trump posted on Truth Social that appointing her would be "a fabulous tribute to Lindsey."
The Governor did not make a case about her qualifications. He made one about her family: "Lindsey took care of his little sister in years long departed. It's my honor to ask his little sister Darline Graham to finish his work for him now."
She said the same thing herself: "Lindsey has always been there for me, and now I will be there for him."
She has never held elected office. Since 2019 she has led the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, a state agency providing vocational rehabilitation and independent-living services — real public service, and not remotely the same thing as being chosen by South Carolina's voters to write federal law.
At her first campaign event on August 1, 2026, she told the crowd: "I certainly never expected to be on this stage, giving this stump speech. I've never had any desire to be a politician."
She now sits on the Appropriations, Budget, Environment and Public Works, and Judiciary Committees — four of the most powerful committees in the Senate. She did not earn those either: Senate Republicans simply gave her the same committee seats her brother had held.

A Senate seat is not an heirloom and it is not a tribute. It belongs to the people of South Carolina, who never got a say in this. We deserve better.

Says Her Job Is to Do Whatever Donald Trump Wants

A Senator's constitutional job is to act as a check on the President — to say no when the President is wrong. Darline Graham has been explicit that this is not what she is there for.

In her political debut she told South Carolina Republicans: "I'm here today because I'm answering President Trump's call to serve. I want to stand up for South Carolina, and I want to fight for President Trump's agenda."
She is not in the race on her own initiative. Three days after she was sworn in, Trump posted that he had asked her to run and would give her his "Complete and Total Endorsement" if she did — "RUN, DARLINE, RUN!" She announced three days after that.
Within days of being sworn in she joined a group of Republican senators urging Majority Leader John Thune to cancel the Senate's August recess to force through a spending and voter ID bill described as the President's top legislative priority.
South Carolina Republicans do not appear entirely sold. An Emerson College poll of 500 likely primary voters released in late July had her trailing Rep. Ralph Norman 22% to 19% in the August 11 primary — within the poll's 4.3-point margin of error — and more than half of those polled said Trump's endorsement "makes no impact on their vote."

We already know what a South Carolina Senator who exists to please this President looks like. We just spent years watching one. We deserve better.

Voted Twice to Keep Us in the Unnecessary War in Iran

War destroys human lives, families and innocent people, causes economic ruin, and triggers immense suffering. War should always be the option of last resort — and under the Constitution, only Congress can declare one.

Darline Graham has been a Senator for three weeks. In that time, the single most consequential thing she has done is vote twice to keep American troops fighting a war Congress never authorized.

On July 23, 2026, the Senate voted on discharging S.J.Res. 180, "to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against the Islamic Republic of Iran that have not been authorized by Congress." It failed 47–49. Graham voted no.
One week later, on July 30, 2026, the Senate tried again with S.J.Res. 181 — a resolution with word-for-word identical text. It failed 49–50. Graham voted no again. Had she voted yes, it would have passed.
American soldiers are dead, and at least 624 American service members have been wounded since the war began in February.
The war is costing us $1 billion a day, and gas prices have gone up because of it.

The American people don't want this war. An unelected Senator, three weeks into a job nobody chose her for, voted twice to keep it going — the second time by a margin of one. We deserve better.

Used Her First Health Care Vote to Let a Company Overrule Your Doctor

We all deserve access to quality healthcare so we can live healthy and productive lives — and if you have paid into Medicare your whole working life, you deserve to have your doctor decide what care you need.

Here is the plain-English version of what her first health care vote was about. In a private Medicare Advantage plan, a company has to sign off before you can get certain treatments. That is called prior authorization, and it is why people wait weeks for a procedure their own doctor already said they needed. Traditional Medicare — the government version, the one most South Carolina seniors are in — has almost never worked that way. In January the administration started changing that, and in July the Senate got one chance to stop it.

What the administration did. On January 1, 2026, it launched the "Wasteful and Inappropriate Services Reduction (WISeR) Model", which extends prior authorization — rare in traditional Medicare until now — to a list of treatments: cervical spinal fusion and epidural steroid injections for pain, implanted nerve stimulators, incontinence devices, and the skin substitutes used to treat severe and chronic wounds. Nearly 1.1 million people on traditional Medicare got at least one of these treatments in 2024.
The company reviewing your case gets paid more when it says no. Medicare did not hire doctors to run these reviews. It hired private technology firms using artificial intelligence, and those firms "will be eligible to receive a share of the savings associated with services that are denied as a result" — KFF's words. They are rewarded, in part, for the volume of care they turn down. It is the same arrangement that got large Medicare Advantage insurers investigated by Congress and sued over AI-driven denials.
The vote. When a federal agency does something like this, Congress gets one tool to erase it: a resolution of disapproval, which needs only a simple majority and expires if it isn't used. S.J.Res. 198 was that resolution. On July 16, 2026 — two days into the job — Graham voted against even bringing it up for debate. The motion failed 46–50, and the program stands.
Why South Carolina should care even though we are not in the pilot yet. WISeR runs through 2031 and starts in six states — Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington. CMS has said the model "may be expanded to include a wider range of services in future years." Of the 1,273,035 South Carolinians on Medicare as of January 2026, 54% are in traditional Medicare rather than a private plan — roughly 690,000 people whose care this reaches if it grows. July 16 was the chance to stop it before it got here. She voted no.
And that is on top of what South Carolina is already absorbing. The state is projected to have 230,000 more uninsured residents over the next decade because of Trump's budget bill, South Carolina hospitals stand to receive $2.4 billion less every year in federal Medicaid funding, and letting the ACA tax credits expire is launching millions of Americans into 2026 with steep insurance hikes. Graham arrived to defend all of it.

We need healthcare to live. Literally. We deserve better.

Wants the Government to Control Women's Bodies

America is the land of FREEDOM — including the freedom to make your own medical decisions. Unless you're a woman deciding whether to have a baby. Darline Graham launched her campaign on taking that decision away.

In her first campaign ad she declares: "I'm a conservative Republican and I believe this: Every life is precious. Men don't belong in women's sports and only American citizens should vote in our elections."
Among the first bills she has put her name to is one prohibiting the Food and Drug Administration from approving new abortion drugs — an attempt to freeze medication abortion in place by statute, over the judgment of the agency whose job is to evaluate whether a drug is safe.
South Carolina already bans abortion at about six weeks of pregnancy — often before women realize they're pregnant. Her answer is to take the fight to the federal level.

60% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Darline Graham thinks she knows better. We deserve better.

Is Trying to Take Away Our Voting Power

In America our vote represents our will. It gives us the power to make the change that we want to see in the world. Read about all the ways politicians are trying to take that power away on our about page, then come back here.

It takes a certain amount of nerve to be handed a Senate seat without an election and then make restricting other people's votes your signature issue. Darline Graham has that nerve.

One of the three things she chose to say in her first campaign ad was "only American citizens should vote in our elections." Only American citizens can vote. It is already a federal crime for a non-citizen to vote in a federal election, and study after study has found essentially no evidence of it happening.
What that slogan is really selling is documentary proof-of-citizenship voting laws. 146 million Americans do not have a passport, and 69 million women who have married do not have a birth certificate matching their current legal name. Those are the people such laws actually stop.
One of her first acts as a Senator was to join colleagues demanding the Senate cancel its August recess to push through a spending and voter ID bill.

YOU HAVE POWER. Why else do you think they're working so hard to take it away? Don't let them. We deserve better.

Voted to Let Child Care Get More Expensive for Working Parents

Child care is the thing that lets parents work. In South Carolina, the Working Families Child Care Scholarship pays for care for almost 50,000 children whose parents could not afford it otherwise — and since December 1, 2025 it has been closed to most new applicants because the federal money ran out.

That is the situation Darline Graham walked into. Here is what she did about it.

What working parents used to be guaranteed. Federal rules adopted in 2024 required every state running this program to do four things: never charge a family more than 7% of its income in copays; pay child care providers up front instead of weeks after the fact; pay based on how many children are enrolled, so a center isn't docked when a child stays home sick; and set aside money to create child care where there isn't enough of it — for infants and toddlers, for children with disabilities, and in underserved parts of the state.
What the administration did with them. A rule called "Restoring Flexibility in the Child Care and Development Fund" repealed all four, effective July 13, 2026. States may keep those policies if they choose. They are no longer required to.
What that costs a family. The 7% cap is the difference between child care being affordable and not. Before the federal cap existed, states across the South charged far more — 10% of household income in Alabama and North Carolina, 9% in Florida, 14% in Missouri. Removing the floor lets any state go back. And paying centers late, only for days a child physically shows up, squeezes providers already operating on almost no margin.
South Carolina's child care system cannot take another hit. Seven months into the scholarship freeze, Upstate centers are closing classrooms and laying off staff. Miss Tammy's Little Learning Center in Landrum is running at half of last year's enrollment and facing around 12 layoffs. "It's not a pause it was stopped," its regional director said. "Seven months is a very long pause." A mother who lost her voucher put it this way: "You are taking away from people that are actually working and actually breaking their back to give their children the life they deserve."
The vote. When a federal agency writes a rule like this, Congress gets one tool to erase it — a resolution of disapproval, which needs only a simple majority and expires if it isn't used. S.J.Res. 199 was that resolution. On July 30, 2026 the Senate voted on whether to even take it up. It failed 47–52. Graham voted no.