The two-week Republican sprint to replace the late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham on this November’s ballot officially kicked off this week as the state GOP certified nine candidates to compete in the Aug. 11 special election.
High-profile contenders include U.S. Sen. Darlene Graham, recently appointed to serve the remainder of her late brother’s term, former Congressman and Gov. Mark Sanford, and U.S. Reps. Ralph Norman of York County and Russell Fry of Horry County.
The biggest question mark in the race? The real value of President Donald Trump’s “complete and total” endorsement of Graham, who until recently served as head of South Carolina’s Commission for the Blind and is little-known to GOP voters.
Fueling those questions is Trump’s increasingly spotty record of crowning winners in Republican primaries, including last month’s Palmetto State gubernatorial contest. After backing Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette exclusively in the first round, Trump issued a last-minute dual endorsement during the runoff, when polling began to suggest the magnitude of S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson’s 40-point landslide victory.
At least one local S.C. GOP official sounded skeptical of the sway Trump still holds over primary voters when he spoke to the Washington Post on Thursday.
“People are going to be independently minded in this,” Dorchester Republican Party Chairman C.J. Westfall said of the race. “I don’t think that Trump is the end-all, be-all that he used to be.”
That view seemed to get a boost later in the day from a fresh Emerson College/Nexstar Media poll of GOP voters showing Norman leading with 22%, followed by Graham at 19%, Fry at 12% and Sanford at 11%. A quarter were still undecided.
- Related: City Paper endorses Sanford
Other candidates in the race include Greenville businessman Mark Lynch, who finished a distant second to Graham in the June primary, Walterborough attorney Duke Buckner, former Myrtle Beach Mayor Mark McBride, retired Air Force officer Glenda Gail Parker and Lexington County entrepreneur Sam Shepherd.
Johnson picks Skardon as running mate
James Island nonprofit leader Sam Skardon is the running mate for Democratic Party gubernatorial nominee Jermaine Johnson, the campaign announced Thursday.
“Sam Skardon has a history in helping out marginalized communities and individuals who traditionally have not had access to capital and the political spectrum,” Johnson told the Charleston City Paper earlier this week. “Sam’s dedication to the people of South Carolina is unmatched,” adding that the campaign’s vision is to build a new South Carolina for the future.
Richland County’s Johnson, elected to the S.C. House of Representatives in 2020, won 60% of the vote in the June Democratic Party gubernatorial primary against two candidates who spent millions of dollars.
Skardon, the 38-year-old former chairman of the Charleston County Democratic Party who ran for state Senate in 2020, said his pick as an outsider candidate for lieutenant governor on the Democratic ticket is a positive for working families across the state.
“Our state government simply isn’t delivering results right now on the issues that matter most to hardworking South Carolina families,” Skardon said in an exclusive interview. “I’m looking forward to meeting those South Carolinians who want new and better results from their state government, listen to them, and implement a vision for a state that actually addresses their needs.”
A Mount Pleasant native, Skardon graduated from Academic Magnet High School, got a bachelor’s degree from Emory University and earned a master’s in business administration from Georgetown University. His wife Leslie is a freshman member of Charleston City Council. They have twin 4-year-old boys.
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