Sometimes, the elephant in the room really is an elephant — as in the South Carolina Republican Party, the grand old pachyderm that’s stomped every Democrat running statewide for the past 20 years.
That’s right. There are Palmetto State voters — tens of thousands of them, in fact — who literally weren’t alive the last time a statewide Democratic candidate uncorked the champagne at an election-night victory party.
So how does Dr. Annie Andrews, the Lowcountry pediatrician turned Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, deal with the elephant at the center of her campaign?
Directly.
“Yes, we can absolutely win,” she told the Charleston City Paper this week, patiently ticking off the internal polling and fundraising data that show her in a dead heat with any potential Republican nominee. On Aug. 11, voters in a special Republican primary will pick her opponent following the unexpected recent death of the incumbent, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham.
“I’m tied with all these Republicans because people are tired of a broken Washington, D.C.,” she said. “They’re looking for something different — and as a doctor and a mom and someone who represents a generational shift in leadership, that’s exactly what I’m offering.”
Of course, this isn’t the race that she, or anyone else, was expecting.
A month ago, Andrews was focused on beating Lindsey Graham — an uphill race, to be sure, but one whose outlines were clear. Now, she’s in uncharted territory, watching from the sidelines while the GOP’s snap primary plays out.
Still, given the invariably low turnout in special elections, Andrews expects the GOP to serve up a candidate that’s a better fit for the party’s MAGA grassroots than its rank-and-file November voters.
“The people who are going to show up and vote in the primary are the most dialed-in, most hyper-partisan Republicans in South Carolina,” she said. “That’s why a more moderate, reasonable Republican like Mark Sanford, sadly in my view, doesn’t stand a chance.”
Sanford, the former congressman and governor who briefly challenged Trump for the GOP presidential nomination in 2020, is currently polling a distant fourth in the race. Last week, he was endorsed by the City Paper’s editorial board. Other high-profile candidates in the Aug. 11 race include U.S. Reps. Ralph Norman of York and Russell Fry of Myrtle Beach and the current incumbent, Graham’s sister Darline.
And it’s precisely the growing gap she sees between MAGA and Main Street that the Andrews campaign campaign, with its relentless focus on pragmatic solutions to everyday S.C. problems like affordability and health care, was designed to exploit.
“When I’m talking to center-right Republicans, they feel like their party left them and they’re looking for an alternative,” she said. “I believe South Carolina can become central to the story of how we turned the page on this hyper-partisan and hyper-divisive era of American politics.”
What’s more, she noted, she comes by that view honestly. After all, her own father is a lifelong Republican — and once a proud Lindsey Graham donor.
From pediatrics to politics
Like the famous Hemingway character who went bankrupt “slowly, then all at once,” Andrews’ political origin story starts with small moments in the life of a doctor — the patient struggling to pay for life-saving care, the mother leaving her child’s bedside to work a third shift — followed by an abrupt transformation.
“Everybody who makes a big pivot like I have from the practice of medicine to politics has that moment that drove them off the sidelines,” she said. “And for me, it was the shooting on Feb. 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.”
Why that one, and not the many before it?
“That was the first school shooting I experienced as the mother of a school-aged child,” she said quietly. “My oldest daughter was in kindergarten that year, so it just hit me differently. And I knew right then that I needed to find a way in, a way to be a part of solving these problems future generations of Americans were facing.”
Three years later, Andrews found her first way in — an uphill run for Congress against the famously fractious GOP U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace in the heavily gerrymandered 1st District.
“Nancy Mace really didn’t pull any punches,” Andrews said. “I got to see the ugliest side of politics in that race.”
But she also learned a lot, she said, from how to raise money to how to spend her own time.
“Mostly,” she said, “I learned how to confidently run the kind of campaign I want to run and to talk about the issues I want to talk about.”
Which may explain why she’s been so clear in this race about what she stands for — and what she doesn’t.
In the past two weeks alone, she’s publicly condemned U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a “grifter and conspiracy theorist,” and called some of the Democratic Socialists of America’s more controversial positions, such as prison abolition, “unAmerican and unhinged.”
“That’s not the far-left of my party,” Andrews said, when asked about the latter comment. “The DSA is a separate party — the Democratic Socialists of America — and I’m not a socialist.”
And with DSA candidates winning high-profile Democratic primaries around the country,
Andrews said her GOP opponents will try to tar her with the socialist brush — as indeed, some already have.
“They’re going to try to associate me with this DSA movement,” she said. “But I don’t support the DSA or its platform. And that’s not the last time you’ll hear me say that.”
It’s the affordability, stupid
It seems hard to remember now, but in 1992, Republicans had been in the White House for 20 of the past 24 years — an electoral run not unlike the one the GOP is on here in the Palmetto State.
That’s why then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s Democratic campaign was so ruthlessly disciplined about not being dragged off-message by the daily barrage of new issues and stories. That campaign’s mantra, captured in a legendary sign at its national headquarters?
“Change versus more of the same. The economy, stupid. Don’t forget health care.”
It’s hard to talk to Annie Andrews and not hear the echoes of that long-ago exercise in message discipline.
“When I’m talking to voters, it’s really two things that we’re talking about — affordability and health care,” Andrews said. “And to me, the health-care piece is part of the affordability conversation, because if you can’t afford to see the doctor, you’re never going to be able to thrive economically in any other way.”
As Andrews continues, you can feel the underlying MAGA versus Main Street theory of her campaign start to take shape.
“Grocery prices are high because of inflation and tariffs, gas prices are high because of the war Trump started with Iran, and our health care system is on the brink of disaster because of the Republican Medicaid budget cuts,” Andrews said, noting that every major S.C. GOP official has supported all of it.
“That’s why they’re going to try to associate me with the DSA,” she added. “They don’t have a record to run on, and they haven’t delivered for South Carolina.”
Asked what she’d want every South Carolinian to know about her before heading to the polls this November, her answer was simple.
“I’m a pediatrician who’s worked on the front lines of our health care system for 20 years,” she said. “I’m a mom of three public school kids in Charleston County. I’m a pragmatic problem-solver and a public servant.”
She paused briefly, and then finished her thought.
“And I’m not a career politician,” she said. “I know South Carolina deserves a senator who will wake up every day and think about South Carolina first and fight for South Carolina first — and that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
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