U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham speaks to reporters in his campaign office in Columbia, South Carolina, on Monday, March 16, after filing to run for reelection. (Photo by Adrian Ashford/SC Daily Gazette)
Six Republicans and three Democrats are trying to unseat U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham as he seeks re-election amid the backdrop of a war with Iran that he sought and the backing of President Donald Trump.
The GOP field has doubled in the last month, making it tougher for each challenger to build the name recognition and money needed to stand out in what’s now a seven-way race in the June 9 Republican primary.
Newly entering the race to try to stop Graham’s bid for a fifth term in the U.S. Senate are Republicans Thomas Dismukes, of York County; Calvin Cowen, of Spartanburg County; and Darius Mitchell, of Columbia. The three launched their bids when they filed their candidacy paperwork two weeks ago.
They joined Mark Lynch, who launched his bid in February 2025; Paul Dans, who announced in July, and more recently, Patrick Herrmann, who joined in February ahead of filing.
The Democrats seeking a flip will need to spend money to win their three-way race June 9 before squaring off against the GOP winner. Three minor-party candidates will also be on the ballot in November.
Six years ago, Jaime Harrison, then a former state Democratic Party chair, was the only Democrat challenging Graham. And that matchup hit records as one of the nation’s most expensive U.S. Senate races ever.
As of Dec. 31, Graham had more than $13.4 million available for this year’s race, according to his last campaign filing.
That’s more than double the $4.5 million cash on hand reported by Lynch, an Upstate furniture seller who is Graham’s closest competitor in fundraising. Lynch’s total haul includes $5 million of his own money, according to his campaign filings.
As war with Iran tests South Carolinians’ appetites for U.S. involvement abroad, Graham’s challengers from both parties have attacked him as a warmonger and accused him of focusing more on conflict abroad than his own state.
Graham, meanwhile, has proudly taken credit for the realization of one of his long-term foreign policy goals and touted his influence on Trump’s decision to attack Iran.
“I’ve never been more excited about my job than I am right now; I don’t think I’ve ever been better at it than I am right now,” he told reporters after officially filing for re-election.
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No U.S. senator from South Carolina has lost a re-election race in 82 years.
Since Democrat Ellison Smith lost his bid for a seventh term in 1944, and died several months later at age 80, senators have either left on their own or died in office, with one exception. Voters refused to elect Gov. Donald Russell to the job in 1966, a year after he resigned as governor in order to get appointed U.S. senator following the death of Olin Johnston.
Democrats trying to flip the seat are Dr. Annie Andrews, a Charleston pediatrician; Brandon Brown of Greenville, a former administrator at historically Black colleges and universities; and Kyle Freeman of Columbia, who works in logistics.
The seat hasn’t been occupied by a Democrat since 1964, when Sen. Strom Thurmond switched parties. Graham’s 2002 election replaced Thurmond, who left office at age 100 after 47 years in the U.S. Senate. South Carolina hasn’t had a Democrat in the chamber since Sen. Fritz Hollings retired in January 2005 after 38 years in office.
Two Democrats are making health care central to their pitch.
As a pediatrician, Andrews says she’s just what a state struggling with a measles outbreak needs. Both she and Brown want to see everyone offered government-funded health insurance.
Freeman’s priorities are higher taxes on the wealthy and limitations on political donations.
Three of the Republicans — Dans, Lynch and Mitchell — have vowed to bring their party back to an “America First” focus with a total about-face on foreign policy. Lynch and Dans told the SC Daily Gazette they want the U.S. to cut off all military funding to Israel and Ukraine.
Lynch said the U.S. is “bankrupt” already and can’t afford to keep supporting Israel’s military. Israel already has God’s protection, he said.
“The Bible prophesies the future – nobody’s gonna really ever harm Israel,” he told the Gazette. “Maybe they could loan us some money, because we don’t have the money.”
“I really do not care about the eastern border of Ukraine, and that is an unwinnable war,” Dans said in an interview. He said China is a bigger threat to U.S. security, and to ensure the U.S. can defend itself, it should avoid “wearing down all of our troops and getting exhausted.”
Mitchell, 52, the son of an Air Force veteran, said war with Iran was a big motivator for his entry into the race.
He bills himself as a “hip hop Republican,” which is his social media handle on Instagram. He regularly reposts tweets from conservatives critical of the Iran war, including Anthony Scaramucci, who was White House communications director for 11 days, and pundit and author Ann Coulter.
He doesn’t think the conflict with Iran is worth any deaths of U.S. troops and worries Trump didn’t know what he was getting into.
Trump campaigned as a president of peace, pledging no more “endless wars,” and that he’d stop wars, not start them. He’s also repeatedly called the Iraq war a mistake.
Mitchell took that as a promise not to get into wars in the Middle East. “It really pains me to see the president’s legacy, all the good things he did over the last decade, be overclouded by what’s going on right now in the Middle East,” he said.
Cowen and Dismukes, on the other hand, said foreign policy had nothing to do with their entries into the race.
Cowen, 67, said he worries about states’ autonomy from the federal government. He agrees with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and returned the legality of abortions to state lawmakers.
Cowen said the prior decisions took away states’ freedom.
However, since legal precedent and executive orders can be overturned, Cowen wants a federal law guaranteeing states the power to set their own policy on issues such as abortion and transgender athletes.
“I don’t agree with California’s stance on abortion, but to me, they should have that freedom to do what they want,” he said.
Dismukes, 51, who works as an interim youth director at his church, said the state needs a “regular old simple senator.” His priority is cutting federal spending and debt, which has spiraled past $39 trillion. He noted he’s voted for Graham in the past.
“When was the last time that these people that represent us – when’s the last time they went to the grocery store, when’s the last time they raked a senior citizen’s yard?” said Dismukes, who lives outside Sharon in York County and gives motivational speeches.
Lynch and Dans have centered Graham’s on-again, off-again relationship with Trump to call him insufficiently loyal to the president, even though Trump endorsed Graham about a year ago.
But the Iran war has complicated their efforts to criticize Graham’s foreign policy while positioning themselves as truer Trump allies.
In February, Lynch told the SC Daily Gazette that he believed war with Iran should be a “last ditch” option.
“I believe President Trump thinks that way — it’ll only happen if it is no other option but to go to war,” said Lynch, 67, who lives in Woodruff and runs a Greenville store that sells appliances and TVs. “I hope that’s his thinking.”
A few days later, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a sweeping U.S. and Israeli bombing attack. His son was named his successor just over a week later, as fighting has continued to spread throughout the Middle East.
In March, Lynch told the Gazette that he was skeptical of plans to overthrow the Iranian government. “When we think we’re gonna have a regime change, and we’re taking out the Ayatollah, and now we have a younger version – it’s not really working,” he said.
“In the long run, we can’t force a country to change its belief system in a chaotic Islam environment,” he said, adding he didn’t think U.S. efforts to overthrow other foreign governments had worked in the past.
But he took pains to place blame on Graham, not Trump.
“I’m all for diplomacy, and I know Trump’s for diplomacy too, and I’m sorry he has Lindsey Graham in his ear all the time,” Lynch said.
Dans, 56, of Charleston, who worked as an attorney in the first Trump administration, has also tried to walk that line.
“I reflexively trust Donald Trump’s instincts,” he said in an X post the day after Khamenei’s assassination. He then said he had questions about the “post decapitation plan.”
In recent social media posts, Dans has focused on attacking Graham’s comments last month to Fox News that he’s asking South Carolinians to “send their sons and daughters to the MidEast.” After people in both parties criticized the statement, Graham said the quote was taken out of context — that troops from South Carolina are already in the Middle East, and it makes him mad that other countries aren’t joining the fight.
He also blasted Graham as wanting women to be drafted and “die in a desert.” That refers to comments dating back a decade ago, when Graham explained his evolving position to requiring women to also sign up for a potential draft, as men do when they turn 18. It became a question on Capitol Hill after the Pentagon offered combat roles to women in 2015. There’s been no draft since 1973.
Dans has also criticized Graham as single and childless by contrasting his family life of five children.
He is best known for his work on Project 2025, developed by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.
He edited the over 900-page Project 2025 policy book, which called for dismantling federal agencies including the Department of Education, shrinking the federal workforce, and barring Medicaid funding from going to Planned Parenthood.
He led the development of the project’s database of potential staffers for a Republican administration who had been vetted for their loyalty to Trump and conservative principles. He stepped down from the Heritage Foundation in July 2024 amid a ramp-up in Democratic attacks on the project and attempts by Trump to distance himself from it.
“I have been in the movement fighting in the trenches for President Trump for the last 10 years,” Dans told the Gazette.
Herrmann, 51, who runs a Myrtle Beach business that restores water-damaged items, told the Gazette that he doesn’t want American troops on the ground in Iran but trusts Trump’s judgement. He said he wanted to see military funding to Ukraine and Israel decreased, but not cut off entirely.
Trump and Graham, 70, have arguably never been closer. Graham has advocated a direct confrontation with Iran for over a decade, saying from the outset that the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran wouldn’t stop the country from pursuing nuclear weapons. He was key to convincing Trump to strike.
He’s been sporting “Make Iran Great Again” hats on Fox News for months and showed off one signed by Trump in a January picture of himself and the president.
Graham’s re-election co-chairs are Gov. Henry McMaster, whose support for Trump has never wavered since 2016, and U.S. Sen. Tim Scott.
At his reelection filing event in an office decked out with pictures of him and Trump, Graham confidently told a room of supporters that “the times in which we live are incredibly exciting and dangerous.”
“Nobody is better prepared to help President Trump protect us from evil than I am,” he said, calling Iran an “evil empire” and citing his multiple phone calls with the president in just the past day.
Graham also said he doesn’t believe the U.S. will need to deploy ground troops to Iran. It’s up to the Iranian people to “take their government back,” he said, adding that the purpose of U.S.-Israeli strikes on the country was to destroy Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon.
He also said of Iran that “taking this regime down” would bring peace to the Middle East.
Graham and Trump haven’t always had a good relationship, something Dans, Lynch, and Herrmann have used to cast doubt on his conservative bona fides.
During his own brief run for the White House in 2015, Graham called Trump a “kook” who’s “unfit for office.” After exiting the field in December 2015 ahead of South Carolina’s presidential primary, Graham remained an outspoken critic, saying in May 2016 he couldn’t vote for Trump.
But within months of Trump taking office in 2017, Graham was heaping praise on him, partly because of Trump’s tough stance against Iran.
Lynch accused Graham of “stabbing Trump in the back” and Herrmann said he’d “betrayed” Trump.
Graham has also gone back and forth on Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020, at times defending the president and other times calling his claims of election fraud “unnerving” and “without sufficient proof.”
But lately, he’s become one of the president’s loudest cheerleaders. At his reelection event last month, he called himself one of Trump’s “closest friends, if not his closest friend in the Senate.”
“I think his policies fit this country at a critical time,” Graham said of Trump.
Most of the money Lynch is spending on the campaign is his own money. He told the Gazette the $5 million he put into the race came out of his retirement savings. Lynch also reported nearly $370,000 in individual donations, as of the Dec. 31 report.
Dans has over $300,000 cash available as of last quarter’s filing. Herrmann, who launched his campaign in February, hasn’t reported any campaign donations yet. Neither has Dismukes, Cowen, or Mitchell.
Herrmann said it’s a selling point of his campaign that he doesn’t have the deep pockets of some of his competitors. He told the Gazette that as a small business owner and blue-collar worker, he understands and relates to the financial pain working people are feeling.
He hopes his ideas – which include abolishing the Internal Revenue Service and imposing a single federal income tax rate on everyone who makes more than $34,700 — will resonate with people, even without a lot of paid advertising. His suggestion of a 19% flat rate, to be decreased later on to 17%, would mean a tax cut for almost everyone. Federal income tax rates range from 22% to 37%, depending on their reported earnings.
“My constituents can’t be bought with propaganda because they’re priceless,” Herrmann said.
Herrmann ran for a state House seat representing Horry County in 2024 and came in third in the Republican primary, 46 points behind the winning Rep. Carla Schuessler of Myrtle Beach.
Dans is a first-time candidate. Lynch tried unsuccessfully in 2020 to unseat state Sen. Scott Talley of Spartanburg County, losing by less than 6 percentage points in the GOP primary. (Talley didn’t seek re-election in 2024.)
On the Democratic side, Andrews, 45, had almost $1.6 million cash available as of Dec. 31. She’d raised $4.3 million but spent $2.7 million, her filings show.
She told the Gazette that the “hard work” she’s put into fundraising makes her a better nominee than Brown, who’s reported just $8,000 in donations.
Brown, 50, told the Gazette that while other candidates have raised more money, he’s “raised an army of volunteers to actually go work and talk about the issues.”
He said over 1,000 people have signed up to volunteer for his campaign. Andrews said about 1,600 people have signed up to volunteer for her campaign.
Brown said his strategy is focused on increasing turnout among Black and young voters. He’s worked in recruitment and fundraising for HBCUs across the Southeast, including Claflin University in Orangeburg, Paine College in Augusta, Georgia; and Jackson State University in Mississippi.
In 2004, Brown ran to represent South Carolina’s 4th Congressional District, which covers most of Greenville and Spartanburg counties. He lost to Republican Bob Inglis, who received 70% of the vote to Brown’s 29% to return to the seat he previously held from 1993 to 1999.
Brown ran again for the seat in 2018, losing to then-state Sen. William Timmons by 23 percentage points.
He told the Gazette he chose to run for Senate after a close family friend died because she couldn’t afford the health care she needed, even after making a GoFundMe page. If elected, he would push to expand Medicare to make it available to all Americans.
Andrews also advocated for such a system. She said she decided to run for Senate on the day Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was nominated by Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
“I knew this would be an unprecedented, coordinated attack on America’s health care system and public health infrastructure,” she said, adding that she believed it was a particularly important time to have a pediatrician in the Senate.
Four years ago, Andrews tried unsuccessfully to oust U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace from the coastal 1st District and lost by 14 percentage points.
She told the Gazette that she learned from that experience that she needed more people on the ground knocking on doors. This cycle, she said, she has more volunteers and plans to rely less on paid advertising.
The third Democrat in the race, a first-time candidate, has focused his ire on billionaires and wants to see more taxes on the rich, not less.
Kyle Freeman, 36, who works for ABW Logistics, said his top priority, along with higher taxes on the wealthy, is capping donations to political action committees. He had about $1,200 in his campaign account as of Friday.
“So much of the cowardice that we see in our politics today is because of the Citizens United decision,” said the married father of three, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave rise to super PACs.
The decision allowed corporations to donate money to PACs that supported candidates, even if they couldn’t donate to candidates’ campaigns directly.
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Courtesy of South Carolina Daily Gazette
