‘There has to be a path’: What will it take for Jaime Harrison to beat Lindsey Graham?
Jaime Harrison has broken statewide fundraising records and impressed the national Democratic Party that typically ignores reliably red states like South Carolina. And now, leading political prognosticators say he might stand some chance of winning a U.S. Senate seat there in November.
But in South Carolina, a GOP-dominated state where general election polls strongly favor President Donald Trump, can a Democrat like Harrison actually pull off a victory?
For all the growing hype behind his candidacy, Harrison still faces long odds against longtime Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has solidified his standing with the state’s conservative base for his embrace of the president and faces no serious primary challenger in June.
“A whole checklist of things have to go right for Harrison to win,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “And if just one of them doesn’t, then it’s not likely to happen for him.”
Last month, Kondik shifted his rating of the South Carolina Senate race from “safe” Republican to “likely” Republican. Jessica Taylor of the Cook Political Report upgraded her rating of the race from “solid” to “likely” Republican at the same time.
Both ratings changes buoyed Harrison supporters’ hopes that there is a path, if a very narrow one, to a Democratic victory this November.
Harrison’s campaign doesn’t disagree that the conditions have to be just right to pull off an upset in South Carolina, where a Democrat hasn’t won a U.S. Senate seat since the late Fritz Hollings, who served from 1966-2005.
Top campaign officials concede that without historically high voter turnout for Democratic candidates in 2020 — the kind Democrats saw in the 2018 midterm elections — Harrison can’t win.
Yet Harrison’s campaign isn’t worried. They anticipate another banner election year for Democrats this fall and they strongly believe Trump fatigue will energize not only Democrats but moderate Republicans and Independents who are disappointed with Graham’s transformation from being one of Trump’s harshest critics to staunchest defenders.
“We see a clear path despite who wins the presidential contest in South Carolina,” said Harrison campaign manager Zack Carroll, “because voters see that Lindsey Graham has changed and is clearly putting political games over the needs of South Carolina.”
Graham told The State this week he was not concerned about losing support, claiming that an internal poll from “not long ago” showed him with a 94% approval rating among the South Carolina Republicans who helped Trump to a substantial win in the state in 2016.
The last nonpartisan, South Carolina-specific survey of Graham’s approval rating among the state’s GOP, conducted by Winthrop University, was in April 2019 and put his Republican support at 74%.
The strength of Graham’s in-state support aside, however, Harrison’s biggest challenge could be convincing enough GOP voters in a presidential election year that he’s worth not voting straight party.
With few if any political observers willing to entertain the possibility that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, can sweep the state, a Harrison victory likely will depend on winning the South Carolina ballot alongside Trump.
And that’s a tall order, these observers say, for a former state Democratic Party chairman. They also question whether the “Trump-Harrison voter” even exists.
“There has to be a path for Jaime Harrison to win, and for Trump to win, South Carolina,” said Scott Huffmon, who runs the Winthrop poll and agreed there were remote prospects for a Biden win in the state.
It is ultimately this question of how split-ticket voting would work in South Carolina this year, and whether there would be enough of that to boost Harrison over the finish line, that presents perhaps the most stubborn obstacle standing in Harrison’s way.
A different time
Split-ticket voting used to happen more frequently, including in South Carolina.
In 1968 and 1980, Hollings’ reelection cycles fell on presidential election years, and South Carolinians decisively favored the Democrat over his Republican challengers — even as they also voted for GOP Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, respectively.
Hollings was, of course, a different breed of Democrat at a different moment in South Carolina politics.
The start of his tenure in Congress coincided with an ideological shift within the two major political parties that would be long lasting — one that would ultimately replace Democrats with Republicans as the dominant party in the state.
Hollings also was a moderate Democrat who endeared himself to Republicans by virtue of being able to deliver directly for the state by way of earmarks, a system of spending federal dollars later banned.
This is a major factor now working in Graham’s favor, said Dave Woodard, a retired political science professor at Clemson University and veteran Republican campaign operative in the state: South Carolina voters still tend to be extremely protective of incumbents due to the fact that the South once had diminished influence in the political process, and building up seniority over the years on Capitol Hill was and remains a way to establish clout.
Meanwhile, as political polarization has increased nationally, fewer voters everywhere have been willing to support a presidential candidate and Senate candidate from different parties. And this growing reluctance to engage in split-ticket voting has made it even more difficult for Senate candidates to win in states where votes are expected to overwhelmingly back the opposition party’s presidential candidate.
By the last presidential election in 2016, ticket-splitting voters had become so rare that every single Republican Senate candidate who won did so in a state that Trump carried — and every single Democratic Senate candidate who won did so in a state carried by Hillary Clinton.
Not one candidate four years ago managed to win a state not also carried by his or her party’s presidential nominee.
This trend has also played out in South Carolina, which is currently one of six states that gives voters an option to vote for a party’s entire slate by checking a single box on the ballot.
The S.C. Election Commission, which has tracked straight party voting since 2006, shows that voters have increasingly taken advantage of that option. Between the 2016 and 2018 elections alone, the percentage of total straight party ballots cast jumped from 50% to 63%.
A narrow path
Still, a small contingent of voters continue to be willing to vote for a down-ballot candidate from a different party than their preferred presidential nominee. And in some recent elections, especially strong candidates have been able to outperform their nominee by a significant enough margin to nearly win their race.
In Missouri in 2016, for example, Democratic Senate candidate Jason Kander came within three percentage points of defeating the longtime GOP incumbent, U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, even while Trump won the state by almost 20 percentage points.
“What people are looking for are, even if they disagree with them on some policy issues, folks who hold the beliefs that they do because they care about people like them,” Kander said in an interview last week.
Kander, who knows Harrison and thinks the South Carolina Democrat has a chance to replicate his near success, recalled that many of the GOP-leaning voters he won over in 2016 were not overly ideological, even if they were generally conservative in their views.
More important, Kander said, was running as a candidate who could convince people that he cared about them and their families, regardless of his specific policy positions.
But Kander was a special kind of candidate. He had non-partisan credentials, including serving as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan in the Army. He branded himself as a non-politician who would shake up the status quo in Washington, D.C. — a similar philosophy touted by Trump, who ran in 2016 on a promise to “drain the swamp.”
Kander also ran a memorable TV ad during his race that showed him assembling a rifle blindfolded, one that helped bolster his claim among moderates and conservatives that he was a different sort of Democrat.
Harrison, in contrast, has been deeply enmeshed in Democratic politics for years. He got his start working for U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., on Capitol Hill. He is the former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party and currently holds an associate chairmanship with the Democratic National Committee.
“Jaime Harrison has to run from Nancy Pelosi, from Chuck Schumer, from the national Democrats to get a lot of traction here,” said Katon Dawson, a former S.C. Republican Party chairman who also had a stint chairing the Republican National Committee.
Carroll, Harrison’s campaign manager, insists that Harrison has more in common with Kander than not. He called Harrison “unabashedly a non-politician” and said Kander’s near-win in Missouri was evidence that Harrison can win in South Carolina.
“They are similar candidates,” said Carroll. “Jaime’s message is about character and upholding the character of South Carolina. This isn’t the race where we are necessarily talking about partisan issues and party issues, we’re talking about helping the lives of the people of South Carolina.
“Lindsey Graham would be considered establishment or toeing the party line, while Jaime’s someone who is willing to speak his mind and not necessarily have a poll-tested answer,” he continued. “He is someone who is bold and puts his character and integrity first and that is what folks are looking for, particularly folks who are attracted to Trump as well.”
Carroll also compared Harrison to Democrat Stacey Abrams, who in 2018 fell short just 55,000 votes in her contest against Republican Brian Kemp for the governorship in Georgia.
“(She) brought historic turnout and also persuasion, people flipping from Republicans to Democrats,” he said of Abrams, a black woman who particularly energized the African American base in Georgia.
Harrison, who also is black, will likely be able to do the same in South Carolina, a state where historically two-thirds of the Democratic electorate has been African American.
The state’s Democratic presidential primary in February, however, showed white voters also turning out in record numbers, with black South Carolinians making up 47% of voters and white South Carolinians constituting 50%, according to S.C. Election Commission data.
Harrison’s campaign knows where it has to boost turnout across the board, citing 400,000 unregistered people of color in South Carolina who need to get on the books to vote for Harrison along with white, college-educated voters who are starting to shift to the left politically and constitute the fastest-growing demographic in the state.
In a recent conservation with The State, S.C. Republican Party Chairman Drew McKissick scoffed at the idea that Harrison’s supporters were crowing over his chances by comparing him to other high-profile, well-funded Democratic candidates who had ultimately lost.
But Carroll insisted Harrison is in the race not just to defy the odds and come close, as Kander and Abrams did, but to win.
“Victory is winning,” he said. “Victory is Jaime being elected a United States senator.“
This story was originally published May 15, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
