Annie Andrews won the South Carolina U.S. Senate race on Tuesday, defeating incumbent Republican Sen. Darline Graham and becoming the first woman elected to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate. The called the race for Andrews, who also became the first Democrat elected to the seat since Ernest “Fritz” Hollings won his final term in 1998.
For readers searching Beaufort County election results, the Senate race was the night’s clearest turning point. Andrews said at her victory speech Tuesday in Charleston, “I think we just made some history,” a line that fit the scale of what had just happened: a seat that had been red for 70 years changed hands.
Her win came alongside a broader Democratic push across the ballot. South Carolina Democrats appeared to gain at least 10 seats in the state House, with flips in Clarendon, Dorchester, Greenwood, Lexington and York counties. Democrats had run candidates in every seat in the 124-member House this year, but Republicans still held 89 seats to Democrats’ 35 going into the election, and Republicans said they kept control of the lower chamber.
Other statewide contests broke Republican as well. Mark Hammond won reelection for secretary of state with 52.9% of the vote over Jason Belton, and David Stumbo won the attorney general race with 52.3% of the vote. The Senate result, though, carried the sharpest historical weight because it ended a stretch that had kept the seat in Republican hands for decades.
Andrews also used her victory speech to thank Graham “for her service and for her love of South Carolina,” while Lauren French cast the result as a rebuke of a national Republican effort to hold the seat. French said Graham had been appointed and treated the job “as hers by birthright,” then argued that Donald Trump and Washington Republicans had poured money into the race only to be turned away by voters in South Carolina. Heather Williams said Democrats had been fighting an entrenched system, accusing South Carolina Republicans of protecting their own power, and said voters had made clear “that enough was enough.”
The result leaves Andrews with a piece of history and a mandate that is larger than the margin of one race. What remains to be seen now is how quickly she turns a symbolic breakthrough into a working Senate presence in a state that had never sent a woman to that chamber before.
