PENDLETON, S.C. ― Less than two weeks from November’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump on Wednesday evening found himself not in one of the several dozen swing House districts that he had promised to visit, but instead in solidly Republican South Carolina to shore up his handpicked U.S. Senate candidate.

“Thirteen days from now, the people of South Carolina are going to elect Darline Graham to the United States. She’s great,” Trump told rallygoers at T. Ed Garrison Arena at Clemson University, located in a congressional district the Republican won by 46 points in 2024 and a state Trump carried by 18. “You’re going to win big, Darline. You’re going to win big.”

That Republicans both nationally and in the state are nervous about the Senate seat is a function of Trump’s choice this summer to replace Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly during his campaign for a fifth term, with his younger sister, who had never run for elected office.

Public polling shows Graham ahead of Democratic nominee Annie Andrews by just a handful of percentage points in what had been considered a safe Republican seat, and both Republican and Democratic super PACs are now spending millions of dollars on the contest. An even bigger hint of a close race, though, could be the decision by Trump’s well-funded political team to send him to South Carolina in the closing days ahead of Nov. 3 midterms.

Scott Huffmon, a political science professor and pollster at Winthrop University, said Trump’s advisers likely fear that Republicans who remain unenthusiastic about Graham could choose not to vote at all.

“I doubt many hardcore Republicans will straight up switch to Andrews,” Huffmon said, but added that staying at home could also be disastrous “if they don’t vote for Graham in enough numbers to stave off the angry independents.”

Many Republican voters in the state resented being told who their nominee would be, and she would up winning the runoff for the special primary election by just 5 points on Aug. 25.

On Wednesday, Trump nonetheless boasted that elevating Darline Graham was entirely his decision.

“She’s smart and incredible. She’ll never let you down,” he said.

A subplot contributing to the intrigue is the residual anger from the candidate whom Darline Graham, with Trump’s help, narrowly defeated in August to win the nomination. Ralph Norman, a South Carolina congressman who earned Trump’s enmity when he endorsed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s run for president against Trump in 2024, said in a Wednesday morning radio interview that Trump should have stayed out of his race.

“What he did to South Carolina to try to force South Carolinians to vote for a candidate and hire her for six years is just not right,” he told iHeartRadio. “We’ve got a candidate that nobody knows anything about. You’re getting ready to hire her for six years because she was a relative of Lindsey Graham.”

Some of his supporters have started a write-in campaign that could potentially bleed off GOP votes from Graham next month. Norman declined to discourage voters from going that route. “My message is: Vote your conscience and let the chips fall where they may,” he said. “This race shouldn’t even be close, and it wouldn’t be if I’d won the race.”

One Graham supporter said the race wouldn’t be close if Norman had been a loyal Republican and had made an effort to help Graham.

“They are sore losers,” said Jane Litton, 65, and a retired ICU nurse who is active in the Charleston County GOP. “The people from the Ralph Norman campaign are very bitter because they feel he was owed that seat.”

At the dirt-floor livestock exhibition hall venue Wednesday, attendees were ready to vote for Graham based solely on his request.

Linda Stumberg, a 66-year-old retiree from Anderson, conceded: “I didn’t know anything about her until recently.”

Melody Edie, who is 58 and is also a retiree from Anderson, South Carolina, wore a Darline Graham T-shirt while admitting she also didn’t know her too well.

“I just trust Trump. I trust his decision,” he said. “If he backs her, then I back her.”

South Carolina has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since Fritz Holling won his final term in 1998 before retiring. No Democrat has won a statewide office at all since 2006, when Jim Rex was elected the state’s superintendent of education.

Trump’s current record-setting unpopularity, though, appears to have filtered even into the Palmetto State just as his choice to succeed her brother is having trouble consolidating Republican support.

Josh Kimbrell, a Republican state senator who drove in to attend the rally from Spartanburg, nevertheless said he is not that concerned about Darline Graham’s race, and that Trump’s trip may have been more about “nostalgia” and honoring his late friend’s legacy.

“I don’t think we’re in a crisis down here where the Democrats are surging and Annie Andrews is going to win,” he said. “I don’t think it will be that close at the end of the day.”

Trump in early September had promised he would hit what he said were 35 swing House districts that would determine control of that chamber in the final month before the midterms. Yet with just 13 days to go, he has yet to visit a single one.

Instead, he has gone to what have in the past been deep red states he has won by double-digit margins, as polls suggest Democrats have a shot at winning Senate seats in traditionally Republican states where high fuel prices generated by Trump’s tariffs and war of choice against Iran have stoked anger. He has held rallies in Nebraska, Montana, Alaska and Ohio, four states he won by at least 12 percentage points.

On Wednesday, his political team even announced a rally next week in Mississippi, where he won by 22 points two years ago, to help GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

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