You Know How Biden Is Better Than Trump? That's Pretty Much How Jaime Harrison Is Better Than Lindsey Graham

In 2016 Trump carried South Carolina 1,143,611 (54.9%) to 849,469 (40.8%). He won all but 15 of the state's 46 counties. One of the ones Trump lost was Charleston County, the second biggest in the state. Two years later Charlestown elected, albeit narrowly (50.7- 49.3%), a quasi-Democrat, Blue Dog, Joe Cunningham, to Congress. Is South Carolina changing-- enough to elect a Democrat-- a Black Democrat-- to the Senate? Earlier this year, no one thought so. Now-- despite the heavily-populated northwest part of the state, around Greenville, being a fascist-oriented hellhole-- it's looking like there's a slight possibility that Jaime Harrison could replace Lindsey Graham in the Senate. Imagine that!

I noticed that in the CIVIQS poll a few days ago, Trump job approval was barely positive. 49% of South Carolina voters approve of the job he's doing and 48% disapprove. More telling, the new poll of South Carolina voters has Harrison tied with Graham 44-44%. Harrison is leading among self-identified independents 47-37%.

Journalist Lisa Rab took a deep dive into the race for Politico yesterday. She wrote that "College-educated moderates and self-described independents have turned on Trump and their anger is threatening the reelection prospects of one of the president’s most prominent surrogates. 'I’m not gonna vote for any Republican who doesn’t disassociate himself or herself from the Trump political school,' said Andy Savage, a prominent Charleston attorney and moderate who has donated to Graham’s campaigns since at least 2004. Normally, this anger might not be particularly worrisome for Graham. He won reelection in 2014 by a margin of more than 15 percentage points, and he hasn’t had a credible Democratic challenger since he was first elected 18 years ago. But that is not the case this year. The anger at Trump comes at a moment when Graham is facing his most serious opponent yet: an exceptionally well-funded, politically connected, centrist Democrat who is forcing election observers to wonder if South Carolina might, improbably, be in play."

As of their last reports, Graham had raised $29,941,512 and Harrison had raised $28,641,476. Maybe a more important number is 102,130-- the number of South Carolinians who have been confirmed to have COVID-19, which is a staggering 19,836 cases per South Carolinian. Their were 971 more cases announced yesterday-- and well as 49 new deaths, bringing the total deaths to 2,098. Greenville, the heart of Trump country, has had the most deaths-- 198 and rising. South Carolinians who are not part of the GOP death cult are starting to blame Trump and his puppet governor, Henry McMaster.





Harrison has a nice resumé-- at least if you choose to view it positively. He's the first African American chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party and now associate chair of the Democratic National Committee. He worked as a lobbyist for the Podesta Group, one of the top lobbying firms in DC. His clients included a roster of some of America's best-known companies-- Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Berkshire Hathaway and Avenue Capital Management, pharmaceutical companies Merck, gambling giants Caesars and Harrah's, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, Walmart, General Motors, Google, and Lockheed Martin. In the past, he has defended his choice of careers and clients by saying "It's how I pay back the $160,000 of student loan debt." It's better than other career options, I guess. Yesterday, I asked someone close with him how he defends himself from Graham attacks along those lines now-- a lobbyist being the most hated category of professions year after year in Gallup polling? The best I could get was "After 25 years in Washington, Lindsey Graham has changed so much he'll attack a South Carolinian who has lived the American Dream. Graham puts himself first, playing Washington political games, spending special interest dollars on luxury travel overseas, and voting to keep lobbyist funded perks for himself." Sounds like it was focus group-tested.

I also asked the same person what Harrison's campaign says when Graham accuses him of being Chuck Schumer's handpicked candidate. "Jaime Harrison," he told me, "chose to run to put South Carolina first. He grew up poor in Orangeburg and knows what it's like to struggle and the pitfalls of the current system.Jaime is running to fight for opportunity for all South Carolinians, and he’s willing to work with anyone to do it." I guess that works-- as long as there's no follow-up question. Besides, the GOP line this year is that every Democrat is a socialist and best friends with Pelosi and AOC and Bernie. Normal people laugh that off-- and nothing is going to persuade brainwashed Fox viewers otherwise.

Ran wrote that "Donors and political experts agree Harrison’s path to victory is a narrow one. 'If Graham’s fortunes are closely tied to Trump’s ... then, for Graham to lose, you either have to predict a Trump loss in South Carolina (which would precipitate a Graham loss) or a situation in which Trump wins in South Carolina and many Trump supporters either vote against Graham, or don’t vote in the Senate race,' Scott Huffmon, political science professor and executive director of the Center for Public Opinion & Policy Research at Winthrop University, said in an email. FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls now puts Trump ahead of Joe Biden by 6.4 percent in South Carolina-- half the lead the president held in February before the coronavirus pandemic tanked the nation’s economy. Yet even if Graham’s popularity continues to decline with Trump’s, Harrison still has to convince some crucial constituencies, including wary Black voters conditioned to believe that Democrats have no real chance in South Carolina, that he is the exception. Add to that the challenges of campaigning during a pandemic and Harrison’s path seems especially daunting. But his sizable war chest-- including $10.2 million cash on hand at the end of June-- has the potential to alter the race with a barrage of advertisements that few Democrats have ever been able to afford."

A memo released by Harrison’s campaign in early February laid out a clear, if ambitious, path to victory. He planned to register a quarter of eligible African Americans, mobilize “new and inconsistent” voters of color and “persuade white suburban voters who are already moving away from Republicans.” Harrison was also counting on some Republicans to abandon Graham for more conservative candidates. About 6.6 percent of voters chose Libertarian or independent candidates over Graham six years ago, and there are similar candidates on the ballot this year who could help Harrison’s cause.

...The question remains whether Harrison can turn the anger at Graham into votes for him. That will mean flipping independents and moderates who have historically had no trouble voting for a Main Street conservative who worked across the aisle on issues like immigration and climate change.

Andy Savage, who leans Democrat but has donated to candidates in both parties, said he supported Graham from his first election because “I just thought he was a really good person. I still think the world of him, I just don’t understand what’s happened to him.”

His disillusionment began with Graham’s “disgraceful” treatment of John McCain. As McCain was dying, Graham went golfing with Trump, whom McCain hated and later forbade from attending his funeral. Trump continued to attack McCain after his death, and Graham, who had once called Trump a “kook” and a “bigot,” was criticized for not defending his friend forcefully enough. “I’m not into this idea the only way you can help honor John McCain is to trash out Trump,” Graham told CNN in March 2019.

Savage didn’t see it that way. “[Graham] promoted that friendship politically, and then to really just turn his back on him after he died-- that didn’t go well with me,” he said. Then he watched Graham explode in anger at the Kavanaugh hearings and take a “strong right-hand turn that’s hard to explain.” It would be one thing if Graham’s allegiance to Trump had translated into some kind of benefit for South Carolina, Savage said, but “I don’t see that. All I see is something for him.”

“It’s sort of an insult to all of us who supported him,” Savage said. “We thought that he was such a good, moderate leader of the country.” Now Savage has donated $2,200 to Harrison, whom he calls a “cheerleader for those who have been left out.”

Johnny Hagins, a Greenville attorney and former state legislator, served on Graham’s finance committee when he ran for president in 2016. He’s a moderate Republican who finds Trump “repugnant” but is not sure whether he’ll vote for Graham this year. “What bothers me about him is his support of Trump,” Hagins said. “On the other hand, if we want our way about something, it’s good to have him.”

...Hagins is certain the women in his family won’t vote for Graham. Like a lot of women, Republicans included, they were turned off by his behavior at the Kavanaugh hearings. Hagins’ wife, Priscilla, has already donated $200 to Harrison’s campaign.

The State newspaper in Columbia has identified at least 24 South Carolina donors who have defected from Graham to Harrison. The most prominent among them is [Richard] Wilkerson, the former Michelin North America CEO who met Harrison during his lobbying days. In an op-ed in the Greenville News, Wilkerson explained that he supported Graham until 2017 because he saw him as “a moderate Republican who could work across the aisle to get positive change made.” But Graham’s perceived failure to defend McCain angered Wilkerson, as did his support for Trump’s 2017 tax bill, which “disproportionately favored those who are financially well off.” Finally, he disagreed with Graham’s attempts to delay the March coronavirus relief package because he felt the unemployment benefits were too generous. “Apparently, he feels that it is OK to share government dollars with those who don’t truly need the money but deny any small windfall to working people who have lost their jobs,” Wilkerson wrote.

In recent months, Harrison has picked up on this theme, emphasizing the impact Covid-19 has had on his state’s most vulnerable citizens. He often cites a Washington Post analysis, which found that South Carolina’s businesses received the smallest Paycheck Protection Program loans per worker of any state in the nation. He points out that most Black businesses haven’t received those loans, and, as of late June, 160,000 households with school-age children didn’t have access to the internet, according to the South Carolina Department of Education. In late July, Harrison held a news conference calling for virtual schooling to be an option for all students and for the Republican governor, Henry McMaster, to issue a mask mandate. He also criticized Graham for opposing the extension of unemployment benefits under the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill passed in March to address the impact of coronavirus on the economy. “We're gonna constantly remind people that he hasn’t done anything,” Harrison told me. “I have never seen such a dereliction of duty in my life.”

...Harrison’s policy stances generally avoid the far left. He has not advocated to defund the police or apologized for his work as a lobbyist. His platform on health care—in favor of expanding Medicaid and protecting rural hospitals, but against a completely government-run health care system—is in line with the national party and Biden. Harrison tweeted his support for "Medicare for All" in February 2019, but later explained he supports a public option, alongside government insurance. Still, he’s too liberal for Graham’s taste. Arrighi calls the closure of rural hospitals “one of the many negative legacies of Obamacare,” and says Medicaid expansion is a decision made by state leaders, not senators. Arrighi also pointed out that Harrison has accepted campaign donations from MoveOn.org, which has petitions on its website advocating to defund the police. “Sen. Graham has made it crystal-clear that defunding the police is insane,” Arrighi said.

As protests over the killing of George Floyd convulsed the nation, Harrison published an op-ed in The Root that cast the struggle for racial justice as deeply personal rather than political. He talked about his grandmother watching the KKK march through her neighborhood, and the murder of his friend, state Senator Clementa Pinckney, during a racist church massacre five years ago. Above all, he worried about his young sons. The thought of having “the talk” about police brutality with them “rips my heart out,” he told me later. Yet the policy proposals in his op-ed were hardly revolutionary: “toughen hate crime legislation, end private prisons and cash bail, and train law enforcement officials on implicit bias.”

This middle-of-the-road platform helps Harrison court moderate voters. Quattlebaum said he appreciates Harrison’s humble roots, his support for the military and his emphasis on improving infrastructure in South Carolina. “I don't think he’s so left wing,” he said. “There’s not anything from a policy perspective that makes me think there’s no way I can support that.”

And nowhere in the Politico story-- let alone in Harrison's campaign-- is there a hint that Lindsey Graham is a deceitful and severely conflicted closet case, something that is universally known in DC and fairly well-known in South Carolina. I can't imagine Harrison's ultra-generic, campaign-in-a-box would get anywhere near it. It would be smart of them, though to drive a wedge between Graham and Republican voters in other ways. This kind of thing would be helpful for them to emphasize: