Annie Andrews is a pediatrician — she has spent nearly two decades caring for South Carolina children, from newborns in the NICU to teenagers navigating mental health crises — and she has decided that the particular skills of her profession, including the ability to explain difficult things clearly and to recognize when a patient is being harmed by circumstances beyond their control, translate to what she wants to do in the United States Senate.
She is running against Lindsey Graham, who won his last race by 10 points in one of the most expensive Senate races in history.
Why She’s Running
Andrews ran against Nancy Mace in 2022 in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District and lost by 14 points. That’s not typically the starting point for a Senate campaign. But South Carolina’s Democratic bench is thin, and someone has to be willing to make the race — otherwise Lindsey Graham runs unopposed and the national party cedes the state entirely.
Her campaign pitch has evolved since 2022. She’s made South Carolina’s measles outbreak — a public health crisis that reflects national vaccine hesitancy trends — a centerpiece of her argument, framing healthcare access and public health investment as a political issue that her medical expertise directly addresses. It’s a specific and genuine argument: she’s not playing a doctor on a campaign trail, she’s a doctor who sees the consequences of bad health policy in her patients.
The Senate is different from a congressional race, but Andrews’s theory is that the same authenticity that makes her argument credible in a doctor’s office makes it credible in a statewide campaign.
Against Graham
Graham’s vulnerabilities are philosophical more than electoral. He is genuinely hard to attack on personal terms — his military background (National Guard colonel), his foreign policy expertise, and his genuine institutional knowledge of the Senate give him credibility that transcends his partisan shapeshifting. The argument that Graham “doesn’t stand for anything” — which Andrews has made explicitly — is both accurate and difficult to translate into votes against an incumbent with 30+ years of South Carolina political relationships.
The Jaime Harrison playbook from 2020 — nationalize the race, raise massive out-of-state money, run up the score in Richland and Charleston counties — produced a 10-point loss despite $57 million in Democratic spending. Andrews won’t match Harrison’s fundraising, which means the campaign requires a different theory than saturating the airwaves.
The Honest Assessment
South Carolina is R+9. Graham is a well-funded five-term incumbent with a military background and genuine bipartisan foreign policy credibility. Andrews is running her second statewide-adjacent race with a thin fundraising base in a state where Democratic infrastructure has atrophied significantly.
This is a race where the question isn’t whether Andrews wins — she almost certainly won’t — but whether her campaign can generate the kind of attention, enthusiasm, and organizing infrastructure that leaves South Carolina Democrats in a better position after 2026 than before. That’s a different kind of success metric, and it’s the honest one for this race.
What to Watch
Whether Andrews can leverage the measles outbreak and other healthcare crises into a genuine organizing moment — and whether South Carolina’s growing suburban Republican unease (particularly in the Columbia and Greenville metro areas) creates an opening that doesn’t exist in the PVI.