COOK POLITICAL: South Carolina Senate Moves To Toss Up
There has been no more surprising race on the Senate map than South Carolina. Even early this year, it looked like Sen. Lindsey Graham would cruise to re-election. Instead, the Republican incumbent finds himself in a tied race in both public and private surveys with challenger Jaime Harrison, who has proven to be perhaps Democrats’ best recruit and a fundraising behemoth.
“It’s a jump ball at this point,” said one South Carolina Republican strategist. “Jaime is peaking at exactly the right time and he’s got a deluge of money. [Harrison] is blocking every pass there is from Republicans.”
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While South Carolina is certainly redder than its border states Georgia and North Carolina — two other Sun Belt states that have seen more rapid demographic and urban/suburban shifts than South Carolina — that doesn’t mean there aren’t underlying shifts here as well. As we detailed when we first moved this race from Solid to Likely Republican back in April, there are shifting areas here too, and not just in the changing Charleston-based 1st District (where surprise freshman Rep. Joe Cunningham is now in a Lean Democrat race) but also even in the typically reliably conservative Upstate core of Greenville/Spartanburg and along the Charlotte exurbs in York County along the border, and even in the Columbia suburbs too. Harrison’s hefty war chest has enabled him to spend heavily in those areas, with the most spent in the Upstate where Harrison does have a shot at flipping college-educated voters, especially college-educated suburban white women — exactly the type of voter his ads have been smartly designed to persuade. And he’s been able to buy considerable time in the Charlotte media market as well, which is already overrun and pricy due to the trio of competitive North Carolina races there at the presidential, gubernatorial and Senate level. Plus, Harrison appears to be hitting the targets right now he needs to excite and turn out the state's Black voters.
Ultimately, this race has earned a more competitive rating — underscoring just how fast the GOP majority is slipping away if they have to defend turf like this, and also how much Trump’s numbers have fallen across the board. We are moving South Carolina from Lean Republican to Toss Up.
https://cookpolitical.com/analysis/senate/south-carolina-senate/south-carolina-senate-moves-toss
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