Brandt donated to Harrison’s campaign and said he intends to vote for him. “Lindsey ran years ago on term limits.… It’s time that his term was limited,” Brandt said.

Graham’s campaign declined a request for comment on this story.

Since the last of the old-school “yellow dog” Democrats left office in the 1990s, Brandt’s northwestern corner of the state has been rock-solid Republican territory. This year will tell if cracks begin to show—and they’ll have to if Harrison is to have any real shot at unseating Graham. Greenville County, one of the largest counties in the state, delivered Trump a 25-point victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and remains a cultural center for evangelical Christians.

Harrison campaign manager Zack Carroll said he has been hearing some signs of change in focus groups this year. “One woman put it great, I thought; that it’s not just that he changed his mind. Lindsey had a total existential change. He went from calling Trump a bigot and a kook to being his best friend,” Carroll said. “We hear a lot here that ‘he’s changed’ … He’s changed, and he’s not the senator that so many folks down here voted for.”

South Carolina Democrats notched one big upset victory in 2018, flipping the state’s 1st congressional district by a margin of fewer than 4,000 votes.

Democratic Representative Joe Cunningham’s win was seen in some circles as a repudiation of Trumpism. His opponent, Republican Katie Arrington, had soundly defeated former Governor Mark Sanford—another GOP leader who’s criticized the president’s excesses and abuses—in the primary. She declared at her victory celebration, “We are the party of Donald J. Trump.”

A few other factors were in play. Cunningham’s suburban Lowcountry district had seen significant demographic shifts, partly thanks to massive migration from other states. An analysis by The Post and Courier found that Charleston County’s political shift from red to purple, and Arrington’s failure to convince moderate Republicans in the suburbs, may have spelled her defeat. With most forecasts pointing to a safe Republican victory, cocksure leaders in the National Republican Congressional Committee also ignored pleas from Arrington’s campaign to pump more money into advertising, causing her to fall behind as Cunningham went to the airwaves earlier and stayed on the air longer.

And Cunningham got a surge in the polls when it was revealed that Arrington supported offshore drilling. The idea was anathema to a coastal economy dependent on tourism, and Arrington was perceived as a flip-flopper when she recanted her original stance. Offshore drilling became a hallmark issue for Cunningham as the race moved into the homestretch.

Mika Gadsden, a progressive activist from Wadmalaw Island and state director of the advocacy group Black Voters Matter, thinks Cunningham simply got lucky. Looking at Harrison’s prospects, she said she’s not sure that health care access—the most sustained policy pitch that Harrison has mounted thus far—is a winning issue for 2020. She notes that Harrison has not yet harnessed the momentum of existing activist movements, like the teacher protest that saw 10,000 people marching on the statehouse in May 2019.

“Democrats here in South Carolina are afraid, they’re fearful,” Gadsden said. “Is [health care] a winning issue? It’s a winning issue if you want to continue to be where we were.”

Gadsen added, “I don’t know if they’re playing to win, to be honest with you.”

Harrison might find his winning issue on his statewide tour. In Allendale County, one of the poorest places in the U.S., he learned that workers at a local Archroma chemical plant were laid off due to lost market share from Trump’s China tariff. Soybean farmers in the agricultural regions of the state similarly complained about the chaos of Trump’s foreign trade policy.

Graham has shown a knack for adjusting on the fly to the party’s shifting ideological winds.

“What is the real impact on those communities, the ones that when the nation has a cold they have the flu?” Harrison asked. It’s a good question, but it also puts the onus on Harrison and other pro-business Democrats to spell out concrete measures to safeguard the economic security of vulnerable workers.

One piece of news bodes well for the Harrison campaign’s viability: Moderate Democratic voters showed up in droves for South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary in February, handing Joe Biden a critical win in the first-in-the-South primary contest. More than 500,000 voters turned out statewide, approaching the record turnout of 532,000 that delivered a win to Barack Obama in the 2008 primary.

On the night of the 2020 primary, longtime South Carolina Democratic consultant Lachlan McIntosh highlighted the turnout on Twitter. “This is really important for Joe Cunningham and Jaime Harrison,” he wrote. “This kind of trend will sooner than later make SC a purple state.”

There’s a thread of conventional wisdom about regional politics that might be termed “Southern exceptionalism.” It posits that Southern politics is somehow unusual in its reliance on racist tropes or in its insistence on courtly manners.

It’s not hard to see this reflex on display in outsiders’ depictions of South Carolina politics. National media have variously described Graham as “genteel,” a “sentient mint julep,” and (during the Clinton impeachment hearings) “a twang of moderation.”

In press dispatches and news analysis pieces, the stately old Southern order is evoked with scenes of dappled sunlight under Spanish moss–draped oak trees. With the mood thus set, curious readers are then reminded of South Carolina’s greatest legacy in our political culture: its role in starting the U.S. Civil War.

But these clichés have grown hoary. Harrison’s campaign manager, Carroll, said he sees a shift happening in South Carolina, thanks in part to what has been called the reverse Great Migration of black families returning to the South. Major cities and metropolitan areas are growing in population at breakneck speed. Recent Census data found the Myrtle Beach metropolitan area was the second fastest growing in the nation between 2010 and 2018, coming second only to The Villages retirement community in Florida.

“I think a lot of people mistakenly look at South Carolina as being like an Alabama or a Mississippi, but you look at demographics and it’s just not the case,” Carroll said. “The trends that are happening along these Southeast coastal states are pretty in line with what Virginia was 10 to 15 years ago.”

That shift could have repercussions in Graham’s bid, and any other statewide race in South Carolina—provided, that is, that voter ID and other suppression tactics introduced by the GOP state legislature don’t outweigh the state’s recent influx of new and nonwhite voters. And in part because of the stakes of the pending race—together with Graham’s recent makeover as a loyal Trump surrogate—it seems clear that, rather than serving as a sleepy backwater steeped in long-standing folkways of racial deference and exploitation, the conservative bastion of South Carolina is something much closer to a bellwether state.

Graham has shown a knack for adjusting on the fly to the party’s shifting ideological winds.

“I think he has always had an understanding of exactly how much danger he is in,” said Scott Huffmon, a political science professor and director of the Winthrop Poll who has closely studied the many permutations that have made up Graham’s political career. “As time wore on, he realized the greatest threat was definitely from within the party, and he started moving right. Even though he was called ‘Grahamnesty,’ his voting record was extremely conservative. When it became the party of Trump, he became his greatest supporter.”

Every political forecast this year has marked Graham as a safe incumbent, and Huffmon doesn’t dispute those forecasts. Harrison’s prospects look better than those of other recent Democratic candidates in the state—but he’s still a long shot.

“Jaime Harrison’s chance comes pretty much only from turnout and this being a high-profile race,” Huffmon said. “Mathematically, people who identify as Democrats could make it a real run, but they aren’t registered at as high levels, and they don’t turn out at as high levels.”

There’s a little-noted historical irony in the pending battle between Graham, the resentment-fueled white GOP incumbent, and Harrison, the black moderate Democrat. In the postbellum South, South Carolina Republicans were at the vanguard of the struggle to institute egalitarian racial policies in the former confederacy. The state party was co-founded by a formerly enslaved man named Robert Smalls who liberated his own family by commandeering a Confederate ship during the Civil War. He dubbed the Republican Party the “party of Lincoln,” and the party’s early members wrote the state’s radical 1868 constitution, which guaranteed black men the right to vote and established one of the first public school systems in the South.

After thwarting Reconstruction, Democrats clawed back power by presiding over an exceptionally vicious segregationist agenda. By the latter half of the twentieth century, the state had steered yet another race-driven political realignment, as Strom Thurmond’s segregationist Dixiecrats gave way to the race-baiting Republican politics of Nixon and Reagan, ceding the bulk of white Southern voters. It was another South Carolinian, political consultant Lee Atwater, who perfected the dog-whistle phase of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy”; Atwater’s notorious Willie Horton ad helped propel the first President Bush into office.

The GOP went from the party of black power and economic liberation to the party that suppresses black votes and opposes the rights of working people. This evolution has been in line with the course charted by the broader political economy of the Palmetto State: From plantation economy to anti-worker corporate paradise, South Carolina has rarely been behind the curve of conservative politics—it has, in fact, been a forerunner.

In this sense, the Graham-Harrison race presents a much broader picture of the future to the country’s political imagination: If the Republican Party ever does collapse under the march of human progress and the weight of a dying conservative base, it could well start here in South Carolina, as soon as November.