National and South Carolina Democrats think they have a new shot at a Republican-held House seat following Rep. Mark Sanford’s upset loss to Republican Katie Arrington in a heated primary race last week.



“This is the fastest blue-trending district in South Carolina and one of our best pick-up opportunities in the state and maybe in the South,” DNC vice chair and former South Carolina state party chair Jaime Harrison told BuzzFeed News.

President Donald Trump endorsed Arrington in the primary, and she’s closely aligned herself with his White House. Democrats see that relationship and Arrington’s strongly conservative positions, coupled with her staggeringly small campaign war chest compared to Sanford, as an opportunity for Democrat Joe Cunningham to compete.

Democratic strategists also see the district’s changing demographics as slowly pushing the electorate in the Democratic party’s favor. Party strategists point to Trump only winning the district with 53% — a 13 point lead over Hillary — in 2016 as a sign that they might have a shot getting a moderate Democrat elected to the seat.

“Republicans moving into that part of the state from Ohio and New York may be Republicans, but they’ll realize that they’re not South Carolina–style Republicans,” Harrison said.

Democrats have had similar hopes dashed before. They tried flipping the district in the deeply conservative state in 2013, when Elizabeth Colbert Busch, the sister of Stephen Colbert, ran as a moderate Democrat against Sanford just four years after he resigned as governor in scandal after disappearing to Argentina for an affair. Polls kept the race close in the lead-up to the election as national support from Democrats poured into the district, but Busch still lost to Sanford, 54% to 45.2%.

Cunningham is running as a Democrat in the same vein as Rep. Conor Lamb, who pulled off an upset in a Pennsylvania special election earlier this year. A source close to Cunningham’s campaign said they had raised more in the week since Sanford’s loss than they had in the previous month. The campaign has also been meeting with the DCCC over the past week. One DCCC official told BuzzFeed News that it’s likely that the district will be added to its list of battleground districts, but couldn’t provide an exact time frame.



Cunningham has pointed to Arrington’s steadfast support for Trump as a weak point in the general election. “We’ve got enough blind partisanship in Washington. I’ll work with Donald Trump if what he’s doing helps the folks back home and I’ll fight him tooth and nail if it doesn’t,” Cunningham says in an ad released Wednesday morning that features clips of Arrington speaking about Trump and her stance on oil fracking off South Carolina’s shore.