COLUMBIA — Jaime Harrison settled into a chair in his basement, transformed into a makeshift studio complete with campaign signs plastered behind him and stand-up lights flanking the desk, and turned on his laptop.

"So as you all know, we are heeding the public warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention," said Harrison, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in South Carolina, to a few dozen supporters as he began a virtual town hall on Zoom.

"We're trying to communicate so that we are practicing the social distancing that needs to take place so that we can all be safe," he went on. "So what we will be doing over the course of the next few days and weeks is, we will be hosting these types of events digitally."

Like so many other aspects of American life — at least those that have not stopped entirely — campaigns in South Carolina have gone fully virtual in recent weeks as candidates try to continue building support without the ability to go out and greet voters in person.

Speeches at county political events and meet-and-greets at local businesses have been traded out for a steady stream of Facebook Live videos and email blasts. While Harrison hosts online forums, his opponent, Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, has maintained a steady presence on cable news and radio talk shows.

The emergency has spurred a flood of business for firms that specialize in digital outreach.

Wesley Donehue, a Republican strategist and the co-founder of Charleston-based Push Digital, said many candidates are increasingly willing to spend their campaign funds on digital now, months before they typically would, because they can get more out of it while everyone is at home.

"They have a captive audience because people right now are playing on their phones, playing on their computers and watching TV all day long," Donehue said. "So both from a grassroots and from a communication standpoint, everything is being run through digital at the moment."

The transition has gone more smoothly for some than others.

Candidates who had already built extensive email lists and followings on social media entered this unprecedented period with an advantage, able to easily tap into those pre-prepared resources.

Others, especially newcomers running for office for the first time or those with little to no campaign budget, have had to start fresh. That's made even more difficult as fundraising efforts yield fewer results due to the suddenly volatile economy.

"Nobody's going to give a politician their money in this kind of environment," Donehue said. "Everybody's worried about their retirement, the markets, their jobs and their families."

The content of campaign messaging has shifted, too, along with their delivery methods.

Cognizant of the weariness many voters may feel towards partisan bickering during a national emergency, most candidates have refrained from launching attacks at their opponents, instead focusing their efforts on either introducing themselves or providing constituent service-like messages about handling the virus.

The challenges have presented particular difficulty for candidates who, unlike Harrison, have competitive primaries coming up as soon as June.

Election officials have begun to consider the possibility of postponing the June 9 primaries, but no decision has been reached on that front yet, leaving campaigns hanging in an air of uncertainty about when they will even be on the ballot.

State Rep. Nancy Mace, one of four Republicans vying for the nomination to challenge Charleston's Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham, has been juggling her virtual campaign with homeschooling her daughter and keeping up with her legislative responsibilities.

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Mace set up a page on her campaign website exclusively to provide coronavirus-related resources for residents and she, like many other candidates, has taken to social media to respond to concerns from supporters.

"It's very critical that I illustrate what type of representative I will be, which means I'm accessible, I'm transparent and I will literally answer every question," Mace said.

But the limitations of virtual campaigning continue to surface, particularly when it comes to reaching older voters who may not be as familiar with the technology candidates are using to communicate.

One viewer on a recent Facebook Live that Mace hosted from her living room, which featured her pet cat occasionally walking in and out of the frame, commented that he was having trouble seeing and hearing the video.

"Sorry," he wrote. "May have to give up."

The campaign of one of Mace's GOP primary opponents, Mount Pleasant town Councilwoman Kathy Landing, recently reached out to supporters asking them to help by writing postcards or making phone calls to voters in the district.

The candidates most affected of all by the virus are the few who have a direct role to play in the response.

Ed Sutton, a small business owner from Charleston and Democrat running for the S.C. House, has been called up for active duty from the Air Force Reserves to fly medical supplies to American personnel in other countries around the world.

But even under those circumstances, Sutton said he has no plans to slow down his campaign — at least as soon as he gets out of his military uniform each day. Sutton's opponent, state Rep. Lin Bennett, R-Charleston, is a regular Facebook user who has kept her campaign page updated with the information on the virus.

"Thankfully, nowadays with modern technology being able to get a Wi-Fi signal basically anywhere in the world, whether I'm talking to somebody sitting in Germany or Jordan is just the same as sitting in my home in Charleston," Sutton said. "Obviously I won't have quite as much free time, but we'll still keep pushing things out."

Despite the hurdles, Sutton, Mace and Harrison were at least among the fortunate candidates who started their campaigns months before the pandemic began to spread.

Sutton said he knew of other potential candidates who had considered running but ultimately decided not to file last month because they thought it would be too difficult to launch a campaign in the middle of the pandemic.

The crisis has also neutralized one of the few advantages challengers typically have over incumbents: time.

"The way a challenger can beat an incumbent is to get out there and outwork him because, typically, an incumbent has a hard time during the primary because they're in session," Donehue said. "But they can't do that right now because everyone is at home and none of them can go knock on doors to get their name out there."

With no end to the stay-at-home recommendations expected any time soon, campaigns have had time to work out the kinks in their digital-first approach.

By the time Harrison hosted a second virtual town hall, he had embedded a live digital interface into his normal website, allowing him to set up the stream right next to a button where viewers could donate to the campaign.