THE really inspiring thing about Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who on June 1st announced a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, is “his message that the whole world is going down the tubes”. That was the slightly bleak endorsement offered by Stephen Young, a retired business-owner looking on when the senator launched his campaign in Central, the blink-and-you-miss-it country town where he grew up.

Mr Graham’s ability to project gloom about American weakness in a nasty world resonates with a lot of folks, Mr Young and his wife Linda explained. More important, the couple hopes that the senator’s hawkish foreign-policy views rub off on Republican rivals, because they do not actually believe that their hero can win his party’s nomination. “We’re with him all the way,” Mr Young beamed, before adding: “It may be a very short run.”

There was a lot of that sort of double-edged praise in Central. Mr Graham offered rhetorical red meat to fans gathered in front of the tiny former pool hall and bar where his parents brought him up. He thundered that “radical Islam is running wild”. He charged both President Barack Obama and some Republicans with wanting to disengage from the world, rather than heeding Ronald Reagan’s doctrine of “peace through strength”. His audience, full of snowy-haired pensioners and flag-clutching military veterans, cheered. Yet an unscientific straw poll found just one person who believed that the senator could win the Republican primary in South Carolina, let alone his party’s nomination. A broad consensus was that Mr Graham was a fine man doomed by his habit of working with Democrats on issues such as immigration.

Many in Central placed themselves to the right of the senator on the subject of the 11m people thought to be in the country without legal papers. Since being elected to the Senate in 2002, Mr Graham has backed several immigration bills that would bring such migrants from the shadows and offer a path to citizenship. He was accused of proposing a “Grahamnesty” for illegal immigrants, and more than once hardliners mounted primary challenges for his seat. Each time Mr Graham survived, beating back Tea Party types who call him an establishment sell-out and libertarians who think him a war hawk (his best friend in the Senate is another interventionist, John McCain).

On a national level Mr Graham barely registers in early presidential polling. Yet fans at the Graham launch were only half-right when they call him a long shot for the White House, whose distinctive role will involve speaking out on foreign policy. He is a long shot. But the Republican field is full of security hawks quoting Reagan. Though it might seem paradoxical, Mr Graham’s really distinctive contribution could involve teaching more timid rivals how to advance sensible views on immigration, without being driven from office by the far right.

Mr Graham’s survival in South Carolina offers several lessons. The first is that even deeply conservative places are not monolithic. South Carolina peach-farmers, for instance, are both powerful and desperate for migrant labour, because their delicate fruit cannot be picked by machine (and locals dislike the work). In recent years some evangelical Christian pastors have joined business leaders in publicly backing immigration reform, citing biblical injunctions to welcome strangers and preserve families. Most voters in South Carolina hate the idea of rewarding law-breakers. But most also know that 11m people cannot be rounded up and deported without turning the country into a “concentration camp”, says Dale Sutton, a Southern Baptist pastor who has spoken out for reform. Thus they know that some sort of compromise is unavoidable.

A second lesson is that Mr Graham has never run from his beliefs, being certain that voters hate hypocrisy more than a difference of opinion. That makes him both braver and cannier than such rivals as Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida who is also expected to run for the presidency. In 2012 Mr Bush supported a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrants, then in 2013 called the granting of citizenship an undeserved “reward” for bad conduct. More recently Mr Bush has started saying that migrants need a path to some kind of legal status, “not necessarily” involving the status of citizen. Mr Graham shuns such flip-flopping. Without any chance of citizenship, millions would be left living out their lives as “the hired help”, he told USA Today in May. “That’s not who we are.”

Bolder and blunter

Mr Graham is more outspoken than another rival for the presidential nomination, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who was a Senate ally on immigration until he faced a conservative backlash. Now Mr Rubio says that voters cannot tolerate even a “conversation” about legalisation until they believe the border is impregnable. Mr Graham calls Mr Rubio’s “enforcement-first” stance impractical. Comprehensive immigration reform cannot be done by one party alone, he has told interviewers: and Republicans will struggle to win the White House if they continue to sound hostile to Hispanic voters. Yet in Mr Graham’s (persuasive) analysis, congressional Democrats will never give Republicans what they want on border security without knowing what is on offer for those 11m migrants in limbo.

Mr Graham’s bluntness points to a final lesson. For a vocal minority of Republicans, his candour about immigration disqualifies him. But most voters weigh politicians in the round. Because they know the senator has very conservative views on foreign policy, gun rights, abortion and more, most Republicans in South Carolina forgive him when they disagree. That is probably not enough to sustain Mr Graham outside his home state, where he is more vulnerable to attacks based on sound-bites. But if he emboldens Mr Bush or Mr Rubio to face down the anti-immigrant hard right, he may yet do his party historic service.