Aside from Maine’s Susan Collins—who is a “moderate” until the moment Mitch McConnell needs her vote to Kavanaugh-ize the Supreme Court—Lindsey Graham is the most duplicitous Republican senator running for reelection in 2020.

As recently as 2016, Graham was known as John McCain’s loyal Sancho Panza—an iconoclastic, albeit conservative, South Carolina senator who radiated scorn for candidate Donald Trump (“You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell”). Even before McCain died, however, Graham was already transforming himself into a Trump toady. Displaying a level of sycophancy that would even give Sean Hannity pause, Graham became a favored presidential golf buddy. He was the only out-of-state Republican senator at Trump’s reelection rollout in Orlando. And in subsequent weeks, he took to Twitter, in his typical lickspittle style, to declare, “that whole Trump third term thing is looking better and better.”

For Jaime Harrison—the former chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party who, in May, embarked on a spirited, if daunting, race to unseat Graham—it all comes down to a question of character.

During a recent 30-minute interview in the former real-estate office in Columbia that serves as his campaign headquarters, the 43-year-old Harrison kept coming back to that nine-letter word—“character.” It is at the heart of his strategy to prevent Graham from winning a fourth term.



After the president attacked McCain for what he called “stains” on his record, a voter told Harrison, “I don’t like what Lindsey Graham has done in not standing up for John McCain.” “That’s an Achilles’ heel for Lindsey,” Harrison said, “because it’s a glimpse into his character.” Harrison used the same argument in his May announcement video, which told his origin story (“born to a 16-year-old Mom and raised by my grandparents in Orangeburg”) through illustrations that looked like they belonged in a superhero comic. “I always tried to do the right thing,” he says, just before the video cuts to a montage of Graham’s double-jointed back flips.