Сестра сенатора Линдси Грэма выдвинулась в конгресс, опираясь на его наследие, но обещая радикально иную политику

Darline Graham Is Not Her Brother Thrown into office and an unexpected campaign, she is running on Lindsey’s legacy—but making clear that she’s different. It’s something that happens so often in politics that there’s a name for it: widow’s succession. Dozens of times over the past century, women have filled a seat previously occupied by their late husband, and some have gone on to serve a long career. What has never happened in Congress before is what Darline Graham is doing: a sister’s succession. Less than 48 hours after Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly from heart issues last month, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster appointed Graham’s younger sister to complete the remaining six months of his term. Soon after that, Darline Graham announced that she would also run for a full six-year term, a bid that came at President Trump’s request. In the solidly red state, her biggest hurdle is likely to come in a primary runoff today. She is running in part on the legacy of her brother—but also in ways that bear no resemblance to the way he approached the job. Where he was chatty and seemed to love campaigning, she is reserved and describes the campaign as “brutal.” Where he was the ultimate Washington insider who served in Congress for more than 31 years, she is running as a populist outsider who previously worked with the disabled and visually impaired. And where he was one of his party’s most prominent and outspoken foreign-policy hawks until the day he died, she has conceded to having no experience and not much interest in such matters. “I’m not that informed on national security,” she said during a debate last week, a blunder that has become a focal point in the final days of an abbreviated campaign. The president came to her defense, praising her for being honest. He has invested significant time and political capital in attempting to give her a late boost in a closer-than-expected primary race. Her late brother comes up during almost every public event she holds—“I knew I could not sit on the sidelines. That’s not how Lindsey and I were raised,” she’s said—and campaign mailers tout that she is “Prepared to Carry on Lindsey’s Legacy.” She tells voters that “no one can ever fill his shoes” but that she will earn his seat. “I don’t just expect it to be handed to me,” she said earlier this month after casting her ballot in the special primary election. Her Republican primary opponent is Ralph Norman, a congressman since 2017 who earlier this summer lost his bid for governor. He has also referenced Lindsey Graham’s pull on the race. “Nobody’s entitled by birthright to this office,” Norman said before the debate last week. “You’ve got to earn it.” He tried to put the situation into college-football terms during an interview with the Associated Press, telling voters to imagine presenting the head coach at Clemson University with a top quarterback prospect who has just this qualification: They’re kin to Tom Brady. “Tell me how that analogy doesn’t work here,” Norman said. Although Graham has a famous last name and the president’s endorsement, Norman and his supporters believe that he can win today. Their message: Darline Graham is not Lindsey Graham. A PAC supporting Norman recently began running an ad that asks, “What if Darline Graham had any other last name?” It’s the last name that has gotten her here—the reason she was appointed interim senator. But in the final stretch of the race, it is complicating her campaign, which has become the latest test of the power of Trump’s endorsement. Although the president has often played kingmaker in Republican primaries over the past decade, that influence has significantly weakened: 10 of his picks have failed to advance this year, many of them in the past few weeks. The congressional candidates Cory Mills and Catalina Lauf both lost in Florida last week. Two of his picks in races for governor—Megan Degenfelder in Wyoming and Mike Lindell in Minnesota—lost by double digits. If Graham loses, it will signal a limit to Trump’s ability to direct the MAGA base in one of the most MAGA states. The relationship between Lindsey and Darline was long ago condensed into a few stock lines in their stump speeches: how they grew up in a one-room home that was attached to the bar and restaurant their parents ran. How their parents both died when Lindsey was in college, and how he took responsibility for helping raise his sister, who was nine years his junior. “Lindsey has been there for me throughout the years,” she said at the Iowa State Fair during his long-shot 2016 presidential campaign. “He has never let me down since then. He’s always been by my side.” Her remarks were earnest. And then he jumped to the stage with a joke: “Well, as Darline said, we grew up in a pool hall, a bar, and a liquor store. I’m eminently qualified to be president of the United States!” A more textured version of their relationship emerges in a memoir he released during that campaign. He tells of how he arranged for her to have golf lessons, so that she could play one of his favorite sports. He took her to the movies (they both loved James Bond). He taught her to ride a bicycle when she was 5—then gifted her a turquoise one when she turned 9. In the early 1970s, he wrote, he heard his young sister use a racial slur. “She didn’t even think the term was offensive. She had heard it used so often,” he wrote. “I told her to not say it again, and a little while later, I went to my parents and asked them to make a change.” Graham says his mother offered a beer to a Black customer, who previously would have taken his beer home, and motioned to him to take a stool, slowly beginning to more actively integrate the barroom. Graham also wrote of persuading his parents to take Darline to Disney World, a trip that became their first big family vacation. (Years later, in March 2026, the senator went viral for riding Space Mountain and carrying a bubble wand around during a government shutdown.) It was his and Darline’s first time on an airplane, and they stayed for five days at a Howard Johnson’s hotel with a pool. “Life was good. Then it wasn’t,” he wrote. The next year, his mother died. Shortly after, so did his father; it was Darline who found his unresponsive body, Graham wrote. Lindsey Graham would go on to a career in the Air Force and then in Congress. His sister would earn a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling from South Carolina State University, in Orangeburg, a historically Black school. She got her optician’s certification and in recent years led the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, which provides vocational, youth, and prevention services. She married her husband, Larry Nordone, in 2006, and they have two daughters. Darline kept her maiden name, she said recently on the campaign trail, as a way to feel connected to her parents. The closest parallel that I could find to what Darline Graham is doing is this: When Representative Sonny Bono died during a family ski trip in 1998, his widow, Mary Bono, ran for his seat with the backing of Republican leaders. “It was crazy. It was a lot,” she told me. She got cotton mouth during her first debate but was so nervous that her shaky hand couldn’t bring the glass of water to her lips. “You’re told, It’d be great to be elected and fulfill the legacy of the loved one that was lost. But it’s really obvious on the campaign trail that only goes so far,” she said. “You have to establish who you are, what you care about, and show voters your own philosophies.” She won the race—and then, on the Judiciary Committee, she sat next to Lindsey Graham. “He had such a great and quick wit,” she said. Of Darline Graham, Bono told me: “I’m glad she’s running. But it will have to become her legacy and her work. It’s a hard job.” Darline Graham has talked about the difficulty of campaigning while grieving, saying that she has not had time to fully process her brother’s death. She has said that sometimes, in the morning, she has time to reflect: “I think a lot about what I would say to him.” She remarked to a crowd at a barbecue joint in Florence, South Carolina, that she’d lost 10 pounds during the monthlong campaign following her brother’s death. “It’s been absolutely brutal. This past month has been brutal,” she said during a speech after making it to the runoff, one month after her brother’s death. “None of this has been comfortable for me. But like I said, I’m a fighter.” Her campaign and Senate office did not respond to my inquiries. In South Carolina, an open Senate seat is rarer than a restaurant that doesn’t serve sweet tea. Strom Thurmond and Fritz Hollings had a combined tenure of more than 85 years, spanning most of the second half of the 20th century. Graham has occupied the seat since 2003. Longtime political operatives see Darline as quite different from her brother, although voters may be willing to overlook that if she can put forward a convincing case of her own. “Lindsey was the unique character in the public spotlight for decades. He was convivial. He was kind of a backslapper, wisecrack. Could deflect. Self-effacing,” Chip Felkel, a veteran Republican strategist in the state, told me. “I don’t see her personality that way, but I don’t think people care if she delivers for the state.” The way Darline Graham is running her campaign reflects the ways she is trying to both align herself with her brother and differentiate herself from him. Her stump speech includes nods to the Second Amendment (“I believe gun control is how steady you hold your weapon”), a nod to voter-ID laws (“If you have to have an ID to check out a library book, you should have to have one to vote”), and transgender policies from her experience as a self-described volleyball mom (“I love watching my daughter play, and I know that boys have no place in girls sports, especially not in the locker room”). She has said that her No. 1 priority is “affordability” (a word that Trump has described as a hoax made up by Democrats). She wants to control health-care costs. She has also pointed to differences with her brother, saying that she would favor getting rid of the filibuster, something that he resisted, and that she would take a tougher line on immigration. Her brother supported creating a clearer pathway to citizenship. “I love Lindsey to death, but I’m a little bit stronger on immigration,” she said during a campaign event last week. “To me, it’s really clear; it’s a black-and-white issue: It’s legal versus illegal. If you’re here illegally, you should be deported. You’re breaking the law.” As Trump prepared to fly to Myrtle Beach on Friday night for a Graham rally, he suggested to reporters that although “she’s a terrific woman,” it’s difficult for voters to get excited about her. The president’s message to voters at the rally: “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” Once he arrived in South Carolina that night, the memory of Lindsey Graham hovered. The late senator was the reason Trump knew Darline and that so many in the state knew her, the president said. Twice, he announced: “I’m doing this to honor Lindsey.” He asked voters to do the same. “For Lindsey,” he said, “I want it to happen.” Jack Rodriquez-Vars contributed research to this report.