South Carolina native Lawrence Moore remembers when he saw his father cast a ballot for the first time in 1968. It was a few years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. Black voter registration was surging across the South.
Those years taught Moore, now 70 and a longtime community organizer, a vital lesson: Politicians respond when voters become too numerous or organized to ignore. As Black voters became an influential political bloc in the 1970s, U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina hired Black staffers to help him with minority outreach. This pivot by someone who had built his career on defending segregation signaled recognition of the shifting politics of the Deep South.
Moore recalled this history as he reflected on Thurmond’s successor, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was in office from 2003 until his death on July 11. But where Thurmond seemed to embrace Black voting power when doing so became good politics, Graham went in a different direction, responding to a different pressure, Moore said. The late senator transformed from a Voting Rights Act supporter into a critic who was under President Donald Trump’s thumb — and endorsed his efforts to scale back Black political participation.
This evolution is why Moore doubts that Graham’s successor, if that person is a Republican, would meaningfully alter the experiences of Black South Carolinians. The political forces that shaped Graham — including a Republican Party influenced by Trump and trying to dismantle Black voting districts — remain as strong as ever. Graham’s sister, Darline Graham, 62, was appointed to serve the remainder of his term, which ends in January, and she’s emerged as Trump’s favored contender to fill the seat for a full term.
“I don’t think that it’s going to make much of a difference,” Moore, who said that he has voted for Republicans in the past, told Capital B, referring to the potential impact of Graham’s passing on Black South Carolinians. “If a Republican wins, I think that they’re going to be in the same mold [as Graham]. They’re going to follow the MAGA Republican program.”
A spokesperson for the late senator, who died at 71, hasn’t responded to Capital B’s request for comment. Memorial services have been scheduled for July 28 in Washington and July 29 in Columbia and Pickens County, South Carolina. A special primary election to determine the Republican nominee is scheduled to take place on Aug. 11.
Before his death, Graham had waded into the redistricting arms race that has consumed the political landscape since Trump’s July 2025 call for Republican-controlled state legislatures to redraw their congressional maps in ways that favor their party. Over more than two decades, Graham had amassed a level of influence that extended beyond his vote, becoming one of Trump’s most trusted Senate allies and a go-between for the president and Republican lawmakers.
As Virginia Democrats sought to redraw their state’s map to counter Texas Republicans’ actions, Graham urged South Carolina Republicans “to seriously look at what our state’s response should be.” He later said that he would “like to have more Republicans [in Congress], but you have to be smart about it.”
These comments reflected Graham’s broader role in advancing Republicans’ efforts to narrow voting rights protections. In 2013, after the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, he praised the decision that experts argue “exploded” the racial turnout gap.
The South Carolina state Senate in May ultimately rejected a plan that would have drawn U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn out of his district — South Carolina’s lone Black congressional district — with one lawmaker supporting that decision because to do otherwise could have carried the “side effect” of “[motivating] Black turnout.”
Cornell William Brooks, who grew up in Georgetown, South Carolina, and is the former president of the NAACP, told Capital B that the ongoing disputes over maps are part of a struggle that has defined Black voting power for generations.
Brooks traces that history through his own family. After the Supreme Court’s 1944 decision in Smith v. Allwright struck down white primaries, his grandfather, the Rev. James Prioleau, ran for Congress as part of a wider push to turn newly won voting rights into political representation.
“Literally, this is like the 2026 playbook of the 1940s and 1965,” said Brooks, 65. “It’s up to date. It’s contemporary. But it’s also historical.”
“I’m a little disillusioned”
Graham’s death has set off a mad dash to fill one of South Carolina’s most influential elected offices. The name that has attracted the most attention is that of Darline Graham. Many observers believe that Trump’s strong endorsement of Graham could give her a leg up in the race in August.
Little is known about the younger Graham, who has never previously held elected office. A graduate of the College of Charleston and South Carolina State University, a historically Black school, she has worked at the South Carolina Commission for the Blind and other state agencies.
Though Graham has earned praise from some disability rights advocates and said that she’s concerned about issues including healthcare, many Black South Carolinians are skeptical that her candidacy, or that of any other Republican, would fundamentally alter the state’s political trajectory.
Tyrone Lynn — a small-business owner from Hartsville, South Carolina — told Capital B that Graham’s lack of a public record makes it challenging to know how she might approach the job. But he said that what he’s learned so far hasn’t reassured him. Her Republican colleagues frame her as her brother’s political heir, and the first existing bill she co-sponsored was the SAVE America Act, which organizers say would heighten racial barriers at the ballot box.
“What I’m hearing is that she’s going to carry on the same positions as her brother,” said Lynn, 63, who’s been politically engaged since he was a teenager and volunteered on campaigns before he was even old enough to vote. “So that’s not encouraging at all. My prediction is that we’re going to get more of the same.”
This guardedness shapes how Lynn views the candidacy of Annie Andrews, 45, a pediatrician who won the Democratic primary in June. He pointed to Jaime Harrison’s well-funded campaign against Lindsey Graham in 2020 — and the fact that the Democrat still lost — as evidence of how difficult it is to overcome South Carolina’s entrenched Republican power structure.
“I’m a little disillusioned about the whole ‘Let’s go out and vote’ messaging because even if you vote for the people you want, the system seems like it still doesn’t work for us,” Lynn said.
Darline Graham’s office hasn’t responded to Capital B’s request for comment. She has retained much of her brother’s congressional staff.
South Carolina hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since Fritz Hollings won reelection in 1998. The Cook Political Report rates the race as “Solid Republican.”
Gilda Hinson, a retired educator who returned to Columbia, her hometown, after spending more than three decades in Miami, shared some of Lynn’s concerns. She told Capital B that she hopes that South Carolina’s next senator will be “more sensitive to Black communities.” While she’s not “anti-Republican” — “I know some good ones,” she said — she isn’t counting on another Republican to meaningfully change Black South Carolinians’ political fortunes.
In this light, she added, Black South Carolinians must remain vigilant. The recent fight over the state’s map was instructive, she said, because it demonstrated both the persistence of attempts to dilute Black voting power and the influence that muscular opposition can have.
“We scared them because we all rallied, and we all came out, and we showed up,” said Hinson, 66, noting the intense backlash that greeted South Carolina Republicans’ redistricting efforts. “I believe that if we go in that direction again and just stand together, then we can make a difference.”
Moore agreed that how Black South Carolinians respond to the person who eventually occupies Lindsey Graham’s seat will matter greatly.
To Moore, it comes back to that lesson he learned from watching his father cast a ballot — that politicians pay attention when communities make their voices impossible to tune out. Whether Graham’s successor governs differently, he said, will depend in part on what Black voters demand of the person in the seat.
“It’s about the people on the ground,” Moore said. “It’s about what we will accept and let happen. The future is going to be determined by how we project ourselves — how we address the new senator.”
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