Three days after Sen. Lindsey Graham’s unexpected death, Darline Graham Nordone was sworn in as her brother’s replacement in the U.S. Senate, a position widely seen as a “placeholder” role until someone else was elected in November.
On Monday, however, Nordone — who is now going by Sen. Darline Graham — told Sean Hannity on Fox News that she planned to run for her brother’s seat, with President Donald Trump’s urging and endorsement.
“He was everything, he was my rock,” Graham said of her brother, going on to tell Hannity, “I knew that I had to step up, I had to carry on his legacy.”
But did she? Not everyone agrees, even within the South Carolina GOP.
Graham, 62, said the decision came easily after Trump said on social media that she would be the perfect choice to replace her brother, who had represented South Carolina since 2003. Lindsey Graham succeeded Strom Thurmond, who’d been in the Senate for 47 years, which shows how rarely Senate seats come open in the Palmetto State.
Despite the speed at which things happened, Darline Graham said she had peace about the decision, which she had prayed about.
“It has to be God’s plan,” she said. “It had to be God’s plan that I carry on his legacy.”
Skeptics, however, suggest that it’s not so much God’s plan as it is Donald Trump’s and that she is a pawn in backroom deals to preserve the status quo.
And even those who admire Graham and support her decision to run for a full six-year term might be unsettled by the speed with which she began to talk like a politician, with her brother’s funeral services still a week away.
There is a pressing deadline, to be sure: A special election Aug. 11 will determine which Republican faces Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democratic nominee, in November.
But surely others could be campaigning on Graham’s behalf until after her brother is laid to rest.
Some are expressing concern about Graham’s lack of experience, which shouldn’t matter in a constitutional republic in which citizen legislators, not career politicians, are the ideal. She is not without her own professional accomplishments, having served as a commissioner for the S.C. Commission for the Blind and worked as business services and communications director at the S.C. Vocational Rehabilitation Department, per The State newspaper. In the interview with Hannity, Graham came across as poised and level-headed.
But it’s the whiff of back-room dealing that is making many people uncomfortable, and the women of the left-leaning ABC talk show “The View” went so far as to call Graham’s ascension to the Senate a case of DEI.
“It’s not like taking over your mother’s job at McDonald’s,” Joy Behar said on “The View.”
Actually, it’s more like that than, say, filling in for an incapacitated pilot, as American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Timothy Carney wrote: “To be a U.S. senator, you need to be 30, a U.S. citizen, live in the state, and get more votes than the next guy. No Ph.D., no job history, and no recommendations are necessary beyond what John Q. Public demands.”
And, in fact, it’s not unusual for a family member to be appointed to serve out the term of someone who has died. There’s even a term for the practice: the widow’s mandate, or widow’s succession. In the early 20th century, this was “one of the most effective ways to get women into Congress,” according to the United States Capitol Historical Society, which offers examples of this practice.
In 1922, for example, Mae Ella Nolan became the first widow to replace her husband in the House after John Ignatius Nolan died in office. Though separated by more than a century, Nolan’s story sounds similar to Nordone’s: She was asked by local leaders to run, and reportedly said, “I owe it to the memory of my husband to carry on his work. ... His minimum-wage bill, child labor laws, and national education bills all need to be in the hands of someone who knew him and his plans intimately. No one knows better than I do his legislative agenda.”
That may well be true for Graham, and few objected to her serving out her brother’s term, which seemed both a tribute and a gesture of grace in a time of mourning. But there is not unanimous agreement, even in South Carolina, that the seat should be gifted to her by Trump.
As CJ Westfall, chair of the Dorchester County GOP, told Politico, “People that were excited about the appointment are now skeptical of the endorsement.”
Two South Carolina Republicans have already said they would challenge Graham in the primary, and others are said to be considering it, including former Gov. Mark Sanford.
These challengers will have a daunting task, aside from the risks of breaking with Trump. (Both South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace and Utah Sen. Mike Lee have already endorsed Rep. Ralph Norman in the special election.)
Most significantly, they not only have to make the case that they are qualified for the seat, but that Darline Graham is not. Playing hardball with the bereaved sister of the man who formerly held the seat is a good way to come across as a bully, no matter how reasonable it is to question her resume and her largely unknown political positions.
Moreover, with the sympathetic Hannity interview, Nordone has inherited the affection of the Fox audience that her brother long enjoyed. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott told Hannity after Graham’s death that “because of you and your audience,” Lindsey Graham won his tight race with Jaime Harrison in 2020.
“Literally, you and your audience pulled him out of the jaws of defeat. I gotta tell you, if I heard it one time, I heard it a thousand times, your show and you saved him,” Scott told Hannity.
Writing for The Washington Post about past examples of family members taking on a deceased politician’s seat, Lindsey Cormack and Kacey DiPasquale noted that in all other cases, the woman involved was a wife. Should Nordone become the Republican nominee and best Andrews in November, she will not only be the first female senator in South Carolina, but also first to exercise a “sibling mandate.”
However South Carolinians — and the rest of the nation — feel about that, there’s little doubt that Nordone’s big brother would be proud. Lindsey Graham once said of his sister: “Of all the things that have happened in my life, her turning out so well is the highlight of it.”
Services for Lindsey Graham will be held in Washington, D.C., on July 28 and in South Carolina on July 29, per The Hill.