One by one, the Republican candidates walk to the front of a cavernous church to address a mostly elderly group of voters gathered on a midweek evening in this solidly conservative corner of South Carolina.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the four-term GOP incumbent they’re hoping to unseat, is not among them. A longtime fixture of South Carolina politics and a golfing buddy of President Donald Trump, Mr. Graham has not faced a serious primary threat in years.
Lately, however, there have been faint flashes of discontent. Senator Graham has been one of the most dogged and high-profile advocates for the U.S.-Israel war against Iran – which polls show has grown increasingly unpopular, even among Republicans.
Why We Wrote This
Lindsey Graham is a powerful Senate incumbent. But the South Carolina Republican’s promotion of the Iran war appears to be taking a toll with voters, raising doubts about whether he’ll surpass the 50% needed to avoid a runoff in Tuesday’s GOP primary.
A poll conducted late last month by The Citadel raised some eyebrows when it showed Mr. Graham falling short of the 50% needed in the June 9 primary vote to avoid a runoff.
To be clear, Mr. Graham is on track to win reelection, probably handily. As chair of the powerful Senate Budget Committee, with close ties to the president as well as powerbrokers in South Carolina, he can point to a long track record of delivering for his state. Though he gets lower approval ratings than other major Republican officeholders here, his incumbency is a powerful and self-reinforcing factor.
Beverly Hice, a retired business owner who went to see the other GOP candidates at the forum in Fort Mill, says she’s “not really fond” of Mr. Graham, but admits she’s likely to wind up voting for him anyway. He’s “a shoo-in,” Ms. Hice says.
Mr. Graham’s political longevity is in many ways testament to his adaptive brand of conservatism. Once seen as a problem-solver who worked with Democrats on immigration reform during the Obama administration, he has pivoted during the Trump era toward a more pugnacious populism – and was rewarded with a place in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. He even finessed the fallout from Mr. Trump’s feud with Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who was considered a maverick among Republicans and had been Mr. Graham’s mentor and friend in the Senate before his death in 2018.
“He knows which way the political wind blows,” says Scott Huffmon, a political scientist who runs the Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. “People say, ‘Oh we need to get Lindsey Graham out.’ But he always ends up in the right place at the right time.”
On the Iran war, though, Mr. Graham early on staked out a prominent and uncompromising position, making the case on television and on social media, and doubling down even as the military mission appeared to stall. Indeed, he is more closely identified with the conflict than perhaps any other lawmaker in Washington, having boasted about his role in convincing Mr. Trump to go to war.
As a result, any dip in Mr. Graham’s own political support might be an indicator of how voters are feeling about the war – and the resulting run-up in the price of gas and other staples – in a deep-red state where two-thirds of adults say groceries are difficult to afford.
Mark Lynch stages a challenge
Of the five Republicans running against Mr. Graham, four are polling in the single digits. Another candidate, attorney and Project 2025 architect Paul Dans, dropped out of the race in April after failing to gain much traction. The closest remaining challenger, Mark Lynch, was 10 percentage points behind Mr. Graham (46% to 36%) in the Citadel poll, and even further behind in a May poll by the Trafalgar Group (52% to 28%). If no candidate receives more than half of votes cast, the primary will proceed to a runoff.
Mr. Lynch, who owns an appliance store in Greenville, is financing his campaign with $5 million from his and his wife’s retirement fund. He says Mr. Graham’s voting record shows he isn’t a true conservative – that as Budget Committee chair, Mr. Graham failed to rein in deficit spending while advocating for raising the eligibility age for Social Security benefits. (Mr. Graham’s campaign has highlighted his role in passing Mr. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which eliminated taxes on Social Security for most seniors.)
But Mr. Lynch’s sharpest attacks are aimed at Mr. Graham’s hawkish foreign policy positions and his support for Israel. Conservatives in South Carolina generally supported Mr. Trump’s decision to strike Iran in order to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon, but many are growing concerned as the war drags on, Mr. Lynch says, adding that Mr. Graham appears to be on the side of prolonging rather than ending the fighting.
“People are tired of him getting [the United States] into endless, needless wars,” he says in an interview.
Abby Zilch, a spokesperson for Mr. Graham, says Mr. Lynch is “a perpetually failed candidate who will say anything for attention.” Mr. Lynch, she says in an email, rejects Mr. Trump’s agenda, and “wants ‘more Massies’ in Congress who relentlessly oppose the President,” referring to Kentucky GOP Rep. Thomas Massie, who lost his primary in May to a Trump-endorsed opponent, and who has strongly opposed the Iran war.
Mr. Trump himself called Mr. Lynch a “lunatic” after the candidate expressed support for both Mr. Massie and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who resigned from Congress in January after a falling-out with Mr. Trump. Mr. Lynch says he was praising the two lawmakers’ conservative voting records, not their opposition to Mr. Trump, whom he has described as “one of the greatest presidents we’ve ever had.”
Mr. Lynch pleaded guilty in 1984 to cocaine trafficking and was treated for drug addiction. Pro-Graham groups have highlighted his drug arrests in ads. He insists that his long-shot campaign is getting traction, despite being heavily outspent by an incumbent with a substantial war chest and national network of donors.
The winner of the Republican primary is expected to face Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who is dominating the Democratic primary race. In 2020, Mr. Graham easily defeated Jaime Harrison, a former state Democratic Party chairman who raked in tens of millions of dollars for his campaign, mostly from out-of-state donors and left-leaning national groups.
An interventionist record
Other critics on the right have cast Mr. Graham as a warmonger who isn’t focused on his state.
This spring, Mr. Graham found himself the target of tabloid mockery, with the outlet TMZ publishing viral pictures of the 70-year-old senator, who is unmarried and has no children, at Disney World as the United States was waging a military campaign abroad and contending with a government shutdown at home.
In March, after Mr. Graham publicly urged the administration to occupy Iran’s Kharg Island and invoked the capture of Iwo Jima during World War II, Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who is running for governor in South Carolina, rebuked him on social media.
“Lindsey Graham needs to be removed from the Situation Room. I don’t want to hear one word from a guy with no kids, desperately sending our sons and daughters into war on the ground in Iran,” Ms. Mace wrote. He later reversed course on seizing Kharg Island, saying its oil facilities could be destroyed from the air.
Still, many Republican voters here say the decision to go to war with Iran was Mr. Trump’s, and that’s enough for them. Mr. Trump wants “to protect America,” says Frank Webb, a voter in Fort Mill who works in retail. He says gas prices went up more under President Joe Biden and he doesn’t fault Mr. Trump for recent price spikes.
As for Mr. Graham, “He’s got a great relationship with our president, and that’s kind of like the key to the game,” Mr. Webb says. “I mean, having him appear in the White House is always great.”
A three-decade rise
Mr. Graham was first elected to the U.S. House in 1994, when Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, part of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America.” In 2002, he won the Senate seat previously held by Strom Thurmond, a segregationist Democrat turned Republican who was one of the longest-serving U.S. senators in history (47 years).
Though he has shifted his free-market conservatism to match the more protectionist Trump-era zeitgeist, when it comes to foreign policy Mr. Graham has been a consistent hawk. “He’s very much someone who believes the world is a better place with a strong and robust American foreign policy,” says Jon Seaton, who advised Mr. Graham in 2015 when he sought the GOP nomination for president, only to drop out before the first primary votes were cast.
This includes his pro-Israel advocacy, a stance that has become increasingly unpopular with younger Republicans. Support for Israel “is not a finger-in-the-wind position for him. He believes it in his core,” says Mr. Seaton, who is now CEO of Echo Canyon Consulting.
In an interview in March with The Post and Courier of Charleston, Mr. Graham said he wasn’t deterred by naysayers when it comes to his stance on Iran – or anything else. “I don’t need a lot of outside validation for things when I know what the hell I’m talking about. You don’t have to agree with me, but I believe I know what I’m talking about. And when I convince myself of something, I’m a force to be reckoned with,” he said.
He told The Post and Courier that he wasn’t afraid to take positions or voice opinions that opened him up to criticism, even if it led to electoral defeat. “If you’re scared of losing your job, you cannot be a very good senator,” he said.