South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of President Donald Trump’s closest congressional allies, is kicking off his pursuit of a fifth term with two of his home state’s top Republicans chairing his 2026 campaign, an early show of strength in a race where the longtime lawmaker is expected to face primary challengers.
Graham’s campaign told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Sen. Tim Scott and Gov. Henry McMaster will chair his 2026 run. Scott, the state’s junior senator, is current chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the chamber’s campaign arm and — after challenging Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination — campaigned for him during the GOP primary.
McMaster recently became the state’s longest-serving governor, having been elected to two terms of his own after serving the remaining two years of Nikki Haley’s term after she became Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations.
Both McMaster and Scott were surrogates for Trump in the 2024 presidential campaign, and their early support for Graham in his own bid is intended as a signal of strength for the incumbent in a state where Trump has maintained high popularity since his 2016 run.
It’s also an early strike in the race, where Graham — as he typically does — is expected to face primary challengers. The Trump confidant has long been targeted by the far right in his state, critiqued by his own party and booed at a home-state rally.
County-level Republican parties have censured Graham a number of times for his willingness to work on bipartisan deals. One such measure derided Graham’s “condescending attitude” to the party’s grassroots organizers.
He has even drawn boos at some events of the party faithful in his home state. That includes a July 2023 Trump rally in Pickens — in the county where Graham grew up — where objections from the crowd drowned out more than five minutes of his remarks. When he took the stage, Trump also elicited boos when he mentioned Graham’s name, saying he was “going to have to work on these people” and adding that Graham is “there when you need him.”
Last month, Graham’s campaign said he had more than $15.6 million cash on hand for his reelection bid, including nearly a million raised in the last quarter of 2024 alone. In 2020, Graham bested several GOP challengers before going on to defeat Democratic nominee Jaime Harrison — who recently ended his term as Democratic National Committee chairman — by a margin of 10 percentage points.
Potential Republican primary challengers for this cycle include South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, and Adam Morgan, a former South Carolina legislator who lost a primary bid last year against U.S. Rep. William Timmons.
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Kinnard reported from Houston and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP