I don’t know much about Dr. Annie Andrews who is running for the South Carolina U.S. Senate seat held by one of Trump’s biggest ass kissers — Lindsey Graham. I did see her latest ad on Bluesky though and her thoughts on the results of the TN-7th Congressional special election. And I want to share her analysis on what the latest results mean for Democrats running for the U.S. Senate.
Yes, I have to admit I was one of those hoping for an upset last night. But as others have pointed out, the fix was in on this gerrymandered district. The district before it was gerrymandered had not elected a Democrat in forty years. In fact, it was designed along with two other gerrymandered districts to disenfranchise the voters of Nashville. It was a blue district in a sea of red, but it was gerrymandered among three other Republican districts to disenfranchise Nashville’s voters.
Like many others, I tuned in to watch the results. I managed to look at the NYT website, and I saw how the voting went in each county. With the exception of two counties, the rest of the district is so lopsidedly Republican that it’s beyond political parody. However, there was a shift to the left in most of those hardcore rural Republican counties last night.
This was the second time, if you include the election results in VA, that rural voters in a southern state have shifted leftward. Yes, Epps still won those counties, but he underperformed. And this is the South we are talking about. As someone who has lived most of my life in a border state or the South, I can attest to how stubbornly Republican those folks have become.
I grew up in an era when the “Solid South” has become the redoubt for conservative Republicans.
And as Dr. Andrews points out, if you can get a 13-percentage point shift in the South, there are number of House Republicans who will be looking for other jobs. And maybe she is correct about her Senate chances in SC. The caveat to this is that it is SC. The home of the first Dixiecrat to switch and become a Republican: Strom Thurmond.
I suppose the questions to ask those in SC and the Andrews campaign is this: is she really building an organization to mobilize voters in SC? Andrews states she has the gotten money, which is never a bad thing. But the only thing that gives me pause is that I’ve been down plenty of rabbit holes in my time. And with me went a lot of my money down political sinkholes (I’m looking at you Jaime Harrison!).
I do know this. If Harrison was so great (one estimate was that he pulled in over a $100 million in 2020), how is the Democratic Party GOTV and other operations in SC? I think the answer is rather obvious. Hopefully, Andrews is trying to build a REAL ORGANIZATION for voter engagement.
Anyway, my point is that Andrews may be correct that Trump’s incompetence and corruption give Democrats an opening in SC.
I wish I could say the same thing about my state of Kentucky though. But that is a woeful tale for another time.
What do you all think?
