Lindsey Graham will continue to get re-elected until a national public figure with near 100% name ID challenges him.
Boomers here will dutifully pull the lever for him over anyone they don’t intimately know - virtually every candidate that has run against him doesn’t can’t understand this.
You can waste your time traveling to as many little pointless republican social events as you want, have a big X account, throw out however much money you want, call him gay, allege hypocrisy, throw out insults, run attack ads that just remind people who already know that Graham exists, but until your name is more recognizable to on the ballot - they will go with the devil they know.
Most X pundits have no idea how S.C. politics works. Graham has the broadest name ID and reach of any figure in the state. He’s as known to as many voters here as Trump. The older electorate here identifies more with their party than they do any candidate and they can’t imagine a bad Republican.
In 15 years of politics and a lifetime in South Carolina I’ve talked to voters constantly who were: generally over 50, had no idea who was on the ballot, and would crawl over broken glass to vote in every election cycle.
They walk into the polls, say they’re Republican, look for names they know, hit submit, and feel a sense of pride they did their civic duty.
For them it’s as routine and essential as church every Sunday.
Mark Lynch may be a great guy, or he may be awful. Frankly, I have no clue because pretty much no one knew who he was. Several just knew him as the “cocaine guy” because of Graham mailers that probably did more to boost his name ID than his campaign.
That’s not a knock on him, it’s just reality.
Votes he got were maybe 10% passionate people voting for him and 90% Graham protest votes.
This is largely the same reason my dad lost to Mark Sanford in 2013 after Sanford left the country while governor to have an affair. In most states, this wouldn’t fly, but people in S.C. knew Sanford.
Part of this is due to the fact that the GOP nationally has pretty much written off the state because it’s reliably red. There’s no real voter education or outreach beyond what candidates can scrape together - and the national GOP wanted Graham anyway.
Sure, there’s other complicating factors but that’s the bulk of it.
Graham’s result is the least surprising of this election cycle.