WASHINGTON – President Trump and Senator Lindsey Graham have established clear but not overwhelming advantages in South Carolina, a strongly republican state that is showing signs of competitiveness this year, according to a new poll by the New York Times / Siena College.
Trump leads Joseph R. Biden Jr., 49 percentage points against 41, while Graham, who faces the most serious challenge of his career, is winning 46% of the vote, compared with 40% of his Democratic rival, Jaime Harrison.
The race for the Senate, however, can be even more competitive because the poll shows that 12% of black voters are undecided, a portion of the vote that is likely to favor Harrison, who is African-American. The survey has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.
No Democratic presidential candidate has beaten South Carolina since Jimmy Carter in 1976, a run that seems unlikely to be broken this year. But the combination of black voters and white transplants should make the state more of a battleground than an afterthought.
It is this coalition of voters that is pushing Trump’s one-digit lead four years after he beat South Carolina by 14 points, and that made the Graham-Harrison dispute perhaps the most heated confrontation in the Senate in 2020.
Still, South Carolina remains more conservative than its rapidly changing neighbors, Georgia and North Carolina, and quite prohibitive for Democrats. The state has not elected a Democratic governor or senator since 1998.
While white voters with higher education in other states of the Sun Belt favor Biden or tie between the two presidential candidates, they favor Trump from 50% to 38% in South Carolina. Even more distinct, and for Democrats absolutely frightening, it is the difference between white voters without a college degree: 77% are in favor of Trump, while only 18% support Biden.
There is much more uncertainty in the race for the Senate. After being one of Trump’s fiercest critics in the 2016 campaign, Graham became one of his most loyal lieutenants.
This shift, along with the skepticism Graham has faced from far-right Republicans because of his penchant for making deals, has made him vulnerable to a challenge.
And Harrison, a former lobbyist who served as president of the Democratic Party of South Carolina, emerged as a fund-raising dynamo: he broke the Senate fundraising record in one quarter, raising $ 57 million in the three months from July to September.
Jason Strickland, a 44-year-old Republican from Summerville, SC, lamented Graham’s willingness to commit, citing immigration as an example. Strickland criticized what he called Graham’s pressure for “amnesty,” a reference to the senator’s years-long effort to broker a bipartisan immigration reform that would include a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants who are in the country illegally.
Strickland said he would vote without enthusiasm for Graham because the “biggest” factor in his thinking is his dislike for Harrison.
“I have a big problem with the whole Black Lives Matter movement,” he said.
Adding another wrinkle to the Senate race is the presence of a constitutional party candidate, Bill Bledsoe. Although Bledsoe withdrew from the race and supported Graham, his name is still in the vote. And Harrison’s campaign is spending money on advertising to flaunt Bledsoe’s conservative credentials and divert Graham’s votes.
Bledose is winning 4% in the poll, while 8% of voters generally say they are undecided in the run for the Senate. Notably, 6% of South Carolina Republicans said they were undecided in the Senate race, while only 2% said the same about the presidential race.
Graham, who is looking for a fourth term, is capturing 89 percent of Republicans, a number he will need to increase to avoid Harrison’s challenge, given the likelihood of black voters going over to the Democrat.
The good news for Graham regarding his own base is that he is now at the center of the stage in Congress, brandishing the hammer on the Senate Judiciary Committee every day this week during Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings.
Fifty-two percent of Southern Carolinians said they supported Coney Barrett’s confirmation, while only 30% said they opposed it. Support for her was even greater among white voters with university degrees, with 59% of them supporting her nomination.
Notably, Graham did better in the poll on the final two nights of calls to voters after the Supreme Court hearings began. In the initial calls, which started last week, the Senate race seemed divided. But this week, Graham really did better among respondents than Trump.
Harrison’s fundraising has also encouraged more Republican donors to donate to Graham, who has raised $ 28 million in the past three months.
Still, Graham, who has hardly faced a competitive race since he was first elected to the House in 1994, is in the struggle of his political life.
Many voters in South Carolina were angry at him. Forty-nine percent of voters said they did not think Graham was honest and trustworthy, while 41% said they thought so, according to the poll.
And while 40% of Southern Carolinians said they had a very favorable view of Trump, there was less enthusiasm for Graham. Only 26% of voters said they saw it very favorably.
Among Republicans, the divide was even more pronounced: 79 percent of Republican Party voters said they saw Trump very favorably, while only 54 percent of state Republicans said the same about Graham.
The senator’s bet, however, is that serving as one of Coney Barrett’s most visible defenders and bonding with Trump will be enough to survive the threat posed by Harrison.
Asked if they could change their mind about the presidential vote, 98% of South Carolina Republicans said they would definitely vote for their favorite candidate.
The race may depend on the scale of black participation and, in particular, whether it reflects the enthusiasm that existed for former President Barack Obama or is more like the 2016 race. In 2008, black voters represented 25% of the South Carolina electorate. South. Four years ago, it was only 19%.
This survey is based on African American voters who represent 23% of the South Carolina electorate.
Matt Stevens contributed reporting.
Here are the poll’s cross-reference tables.