In deep red South Carolina, Annie Andrews will be the first Democrat Senator in three decades. The state’s rural voters pushed her over the edge into victory, according to a Daily Yonder analysis of preliminary voting data.
In South Carolina, historically deep-red rural counties flipped blue this cycle, which coincided with significant increases in turnout from Democratic voters, all the way from the largest cities to the most rural parts of the state. Democrat Annie Andrews would not have been able to beat incumbent Republican Darline Graham without help from the state’s rural voters. Senator Graham was appointed to sit out the remainder of the term of her late brother, Lindsey Graham, who died in July at the age of 71.
Without the 138,500 rural voters who supported her, Andrews would have only garnered 44% of South Carolina’s popular vote.
Because the margin for this race was so close, decided by barely a percentage point, every type of county, from the cities to the countryside, contributed to Andrews’ win. But it is a surprising break from recent trends that rural voters have contributed to the deciding margin, swaying a red southern state in the direction of the Democratic candidate.
The following map shows the vote share for Democratic Senate-elect Annie Andrews. Shaded counties highlight areas that flipped from red to blue in 2026 compared to the previous midterm cycle. Out of the state’s 46 counties, 15 formerly red counties shifted blue this year. Six of those counties were rural.
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The last time South Carolina elected a Democratic senator was in 1998, when incumbent Fritz Hollings beat Republican challenger Bob Inglis. The state has been red ever since. In 2024, Trump won South Carolina by 18 points.
The following chart demonstrates the vote share for the Democratic candidate in the 2022 South Carolina US Senate election compared to this year’s election. Across all types of counties, the share of voters who supported the Democratic candidate increased.
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In nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties, 51% of midterm voters in South Carolina cast their ballots for Annie Andrews.
Note: Major metro suburbs are suburbs of cities with more than one million residents. In South Carolina, these suburbs surround the North Carolina city of Charlotte. Medium-sized cities have populations between 250,000 and one million residents. Small metros have fewer than 250,000 residents. Metropolitan counties are based on the Office of Management and Budget’s list of 2013 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA). Counties outside of MSAs are nonmetropolitan, or rural, for the purposes of this analysis.
Many of the rural counties that carried Andrews to victory were located in the Black Belt region, a cluster of majority-Black communities that lies southeast of the capital city of Columbia. Turnout in many of these Black Belt counties was significant, including rural Allendale County, which saw the Democratic candidate win by more than 10 percentage points compared to last cycle.
But that trend wasn’t concentrated in one region. The number of voters who supported the Democratic candidate increased by 414,800 compared to the last cycle. Rural Clarendon County, where Trump won by a margin of 12 points in 2024, turned blue this year, supporting Annie Andrews by a 6-point margin.
The post Rural Voters Helped Democrats Win South Carolina’s US Senate Seat appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
