On July 11, Sen. Lindsey Graham died of a torn aorta, a month after winning South Carolina’s Republican primary for a fifth term. Three days later, Gov. Henry McMaster appointed the senator’s sister, Darline Graham, to serve out the remainder of his term. President Trump endorsed her for the seat in her own right. On Tuesday she led a ten-candidate special primary with roughly 33% of the vote — first place, but short of the majority that would have ended it. On August 25 she faces Rep. Ralph Norman in a runoff.
The word that has followed her through all of it is nepotism. It is worth asking what the word actually means here, because the answer is less obvious than either side of the argument suggests — and because American political history contains an almost perfect test case.
The South Carolina timeline
- Jun 9Lindsey Graham wins the Republican primary for a fifth term
- Jul 11Graham dies of a torn aorta
- Jul 14Gov. Henry McMaster appoints Darline Graham, the senator’s sister
- Jul 28Filing closes; the state GOP decertifies three of twelve filers
- Aug 11Special primary: Graham ~33%, Norman ~24%, Fry ~20%, Sanford ~15%
- Aug 25Runoff: Darline Graham vs. Ralph Norman
- Nov 3General election vs. Democrat Annie Andrews
Nepotism describes a transaction, not a bloodline
The precise charge of nepotism is that someone with power handed a benefit to a relative. That is a claim about the person doing the appointing, not the person appointed. And on those terms, the South Carolina case is weaker than it looks: McMaster is not a Graham. He filled a vacancy with someone who shared the dead senator’s name and, presumably, his politics — a decision that is plainly dynastic, but not self-dealing.
There is a version of this that is much starker, and it happened in Alaska.
In November 2002, Sen. Frank Murkowski was elected governor. That gave him the power to name his own replacement in the Senate seat he was vacating. In December, after a public process in which he collected applications from a long list of Alaska Republicans, he appointed his daughter, Lisa Murkowski, then a member of the state House.
The reaction was severe and it did not fade. Alaskans responded by amending the state constitution to strip future governors of that power, requiring a special election instead. Frank Murkowski himself finished a distant third in the 2006 Republican gubernatorial primary, losing to Sarah Palin — a defeat in which the appointment featured heavily.
Then his daughter spent twenty years answering for it
Here is the part that makes Lisa Murkowski the essential reference point rather than merely a colorful comparison.
In 2004, facing voters for the first time, she nearly lost. Former Gov. Tony Knowles held her to a margin of about three points in a year when George W. Bush carried Alaska by more than twenty-five. That is a roughly twenty-two-point gap between the top of the ticket and the appointed incumbent — a measurable price for how she arrived.
In 2010 she did lose. Tea Party challenger Joe Miller beat her in the Republican primary outright. Her career, by every conventional read, was finished.
She then ran as a write-in candidate and won — the first senator to win a write-in campaign since Strom Thurmond in 1954, and the only one since. Voters had to spell her name correctly on a blank line, and enough of them did. She has been re-elected since, and by 2010 nobody was describing her as her father’s appointee. She had become one of the most independent votes in the chamber, which is precisely the reason the party establishment kept trying to remove her.
Appointed senators face a real penalty at the ballot box
Murkowski’s survival is notable partly because it is unusual. The modern record for appointed senators seeking election in their own right is genuinely poor, and it does not depend on family ties.
| Senator | State | Appointed | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lisa Murkowski | AK | 2002, by her father, Gov. Frank Murkowski | Won 2004 by ~3 pts; lost the 2010 primary, then won as a write-in |
| Jean Carnahan | MO | 2001, after her husband Mel Carnahan’s posthumous election | Lost the 2002 special election |
| Martha McSally | AZ | 2019, after losing a Senate race the previous year | Lost the 2020 special election |
| Kelly Loeffler | GA | 2019, by Gov. Brian Kemp | Lost the 2021 runoff |
| Ashley Moody | FL | 2025, to Marco Rubio’s vacated seat | On the 2026 ballot |
| Darline Graham | SC | 2026, to her late brother’s seat | Runoff Aug 25 |
The pattern is intuitive once you see it. An appointed senator arrives without ever having built a statewide campaign, without a donor network assembled under fire, and without the one credential every colleague has: somebody voted for them. They inherit the office and the scrutiny simultaneously, and the first is no defense against the second.
The widow’s succession is older than the complaint
It is also worth noting that filling a seat with the previous occupant’s relative is not a modern innovation or a partisan one. For much of the twentieth century it was close to routine, particularly for widows.
Hattie Caraway of Arkansas was appointed in 1931 after her husband’s death, expected to serve quietly as a placeholder. She then won the 1932 special election on her own, becoming the first woman elected to a full term in the Senate, and served until 1945. Muriel Humphrey was appointed to her husband Hubert’s seat in 1978 and chose not to seek election. There are more than a dozen similar cases.
The practice has a name in political science — widow’s succession — and its history cuts both ways. It handed some women national office decades before the parties would have nominated them, and it did so through inheritance rather than election.
What Tuesday actually told us
Which brings the question back to South Carolina, where the voters have already delivered a partial answer.
Graham finished first. That is a real result and her allies are right to say so — she led a field that included two sitting congressmen and a former governor, in a race compressed into a few weeks, and she did it with Trump’s endorsement behind her.
But two-thirds of Republican primary voters chose somebody else. In a low-turnout special primary, against opponents who had weeks rather than years to introduce themselves, the appointed incumbent with the president’s backing could not reach 50%. Norman took about 24%, Rep. Russell Fry about 20%, and former Gov. Mark Sanford about 15% — and that Sanford bloc is the most interesting number on the board, because he was the only major candidate in the race not running as a MAGA Republican.
Norman now has two weeks to consolidate roughly 35% of the electorate that backed Fry or Sanford. Trump has said he intends to campaign for Graham, which makes August 25 a cleaner test of the endorsement than almost anything else on the 2026 calendar.
The honest answer
Was the appointment nepotistic? In the strict sense — a relative in power handing a job to family — no. McMaster is not her relative. In the broader sense that most people mean when they use the word — a seat passing within a family because of the name attached to it — obviously yes, and pretending otherwise is not serious.
The more useful question is the one Murkowski’s career answers: does it matter? And the answer is that it matters exactly as much as voters decide it does, on a schedule they control. Murkowski was appointed by her own father and spent eight years being punished for it, then won a race no one has won since 1954. Jean Carnahan was appointed on a wave of genuine public sympathy and lost within two years.
An appointment is a starting position. South Carolina Republicans get their say on August 25, and the state gets its say on November 3. Whatever the word for how Darline Graham got the seat, it is not the word for how she keeps it.