Who Is Darline Graham?

By John McCormack

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

About a year ago, Sen. Lindsey Graham was walking down the street in Washington, D.C., with his sister Darline when the skies opened up and it began to pour. A man with an umbrella came rushing toward the two South Carolinians, who were expecting a chivalrous gesture—until the man placed the umbrella squarely over the head of the powerful senator.

 

“Lindsey, being the gentleman, puts it over Darline,” Kevin Bishop, Lindsey Graham’s longtime adviser, said in an interview with The Dispatch. “In a lot of ways, that sums up Washington, and I think in a weird way it sums up Lindsey, too.”

 

Since Lindsey Graham died on July 11 and Darline was appointed two days later to serve out the remaining five months of his term, many more people have learned about what Bishop described as the Grahams’ “unusually close” relationship. They came from modest means, working as children for their parents in a bar and pool hall called the Sanitary Cafe in Central, South Carolina. A little over a year after cancer killed their mother, their father died of a massive heart attack. Darline was 13, and Lindsey was 22. Darline went to live with an aunt and uncle, but Lindsey legally adopted her and came home every weekend from law school to visit. When Lindsey ran for president in 2016, the lifelong bachelor said that if he were elected, his sister would fulfill the duties of first lady.

 

“Darline understands Washington, D.C., very well,” said Bishop, who worked for Lindsey Graham for 27 years until retiring as communications director in 2024. Bishop observed the senator on the phone with his sister perhaps “every day, every other day. They talked all the time.” They spoke about everything, including Lindsey’s lifelong passions of politics and policy.

 

“It’s been a little strange for some of us because I got to hear one side of the conversation for years,” Bishop said. “Now you get to hear the other side.”

 

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On July 17, a day after Darline Graham met President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Trump publicly offered her his “Complete and Total Endorsement,” writing in a Truth Social post that he had asked her to run during their meeting. She had to make a snap decision because of the upcoming July 28 filing deadline—the day of her brother’s funeral service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and the day before his burial in South Carolina—for the August 11 special primary election. On July 20, Darline Graham announced in an interview with Sean Hannity that she would seek the Republican nomination for a full six-year Senate term so that she could carry on her brother’s legacy.

 

But even with Trump’s endorsement and the outpouring of public sympathy following her brother’s death, Darline Graham is not a shoo-in. South Carolina Republicans paid little heed to Trump’s endorsement of Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette in the recent gubernatorial primary, in which she was trounced by state Attorney General Alan Wilson. (With polls showing Wilson running away with the nomination, Trump modified his “complete and total” endorsement of Evette to a co-endorsement of Evette and Wilson.) Graham is facing competition from sitting GOP Reps. Ralph Norman and Russell Fry, as well as former governor Mark Sanford. And a number of South Carolina Republicans are publicly objecting that they just don’t know enough about Darline Graham to entrust her with more than a caretaker role in the U.S. Senate.

 

“I don’t think that she has the experience, the track record to run for the full term,” South Carolina state Sen. Tom Davis, who is backing Sanford, told The Dispatch. “This is almost like calling somebody up from Little League to play in the World Series. I mean, this is six years in what’s ostensibly the world’s most important deliberative body.”

 

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One big challenge for Darline Graham is that she’s not merely unknown to voters—even those in South Carolina politics who do know her lack a clear understanding of her views on the issues beyond a broadly Republican outlook.

 

Former state Sen. Katrina Shealy, for example, is a friend of Darline Graham’s who has spoken to her several times since Lindsey Graham’s death and encouraged Darline to run for a full six-year term. “I think all the naysayers, all the people saying she doesn’t have experience, need to get to know her,” Shealy told The Dispatch. “This is a great opportunity for the state of South Carolina for a change in leadership to give us something new.”

 

Darline Graham has served as the head of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind and worked with Shealy on disability-rights issues, including ending a law allowing a sub-minimum wage for the disabled. Shealy said the two would meet socially a couple times a year to drink wine on her back porch, but she still doesn’t know where Graham stands on many issues.

 

“She didn’t discuss with me where she disagreed with [Lindsey] on anything because … I don’t think she would discuss that with anybody,” Shealy said. “Darline was more of a friend and a business comrade as far as working on disability rights. We try not to talk about politics because when you get away from it, you don’t want to talk about it all the time.”

 

Shealy, who generally supports a legal right to abortion, lost a primary race in 2024 over her opposition to South Carolina’s current law that generally bans abortions later than six weeks of pregnancy. “As long as you don’t get an abortion just for birth control, I think women deserve some control over the body,” Shealy said when she spoke to The Dispatch on the morning of July 22, but she said she didn’t know where Darline Graham stood on the state’s abortion law.

 

Later that evening, Darline Graham issued a statement saying that one of her “core convictions” is “protecting the sanctity of human life at every stage.” She highlighted several pieces of pro-life legislation she would co-sponsor but did not mention the 15-week federal limit on abortion for which Lindsey Graham had been the lead Senate sponsor in Congress.

 

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told The Dispatch she wasn’t concerned by the omission because the bill had not been reintroduced in the current Congress. “I’d be shocked if there was any daylight between them,” Dannenfelser said.

 

Kimberley Tissot, president and CEO of Able South Carolina, who has also worked with Graham on disability-rights issues, told The Dispatch that Graham is “not political.” While the two had never discussed hot-button issues like gun control or abortion, Tissot said she has discussed Medicaid with Graham. “I do know that she is very passionate about Medicaid because she knows that without Medicaid, people can’t work,” Tissot said. “We have had conversations about the Medicaid cuts, and she said that would be detrimental to our community.”

 

In her own words, Darline Graham has suggested the difference with her brother would be more a matter of emphasis than substance. “I used to see him on the talk shows. I would watch him, and I’d be like, ‘Lindsey, are you just talking about national security all the time?'” she told Sean Hannity on July 20. “And I understand that’s important. Protecting our borders, national security, absolutely. I said, ‘But talk about also what matters to the average person. The price of groceries, the price of gas, healthcare. Insurance, those kind of things.’ That’s what I’m worried about.”

 

It’s unclear how exactly she will try to allay concerns of voters who don’t know her during the sprint toward the August 11 primary. Less than two weeks ago, Darline Graham had no expectation she’d ever run for statewide office. “This has been a really big shock for her,” Katrina Shealy told The Dispatch. “We expected Lindsey to be like Strom Thurmond and live until he was 101.”

 

One thing that could help voters get to know Graham, Shealy said, is a debate. “People want a debate. I think that it might be good,” Shealy said. “I think she can hold her own. I think people would be foolish to go after her because that’s going to make them look really bad.” She recalled the 2010 South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary when Nikki Haley won. “When a bunch of men gang up on a woman,” Shealy said, “it hurts them worse than it hurts her.”