Jaime Harrison, one of the South Carolina Democrats currently campaigning to oust Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, just announced that he’s raised $3.5 million in 2019’s final quarter. According to Harrison’s campaign, his fourth-quarter haul is the most any challenging Democratic Senate hopeful has raised in a single quarter in South Carolina. His average donation is $27 and he got to the $3.5 million mark by accumulating about 67,000 individual donors, and 112,000 different contributions from all 46 counties, as reported by The State. Harrison’s campaign also reported to the same outlet that it has over $4.6 million in cash on hand as we enter 2020.
According to the Washington Post, a South Carolina Democrat has not held a Senate position since 1998. Graham, as we know, is a third-term senator. Harrison has been regarded as a long-shot candidate from the start, but he has some serious momentum behind him; in fact, you might remember Harrison from October, when he broke a fundraising record for the first time. In that case, Harrison raised $2.1 million in the third quarter, which was at the time the most raised in a single quarter by a Democratic senate challenger in the state. Who had the record before that? Oh, Harrison again. He’d set the precedent himself in the quarter before that by raising $1.5 million.
Harrison, a former South Carolina Democratic party chairman and current official in the DNC, hasn’t been shy about taking his opponent to task. In his campaign launch video, for example, which is embedded at the bottom of this post, Harrison called out Graham for his transition from decrying Donald Trump as a “kook” to becoming one of his faithful supporters. Harrison describes Graham’s hypocrisy as “comical,” which is, frankly, a gentle way of putting it.
More recently, Harrison called out Graham for his terribly inappropriate descriptor of Trump’s impeachment investigation as a “lynching,” in which he was apparently following up on Trump’s tweet using the same language, as Daily Kos covered at the time. “For three generations in South Carolina, we have understood the evil history of lynching in our state," Harrison said in a statement at the time as reported by ABC 4. “We put the shadow of lynching behind us, but now Lindsey Graham is casting that shadow across South Carolina and our nation to defend Donald Trump.” Harrison then invited Graham to the opening of the International African American Museum in Charleston.
But Harrison’s campaign is about more than just a disdain for Graham—it’s about the people of the state who are deeply hurting. And deeply unheard.
"People all across this state and across this country have given up all hope because when they turn on their TV, when they open up their newspaper, when they read each and every day all they see is racism, hatred and vitriol,” Harrison said at an event in Greenville, South Carolina, in December. “It is now time for us to give those people hope once again."
Here is Harrison’s recent tweet celebrating his latest fundraising haul.
And for prosperity’s sake, here’s his original launch video calling out Graham. And, perhaps more importantly, talking about being raised by a single mom, the importance of character, and origin stories.
Notably, Harrison isn’t the only Democrat hoping to flip Graham’s seat. Gloria Bromell Tinubu, a former Democratic congressional candidate, is also running for the seat.