By Nia-Malika Henderson“SC a toss up. For real?”That’s the text message I sent to a bunch of folks in South Carolina, my home state, where a closer-than-expected Senate race has the GOP shook and Democrats giddy.

“This seems to be a real race!” one texted. “It’s still hard to believe!”“Tied up!” texted another. “Graham by 3,” predicted someone else.

According to a New York Times/Siena poll, the race is tied, with Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, and Senator Darline Graham both at 48%. The Fox News Power Rankings shifted the race from “lean R” to “toss-up” because of that poll and other dynamics. (Another source cast some doubt on this poll and suggested another poll for The Citadel, with Graham up by 4 points, was more accurate.) The race has been tightening for weeks because Graham is a nepo senator who owes her seat to President Donald Trump and to her connection with the late Senator Lindsey Graham. But Darline Graham is nothing like her brother.

The late Lindsey, if he were polling at 48%, would have shown up on Fox News and asked for donations to his campaign and pressed his case for reelection all around the state. But Darline doesn’t take her job as a senator as seriously. She isn’t up to speed on the issues and has spent little time campaigning in the Palmetto State. South Carolina isn’t large. But Senate seats have helped us punch above our weight. Senator Strom Thurmond, for whom both my older brother and I paged in the 1990s, retired from the Senate when he was 100 years old.

And Lindsey Graham was poised to run for a fifth term after he won the GOP primary by almost 30 points in June. When he died of a heart ailment, he had just gotten back from a meeting in Ukraine with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, where Graham sounded hopeful about an end to the war. Darline Graham has proven that she doesn’t have the chops to fill those shoes and has emerged as an embarrassment to a state, and region, that is often stereotyped as ignorant and backwards.

Two months after her brother died, she stood on a debate stage during the special election and had the nerve to say this: “I’m just going to be honest here. I’m not that informed on national security,” she said in response to an August debate question about Taiwan and the South China Sea. “National security is not my thing, not my area of expertise.”She has been hard to find since then, failing to do media interviews and largely absent from the stump, except when Trump, her benefactor, comes to town.

“He was a great politician and she’s got the gene,” Trump said at a recent rally. This, of course, makes no sense.

Which is why Republicans like former Governor David Beasley and conservatives like Ralph Norman’s son, Warren, aren’t voting for her.

“What we need is strength, courage and real leadership,” Warren Norman wrote in a piece explaining his decision. “We need senators with the backbone to stand up to pressure from both parties, including their own, and the commitment to root out corruption wherever they find it.”There is now a write-in campaign for Ralph Norman, who lost to Graham in the special primary election.

That’s a sign of Graham’s weakness with her own party. She has raised just $2 million for her campaign and is relying heavily on outside spending. Democrats see her as so vulnerable that, Senate Majority PAC, a group aligned with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, invested $750,000 in digital ads to boost Andrews down the stretch — once unthinkable in a state Trump won two years ago by nearly 18 points.

“Early voting is going on, and South Carolinians face a crystal clear choice between two very different candidates. I am a proud conservative Christian who will fight every single day for your family,” Graham said at a rally in Rock Hill, where Trump also appeared. “Or Democrat Annie Andrews, the most radical liberal candidate ever to run for office in the history of South Carolina. Like they say out in the country, she’s just plain old bats--t crazy.”

For her part, Andrews is acting like a candidate who wants to earn the job, rather than a candidate who feels they are owed the job. She has stumped in all 46 counties, holding town halls and blanketing the state’s major highways with billboards. Although a Democrat hasn’t won a Senate race here since 1998, when I was in the state earlier this month, her ads dominated the airwaves and a robust crowd showed up to support her before her only debate against Graham.

“For eighteen months, I’ve traveled this state and looked you in the eye. Darline Graham has looked down at a script, written by Washington insiders trying to buy this seat. But this seat belongs to you. I’m in this race for my three kids. To fix a broken healthcare system, fight corruption, and bring down costs,” she says in her closing ad, one of her most effective. “And if my party gets it wrong, I’ll stand up to them every single time.”

In his life, the late Senator Graham said that he wanted to be relevant. But it’s still not really clear why his sister wants her late brother’s seat. Voters in South Carolina shouldn’t cotton to someone who has the right last name, but the wrong approach to a serious job.