Carolina’s surprisingly competitive race for a US Senate seat could be the difference between a seismic victory for Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections or a false dawn for the party as it seeks to leverage voter discontent to score wins in Republican strongholds.

Of all the states on Democrats’ expanding path to a Senate majority, none is perhaps more culturally conservative than South Carolina, where President Donald Trump won by 18 percentage points just two years ago.

But a confluence of events — Trump’s growing unpopularity, the Iran war, economic frustrations and an inexperienced candidate in appointed Senator Darline Graham — has created a rare opening for Democratic candidate Annie Andrews.

The Palmetto State hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since Fritz Hollings, a former segregationist, retired in 2005. If Andrews, a pediatrician, pulls off a victory here, where registered Democrats make up only about 40% of the electorate, it could portend a big night for the party on Tuesday.

“This campaign is not just for Democrats who are daring to feel hopeful in this moment,” Andrews said Saturday to a crowd of around 80 canvassers in Mount Pleasant, a suburb of Charleston. “This campaign is for independents who are ready for change and for Republicans like my own dad who care more about South Carolina than the party politics in Washington, DC.”Democrats need a net gain of four Senate seats to win the majority, a position that would allow them to reject Trump’s nominees, set the legislative agenda and provide a significant check on the president during his last two years in office.

The Democrats’ Senate Majority political action committee for the first time spent $750,000 in digital advertising in South Carolina in the final week of the campaign, a sign they see the state as competitive.

Republicans, too, have paid increased attention to the race in recent weeks. Trump has twice visited to urge his base to vote and House Speaker Mike Johnson personally rallied in the state’s hotly contested 1st Congressional District this weekend. A Republican super PAC shifted $5 million to the race in recent weeks. The race is now rated “lean Republican” by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Graham, appointed to the seat after her brother Senator Lindsey Graham died in July, held a single-digit yet persistent lead in polling after she secured Trump’s backing and became the GOP candidate for the seat this summer.

But polls showed the race tightening against Graham, whose political brand is inextricably linked to Trump, in recent weeks. A recent New York Times/Siena University poll found Graham and Andrews tied, with about 48% support in the state. Graham acknowledged at a campaign event last week that “the polls have me a little nervous,” the New York Times reported.

“Staying home or voting for anyone other than the candidates on the Republican ticket is a vote for the radical Democrats looking to turn our conservative state liberal,” she said alongside Trump at the rally in Rock Hill Thursday.

Andrews, who campaigned this weekend alongside congressional candidate Nancy Lacore — a retired three-star Navy admiral who was fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last year — jokingly referred to the pair as “admiral toss-up and doctor toss-up.’ But famously unreliable US polling has previously swelled false hope for Democrats here, with Lindsey Graham beating his opponent Jaime Harrison by 10 percentage points in 2020 despite close polling in the weeks preceding it. Election guru Nate Silver said South Carolina is “relatively inelastic” with large Black and conservative evangelical White populations and not many swing voters.

“Democrats will need basically everything to go right there: first, a serious outperformance for Andrews based on candidate quality and second,turnout patterns that look much different than South Carolina has experienced in the recent past,” he wrote in his blog last week.

That uphill battle in such a culturally conservative state was apparent at one of Lacore’s last canvassing efforts of mostly Republican and independent voters in the affluent Hamlin Plantation neighborhood on Saturday.

The district, which includes parts of Charleston and the beach community Hilton Head, has almost exclusively been represented by a Republican since 1981. Democrats won the district once in the last 45 years, two years into Trump’s first term in 2018.

As voters stepped onto their Halloween-adorned porches to speak to volunteers, some were receptive to Lacore’s and Andrews’ campaign messaging on ending corruption and tackling soaring healthcare costs.

At one house, an independent female voter said she was supporting Andrews and Lacore but her husband was voting Republican. Another said he would vote for Lacore due to her military background.

People at other houses were willing to hear more about Lacore’s campaign or take the campaign leaflets, but were reluctant to say how they intended to vote. One woman was clear she wouldn’t vote for Lacore, saying she didn’t agree with her politics.

“That’s why it’s a ground game,” said Karen Byko, 63, a lifelong Democrat who’s lived on Sullivan’s Island with her husband Rob, 65, for 14 years. The pair have been canvassing support along South Carolina’s coast and said they’ve met several Republicans now willing to vote for Democrats. “I feel really positive,” Byko said.

South Carolina is experiencing some of the US’s most rapid population growth, though has fewer northern transplants than neighboring North Carolina and Georgia, where Democrats are favored to win Senate races.