Palmetto State Democrats have chosen their candidate who will face incumbent Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, survived a three-way primary contest in South Carolina on Tuesday and will officially face Graham, who is seeking a fifth term in office, in November. Andrews, who is a familiar face in Palmetto State politics.
That’s because South Carolina voters haven’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since the 1990s. Former Sen. Fritz Hollings, who retired in 2005, was the last Democratic lawmaker to represent the state in the upper chamber.
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While Andrews’ primary focus is to unseat Graham, her larger target is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she vowed to “lead the charge to impeach and remove RFK Jr.,” at a recent rally with voters.
The Senate doesn’t initiate impeachment proceedings, but acts as the final step in the process.
In an op-ed piece for MS Now published earlier this year, Andrews charged that while Kennedy wasn’t solely responsible for the recent measles outbreak in her state, “We’re kidding ourselves if we pretend leadership doesn’t matter.”
“Kennedy has been a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement for decades, which has led communities across the country to slip below the herd immunity threshold for the prevention of outbreaks of infections like measles,” Andrews wrote.
“Even if you replaced the name on the door at HHS tomorrow (which a responsible Congress would do), trust doesn’t snap back like a rubber band. It takes years to build and minutes to burn,” she continued.
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Graham won a six-way primary dogfight, which included businessman Mark Lynch, on Tuesday night.
That contest was effectively a test of President Donald Trump’s endorsement power versus the fraying edges of his own Make America Great Again movement.
Lynch, who styled himself as a constitutional conservative and called for more “MTGs, Gaetzes and Massies” in Congress, was recently endorsed by Trump’s former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, who argued to voters that Lynch was “the best postured right now to get the warhawk, neocon, Lindsey Graham out of office.”
