Annie Andrews, a Democratic pediatrician who ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2022, is launching a Senate bid in the hopes of toppling GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a mainstay of South Carolina’s GOP who has served in elected office in the state for more than 30 years. Andrews played up her background in a launch video, and in a conversation with NBC News on Monday before her launch where she said Democrats “need to meet people where they are [and] talk like regular people to regular people, which is why we need regular people like me, a mom and a pediatrician, to run.” Andrews was deeply critical of Graham’s record, and his growing fondness for Trump after spending much of his 2016 presidential campaign warning against Trump’s influence on the GOP.
Dr. Annie Andrews, the South Carolina Democrat who unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace in 2022, says she’s running against Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham in 2026, challenging the four-term incumbent in part due to what she characterized as his waffling positions over the course of his political career. “He’s changed his position on nearly every issue over that time and that’s because, in my view, he doesn’t stand for anything or believe in anything other than what it takes to get reelected,” Andrews, a pediatrician in Charleston, told The Associated Press before a campaign rollout Thursday. Andrews joins at least one other Democrat in a primary field.
A South Carolina pediatrician and former Democratic House candidate announced Wednesday that she is now running to replace Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham in the upper chamber of Congress. Dr. Annie Andrews, who lost by about 14 percentage points to Mace in the 2022 election, announced her campaign through a roughly three-and-a-half-minute political ad in which she describes Graham as "full of s---." Andrews, wearing scrubs and seen interacting with young patients, says she has been a pediatrician in South Carolina for about two decades, and that parents trust her to "treat their kids for just about everything you can imagine."
