A new poll fielded after the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shows Lindsey Graham trailing Jaime Harrison in the South Carolina Senate race by two points. This is the first survey to show the three-term incumbent behind his opponent.
Veteran pollster Cornell Belcher and his firm, Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, queried more than 600 likely voters in South Carolina from September 21 to September 24. The poll, released on Saturday, shows Harrison leading Senator Graham by 2 percent. The results differ slightly from a newly released CBS News-YouGov poll that showed the two men in a dead heat.
The Brilliant Corners poll is the first one released to the public to show an advantage to Harrison in the race for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina. Previous studies, according the CBS News-YouGov poll, shows the men tied or Graham with an advantage. This particular survey shows Harrison currently earning 45 percent to Graham’s 43 percent, with five percent of likely voters choosing a third-party candidate.
“Though within the margin of error; momentum in South Carolina is clearly on the side of Harrison,” Belcher said in a statement accompanying the poll. “Harrison is increasingly well positioned to flip this Senate seat in a race that everyone must now place onto the list of most competitive races in the country.”
Graham has been grabbing headlines since the passing of Justice
Ginsburg—and not in a good way. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has done a complete 180 on replacing a justice in the last year of a president’s term, drawing strife from the left and a couple of detractors on the right.
“With less than 40 days to go, this grassroots movement is in its strongest position yet,” Guy King, a campaign spokesperson said in a statement shared with ESSENCE. “This poll makes clear that after 25 years in Washington, Lindsey has changed and is no longer someone South Carolinians can trust. Every day, the momentum is growing for Jaime Harrison’s vision for a South Carolina where every child growing up here has a chance to succeed, regardless of their zip code or economic status.”
The Brilliant Corners poll also found that Harrison has a favorability rating nine points higher than Senator Graham’s figure, which reaffirms Graham’s own comments made last week. Appearing on Fox News twice in the week after Justice Ginsburg’s death, the veteran politician groveled for support, claiming to be falling behind Harrison in fundraising efforts because voters “hate my guts.”