Sister of late Lindsey Graham, who has been backed by Trump, overcomes concern about lack of experience to win place on November ballot
South Carolina chooses Darline Graham as Republican nominee for US Senate
3m agoAbortion rights group endorses Democrat Troy Jackson in critical Maine Senate race
18m agoDarline Graham wins South Carolina GOP nomination to replace her late brother in US Senate
One of the oldest abortion rights groups in the US is endorsing Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee in Maine’s critical US Senate race, according to details first shared with the Guardian.
Reproductive Freedom for All is supporting Jackson, the former state senate president, in challenging Susan Collins – the five‑term Republican incumbent who has been dogged on the campaign trail for her role in overturning abortion access in the US.
Collins voted in 2018 to confirm conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court. In 2022, Kavanaugh joined the majority opinion overturning Roe v Wade, a landmark abortion rights protection. In the aftermath, more than a dozen states enacted near‑total abortion bans. This year’s midterm elections mark the first time Collins is on the ballot since the decision.
“Flipping the Maine Senate race is a critical path to winning a Senate majority, and we do not restore a federal right to abortion without flipping the Senate majority,” said Mini Timmaraju, the group’s president.
Timmaraju will join Jackson on Wednesday in Brunswick for the launch of the campaign’s Women for Troy coalition.
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Senator Darline Graham has won the Republican nomination to replace her late brother, Lindsey, on South Carolina’s general election ballot.
Her success marks another win for president Donald Trump after he threw his support behind the political novice.
Graham defeated US representative Ralph Norman in Tuesday’s special Republican primary runoff, two weeks after they were the top two finishers in a 10-way primary.
With nearly all of the ballots counted, Graham had received 52.4% of the vote, according to the Associated Press, ahead of Norman’s 47.6%.
Lindsey Graham, a US senator for more than two decades, won the party’s primary in June, but died the next month. Days later, Darline Graham, was appointed to serve out the remainder of her brother’s Senate term.
“The critics say I shouldn’t run for the Senate,” she told a rally audience Friday. “They say I’m not a politician. You know what I say? Guilty as charged.”
Graham will face the Democratic nominee Annie Andrews, a Charleston-area pediatrician, in November. Andrews faces steep historical odds; the last Democrat to win a statewide race in South Carolina was state superintendent Jim Rex in 2006.
Trump recommended the appointment of Darline Graham, a career civil servant who was head of South Carolina’s Commission for the Blind, then encouraged her to run for a full term – upending a Republican scramble to select a new Senate nominee.
“What I really want you to do is pretend – please – that I’m on the ballot,” Trump said at a rally in Myrtle Beach on Friday. “Just come and vote.” Trump’s Maga Inc Super Pac spent more than $800,000 in support of Graham during the campaign.
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The US supreme court lifted one of two injunctions that block the Trump administration from pressing ahead with a sweeping effort to restrict mail voting
The court’s decision “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections”, justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a blistering dissent.
The NAACP, which sued in April to block the order to restrict mail-in voting, said that Republicans are trying to make it harder to vote in November because they “know full well that they are unpopular and will lose in a free and fair election”.
The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for asylum status in the United States, according to US state department documents obtained by the Associated Press.
Donald Trump responded to criticism of his new tariffs on Canadian imports from the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, by comparing him unfavorably to his late brother, Rob Ford, a former mayor of Toronto best known for smoking crack.
US treasury secretary Scott Bessent announced that the US has begun an “unprecedented” sanctions campaign against Iran “and its enablers”.
