Polls are closed in South Carolina, where voters in the state's 1st Congressional District are choosing a replacement for Tim Scott, who was appointed to fill former Sen. Jim DeMint's seat earlier this year. Though SC-01 is a dark red seat, Republican Mark Sanford's personal foibles have combined with Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch's family connections (she's the sister of Stephen Colbert) to make this a competitive race. You can check out our helpful county-level benchmarks
here, and we'll be liveblogging the results below.
Results: AP (summary) | AP (by county) | SoS (summary) | SoS (by county) | HuffPo
5:43 PM PT: The race was called several minutes ago for Mark Sanford, who currently holds a 54-45 lead with 74% reporting. Ultimately, SC-01 demographics simply reasserted themselves: The district voted 58-40 for Mitt Romney, giving Sanford a pretty healthy cushion. He underperformed Romney by almost half, around 9 net points, which is weak, but more than good enough to prevail here.
6:11 PM PT: And 54-45 it'll be, with 99% reporting. Green Party candidate Eugene Platt took a rounds-down-to-zero percent with under 700 votes. ECB got about 4,000 votes on the Working Families Party line, versus 51,000 on the Democratic line. (South Carolina is one of eight states that allows fusion voting.)