Mother Jones has a terrific profile piece on former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman and current U.S. Senate candidate, Jaime Harrison (D. SC). It’s a great piece about his upcoming race to take on U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R. SC). It’s certainly worth a full read but here’s the part that caught my eye:
In the summer of 2017, DNC Chair Tom Perez called Harrison for advice. Harrison, coming off four years as chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, had lost his bid to lead the national party earlier that year. But Perez had given him a meaty consolation prize—an associate chair position tasked with developing the party’s Southern strategy.
Harrison’s first test would be helping Doug Jones, a former US attorney who had been at the helm of some of Alabama’s most important civil rights victories, and who was running in a special election to replace Sen. Jeff Sessions. Perez, who overlapped with Jones at the Justice Department, knew he had a good candidate in him, and, thanks to congressional Republicans’ incessant attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also had a favorable political landscape. (This was before the accusations of child molestation against Republican candidate Roy Moore.)
Jones has a contentious relationship with the Alabama Democratic Party and Joe Reed, a powerful black political leader who’d long been among the party’s key power brokers. He needed a strategy to turn out black voters (above and beyond courting Reed), who account for more than a quarter of Alabama’s population but whose votes had been particularly depressed by voter-ID requirements and felon disenfranchisement.
Harrison and a few DNC staffers went down to Alabama that July and presented Jones with a blueprint he’d tested during a House special election in South Carolina. “I talked about the divisions within the African American community—and not so much divisions, but the different groupings, the older African Americans, African American women, younger African Americans, and the things that motivate them,” Harrison says.
“He emphasized how important it was to work alongside local folks who really understood that black voters aren’t a monolith,” Doug Turner, a senior adviser for Jones’ campaign, recalls. The advice proved crucial: Jones narrowly won, largely due to black voters, whose almost 30 percent turnout rate eclipsed previous Alabama Senate elections. “The votes are here,” Harrison says. “The question is, can we change the mentality?”
By the way, it looks like Harrison is on to something:
For the first time in South Carolina's history, voter registration among people of color surpassed 1 million, according to Jaime Harrison's campaign Jaime Harrison of U.S. Senate. Harrison is running for Senator Lindsey Graham's seat on the Senate in the 2020 election.
The campaign added that this is "the highest number of voters of color the state has seen."
“The fact that over one million people of color living in South Carolina are now registered to vote is a true testament that the South is changing," Guy King, the campaign spokesman, said.
There are 1,000,759 people of color in South Carolina who are now registered to vote.
And Harrison is making a strong case for Democrats to invest big in South Carolina:
After the South Carolina presidential primary at the end of the month, Democratic investment in the state usually dries up.
But former state party chairman Jaime Harrison, who’s giving Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham his toughest challenge yet, is trying to change that this year by getting national organizations to invest in voter registration efforts to help reach some of the 400,000 South Carolinians of color who are eligible to vote but not registered.
With the backing of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Harrison is taking on a three-term incumbent in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide since 2006. Graham, who started out as a critic of President Donald Trump, has now become one of his biggest allies. That would seem to go over well in a state that Trump carried by 300,000 votes, or 14 points, in 2016.
Harrison is tired of hearing that.
“You can’t win if you can’t compete,” he told CQ Roll Call last week. “Republicans understand that. You look at states like Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont. What do they have in common?… Blue states, Republican governors!”
“Whereas you got folks on the Democratic side, ‘Well, it’s a red state, and Donald Trump carried it by this and this.’ … I don’t care about that,” Harrison said.
Harrison’s team has sent a seven-page memo to the national party committees and outside groups laying out the argument that South Carolina is just as much a part of the changing South as are North Carolina and Georgia and should be included in the competitive playing field. Harrison has also reached out to individual presidential candidates to ask them to keep resources in the state beyond Feb. 29.
“We can prove our political net worth in the 2020 cycle,” said Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina-based strategist and senior adviser to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
“There’s so much energy from Jaime and the presidential preference primary,” he added. “It would be malpractice to let that fall by the wayside.”
On the financial front, at least, Harrison is competing. He raised $7.6 million in 2019. About one-fifth of his disclosed contributions in 2019 from individuals were from out of state.
Graham, though, has continued to raise money too. He’s narrowly outraised Harrison the past two quarters and has $10.3 million in the bank to Harrison’s $4.7 million. Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales rates the race Solid Republican.
But Harrison’s profile, and the money he has to invest on the ground, should at least force Graham to dip into his coffers. The senator took 54 percent in his 2014 reelection, but the Libertarian nominee and a write-in candidate combined for nearly 7 percent of the vote. Harrison thinks he can capitalize on the “disaffected” Republican vote to cut into Graham’s margin.
By demographics alone, Harrison argues, South Carolina should be in play. African Americans make up 28 percent of registered voters — higher than in North Carolina, which national parties have treated as purple for more than a decade.
Let’s go big this year and flip Graham’s seat. Click here to donate and get involved with Harrison’s campaign.