MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — Alan Wilson, South Carolina's Republican nominee for governor, said he likens the midterm election and his role at the top of the GOP ticket to a rapid loss of cabin pressure on an airplane, causing oxygen masks to immediately deploy.
"(I am) making sure that my operation is healthy and taken care of — that's the putting on the mask, and then we have done that and now we are helping others," Wilson told SCETV in an Oct. 8 sit-down interview.
Wilson, the state's attorney general, isn't too worried about his race against state Rep. Jermaine Johnson, the Democratic nominee who is trying to best the party's chances by winning back the office for the first time since former Gov. Jim Hodges in 1998.
It's U.S. Sen. Darline Graham, who decided to run for a full six-year term after she was appointed by the governor to take her late brother Lindsey Graham's seat in Congress, who has Wilson anxious.
"I’m concerned for her," Wilson said. "I do believe it is going to be a very good year in South Carolina for our ticket and down ballot. I know there are some headwinds now, some externalities we can’t control, but I do believe we are going to do well."
South Carolina Republicans hope GOP unity will help pull Graham past the finish line as the political newcomer has found herself in a more competitive race than anticipated against well-funded Democratic nominee Dr. Annie Andrews.
Two third-party candidates — Constitution candidate Mark Hackett and and Libertarian candidate Kasie Whitener — are also on the ballot.
"I'm not taking anything for granted," Graham told reporters Thursday after voting early in Lexington County, following President Donald Trump's rally in Rock Hill.
That GOP unity was on full display Monday in Myrtle Beach as every Republican vying for statewide office and congressional seats — even a possible 2028 presidential candidate — attended Congressman Russell Fry's annual "Freedom Fry" fundraiser.
There in the GOP voter-heavy county, Republicans preached turning out to vote for the party even if Graham — or even Wilson — wasn't voters' first or second choice.
"You (Russell Fry) ran against Darline, you had a vigorous contest and you didn't prevail. And you know what? It would be easy to take your ball and go home. It would be easy to be get mad and get petulant, but you didn't do that," Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told the Myrtle Beach crowd. "Instead, you're standing up and fighting because you care about South Carolina, you care about this country enough that we need to all line up, that we need to all unify, we need to all win in November. That takes character and I respect that."
But that needs to include every Republican, they said — even those who lost.
Despite cracks in the state GOP that emerged after the Senate special primary election and subsequent runoff, Fry, who ran and lost the Senate primary, said he believes every Republican candidate will "come home."
He hopes that includes, more vocally that is, outgoing 5th District Congressman Ralph Norman, who swept the Upstate and his district but ultimately lost to Graham in the runoff.
"I hope that he (Norman) does, in the final eight days, step into the sunlight a little bit and help his Republican nominee," Fry said.
A public display of support, however, appears unlikely with few days left until Election Day Tuesday.
Norman has said he is not campaigning for Graham but will back the Republican ticket. He said he is telling voters to "vote your conscience."
"My family is not going to vote for Darline Graham. They're just not," Norman said in an Oct. 21 episode "The Nashional Briefing with Kelly Nash." "Now, they're grown and with their own children can do what they want. But I will because I promised to do that. But that's about as clear as I can make it."
That has not stopped a grassroots write-in campaign from Norman's supporters that they hope makes a difference — or sends a message — to the entire Republican Party.
"If voters feel like a choice was removed from the ballot, there's still an opportunity before us to put it (Norman) in," said Avery Milton, who is behind the creation of the write-in Norman campaign. "We don't necessarily have to go along with the party's nomination."
State Rep. Jordan Pace, a Berkeley Republican who chairs the hardline House Freedom Caucus, is hoping conservative Republicans do go along.
"I mean, vote Republican and voting your conscience should be the same thing," he told SCETV at an event for Republican candidates in Goose Creek. "The grander issue is, what we're up against as Republicans and as conservatives is a much greater threat outside the house than inside the house.”
Meanwhile, Norman's son, Warren, has since said he will support Andrews, the first Democrat he said he's voted for in a partisan election.
Andrews held her own get-out-the-vote rally Wednesday in Rock Hill, where she referred to Warren as her "new friend," and said the pair grabbed a beer before her event.
"This campaign is about bringing people together, because if we want to move forward together as a state in South Carolina, it's going to take all of us remembering that there is far more that unites us than divides us," Andrews told the crowd.
Already, a midterm record-breaking more than 948,000 South Carolina voters of nearly 3.5 million registered voters have cast an early ballot in the state's two weeks of no-excuse early voting that ends Saturday on Halloween.
Every statewide constitutional race is on the ballot. So are state House and local races.
But voter after voter — Democrat and Republican — says they're watching the Senate race.
"The Senate race is sticking out as most important" and the governor's race, Jessemia McClure, a military spouse, said this month while walking with her family through the State Fair in Columbia. "I'm excited to see how it all turns out, whether or not this state changes."
And voters in both parties are on edge about how close the polls suggest the race is.
A recent New York Times/Siena Poll showed Graham and Andrews virtually tied.
"I would hope that we could get behind one candidate, and coalesce behind that and to unify for the bigger picture" to keep Republican control of Congress and help Trump, said Rhonda Billingsley, with the Pickens County GOP.
On the stump, Republicans have repeatedly asked voters to strike the straight GOP ticket option — what has worked in the past for the party.
Straight party tickets accounted for 54% of all ballots cast in the 2022 midterms. And the last four election cycles, Republicans hit straight party more than 50%.
Republican strategist and pollster Walt Whetsell acknowledged the headwinds for the party in a year when the economy has especially been center focus, from the Iran war and higher gas and diesel prices to rising inflation.
That plus other candidate options like a write-in campaign — Whetsell said a generic write-in question has polled around 1.7% — and a well-funded Democratic challenger has made the race tighter than anticipated.
But Whetsell, who is conducting polling for Graham, said he sees a GOP edge.
"We have it internally, 4 or 5 points to Darline's benefit," Whetsell said. "Tighter than ... six years ago. That's largely just, again, the political environment is very different from 2020 to 2022."
It's why Graham's challengers, even some critics of Graham's run, are urging voters to unite behind the nominee.
And it's why Wilson, with high name ID and a significant campaign operation, is pulling his resources behind Graham.
"When Sen. (Lindsey) Graham passed away, obviously that largely fell on me. So, I have been doing largely the vast majority of the fundraising for our victory operation. These are our door knockers. These are our phone bankers. These are people writing postcards. These are people deploying signs, collateral, people putting on events. We are doing all of that get-out-the-vote stuff," Wilson said.
"That helps Darline," Wilson added, "But that helps everyone else, too."
Election Day is Nov. 3.
Scott Morgan and Kristina Thacker contributed to this report.
