Trump at Rock Hill: 'No President Has Ever Worked So Hard on a Midterm,' a Raspy Voice, and an Hour for Darline Graham
He took the stage at 1:15, spoke for more than an hour to over a thousand people, and made the closing argument himself: the hardest-working midterm president in history, asking South Carolina to unify behind a senator in a race Fox now calls a toss-up.
ROCK HILL, S.C. - President Donald Trump made his third South Carolina trip of the election season on Thursday and gave the state the full closing-week performance: a crowd of over 1,000 at the Rock Hill Sports and Event Center, a stage time of about 1:15 p.m., and a speech that ran more than an hour for Sen. Darline Graham's race against Democrat Annie Andrews. 'No president has ever worked so hard on a midterm,' Trump told the crowd. His voice told the schedule's story too: 'My voice is a little bit more raspy than it was two weeks ago. We just power through it.'
The speech's sharpest lines were aimed at Andrews. Trump said she supports hormone treatments and gender-affirming surgeries for minors - a claim Andrews has refuted - and said she wants to take away people's guns, despite Andrews saying on the campaign trail that she supports the Second Amendment. 'Darline Graham has devoted her entire life to the people of the state, and now she's running to save you from a radical left lunatic,' Trump said. Graham matched the register, calling Andrews the 'most radical liberal candidate' ever to run for office in South Carolina and warning that 'staying home or voting for anyone other than the candidate on the Republican ticket is a vote for the radical Democrats.'
The rally doubled as a unity operation in territory Graham's party has been fighting over since the primaries - Rock Hill is Rep. Ralph Norman's home ground, and a write-in campaign for Norman has circulated since his August loss. Attorney General Alan Wilson, the Republican nominee for governor, called the primary season's 'family arguments' over: 'Not voting for Darline Graham isn't just not voting for Darline Graham. You are saying indirectly that you're okay with Chuck Schumer being the majority leader of the United States Senate.' Sen. Tim Scott closed the same argument from the stage: 'We must protect the America we love. That means voting Republican from the top of the ticket all the way down to the bottom.'
The stakes under the performance are measurable. Fox News updated its forecast of the South Carolina Senate race on Thursday, shifting it from a Republican lean to a toss-up, following a New York Times/Siena poll that put Graham and Andrews at 48 percent each. South Carolina's early voting runs through October 31; Election Day is November 3.
