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South Carolina voters have chosen Darline Graham as the Republican nominee for US Senate, the seat formerly held by her late brother, Lindsey, on November’s ballot.

Darline Graham, with Donald Trump’s full-throated support, overcame concern about her lack of legislative experience to beat five-term congressman Ralph Norman in Tuesday’s Republican special primary runoff. 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. She advanced to the runoff election after emerging as the top vote-getter in a 10-candidate field that included two congressmen and a former South Carolina governor.

“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.

Graham spent the last week of the unusually short campaign digging out from a gaffe made at a debate. Asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea are national security issues, she replied that she was “not that informed on national security … but I do support the military”.

Some Republican voters saw that as evidence that she was not prepared for the role. Others dismissed the perceived effect as media spin.

Norman served for 10 years in the South Carolina house of representatives before winning a special election in 2017 for Congress. A real estate developer, Norman is one of the wealthiest members of Congress. The member of the far-right House Freedom caucus is also ranked by Heritage Action and other conservative organizations as one of Congress’s most conservative members.

In the days following the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, Norman texted Trump’s chief of staff, urging Trump to declare martial law to prevent Joe Biden from taking office. Norman leaned into hard-right themes on the US Senate campaign trail, calling for Anthony Fauci, the former National Institutes of Heath director, to be jailed.

Norman’s campaign cast Graham as a creation of the Washington elite and himself as the true heir to South Carolina’s Maga legacy. But many of Trump’s most ardent supporters in South Carolina remember that, in 2023, Norman endorsed Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, over Trump in her candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

A deluge – by South Carolinian standards – of negative advertising suggested that Norman had bucked Trump on border security votes, a charge he says mischaracterized his long holdout on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to strip subsidies for electric cars and renewable energy.

“I would do that over again,” he said in a debate. “I don’t apologize.”