Lindsey Graham challenger touts $270K haul in first 24 hours of campaign

Democrat Jaime Harrison said Thursday that he raised $270,000 in the 24 hours after announcing his bid to oust Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

The six-figure haul came from nearly 9,500 contributions, Harrison’s campaign said, with an average donation size of just $29.

Harrison, who served as the first African American chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, formally announced his campaign this week with an online video in which he blasted Graham as a political opportunist who supported President Trump only after doing so became advantageous.

That video, Harrison’s campaign said, has been viewed more than 1.1 million times.

{mosads}Harrison’s Senate bid is likely to be a tough one. South Carolina hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 2006, and Trump won the state by 14 points in the 2016 presidential election.

On top of that, Graham has a well-financed campaign operation. He reported raising more than $2 million in the first quarter of 2019 — a bigger haul than some of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates — leaving him with roughly $4.6 million in cash on hand, according to his most recent federal filings.

Harrison, however, is hinging his campaign message on the notion that Graham is a Washington insider who has “traded his moral compass for political gain.”

“Sometimes people have been in Washington too long and I think Lindsey’s probably one of them,” Harrison told The Hill in an interview following his campaign announcement on Wednesday.