South Carolina gets an election, Maine gets a party pick: Byron York
Byron York of the Washington Examiner compared how South Carolina and Maine handle filling a Senate vacancy. South Carolina involves voters in the selection process, while Maine appoints a replacement without a general election. York highlighted that South Carolina’s process resembles a more democratic approach, whereas Maine’s relies on a small group of party insiders. After Senator Lindsey Graham’s death, his sister was interim senator, and a November primary will decide his permanent replacement. In Maine, Democratic candidate Graham Platner withdrew amid sexual assault allegations, and the party will select a new nominee through a delegate process involving about 601 party activists-mainly more liberal than the general electorate-rather than a vote by the wider public. York compared this to how Biden’s and Harris’s candidacies were decided in 2024. He emphasized that such insider selections limit voter influence, contrasting with more direct electoral processes.
Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York contrasted South Carolina and Maine’s approaches to filling a Senate vacancy: South Carolina puts the decision before voters, while Maine’s replacement is chosen rather than elected.
“It’s really an extraordinary situation. I think you have to say the Republicans in South Carolina have a more Democratic process than the Democrats in Maine,” York said on Fox News’s Fox and Friends on Friday.
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York noted that the circumstances for each state are very different. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died in his home on July 11. His sister, Darline Graham Nordone, was sworn in to fill her brother’s seat in an interim role. The South Carolina GOP primary election in November will end with a vote to replace Graham.
In Maine, the Democratic nominee for the Senate seat, Graham Platner, withdrew from the race after calls for him to drop out over multiple allegations of sexual assault. Under Maine election law, the Democratic Party will now select a replacement Senate nominee.
York said Maine will hold meetings in its 16 counties from July 18-19, and choose 500 delegates, plus 101 delegates who are members of Maine’s State Democratic Committee, to determine, on July 25, who will replace Platner as the Democratic nominee. He highlighted that is the vote of only several hundred people, versus the hundreds of thousands of votes counted in both the Maine and South Carolina elections.
“That’s 601 people, almost all of them party activists who are usually more to the left than the general electorate. Those 601 people are going to decide who is the next Maine Senate Democratic candidate,” York said.
York compared it to the 2024 election, saying there’s “a lot of similarity” to when former President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, and former Vice President Kamala Harris was chosen to replace him on the ballot.
“They decided to just pick her, and nobody ended up voting for her to be the Democratic candidate,” York said.
“The voters don’t get to decide who their candidate is.”
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