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\n

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is on his way to clinching his fifth term in the Senate.<\/p>\n

Graham won the Republican primary for Senate on Tuesday, vanquishing five opponents that included businessperson Mark Lynch \u2014 who challenged the senator over his staunch support for the war in Iran and long history in Washington. Lynch also drew support from some of the president\u2019s most prominent MAGA Republican critics.<\/p>\n

But Graham won more than half the primary vote, allowing him to avoid an embarrassing two-week runoff sprint. He is expected to cruise to victory in November; a Democrat has not represented the state in the Senate since 2005, when longtime Sen. Fritz Hollings chose not to seek reelection.<\/p>\n

The four-term senator spent big in the final weeks of the campaign to make sure he won, combining with his allies to spend over $18 million<\/a> in television and digital ads touting his record and endorsement from President Donald Trump. That spending proved to be decisive in staving off Lynch\u2019s challenge from the right.<\/p>\n

He even called in the big guns for a last minute bump, bringing in Trump, who reaffirmed his support<\/a> for his occasional frenemy in a telerally<\/a> on the eve of the primary election.<\/p>\n

Graham\u2019s success is a loss for the strict \u201cAmerica First\u201d wing of the GOP that has criticized the president\u2019s new interventionist foreign policy streak, including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent. They came out in support of Lynch during the final stretch of the campaign, though that was not enough to upset Graham, a fixture of Columbia and Washington politics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is on his way to clinching his fifth term in the Senate. Graham won the Republican primary for Senate on Tuesday, vanquishing five opponents that included businessperson Mark Lynch \u2014 who challenged the senator over his staunch support for the war in Iran and long history in Washington. Lynch also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}