“It’s a jump ball at this point,” said one South Carolina Republican strategist. “Jaime is peaking at exactly the right time and he’s got a deluge of money. [Harrison] is blocking every pass there is from Republicans.”

Even Democrats in and outside of the Palmetto State are surprised such a typically red state is truly in play. Many Republicans have privately voiced frustrations that Graham’s campaign didn’t take the challenge from Harrison — a charismatic 44-year-old African-American former state party chairman who tells a compelling story of growing up with a teen mother and being raised by his grandparents in impoverished Orangeburg — seriously enough from the get-go…

The crosstabs in public polling — and what mirrors some private polling — show that Graham still has weaknesses among the GOP base. Overall, in the latest Quinnipiac University poll, Graham is underwater (43% fav/51% unfav), an 8 point gap that rose from five points in the same survey just two weeks prior. Eleven percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Graham, including 56 percent of women. Perhaps most troubling, though, is that by a 10 point margin (40% yes/50% no), voters say they do not believe that Graham is honest — and just three-quarters of Republicans believe he is, in fact, honest. That’s why Democrats think the Supreme Court argument hasn’t moved the race in the weeks since Ginsburg’s death given that the video of Graham saying in 2018 to “hold the tape” if a Supreme Court vacancy occurred during the last year of Trump’s term and Republicans tried to fill it.