But George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer and the protests that followed pushed Quattlebaum to examine a conflict between his political and moral beliefs. “I’ve never considered myself a racist, but I have been complicit in it because of my silence,” he said. He wants the elected officials that represent him “to be angry about this situation,” but the politicians he has voted for—like Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham—are not. “It makes me embarrassed to be a Republican.”

At 51, the software consultant is planning to vote Democrat for the first time. “I think Lindsey Graham, to a large degree, has been a talking head for Trump,” Quattlebaum told me recently. “I know in his heart he doesn’t support everything that Trump represents, yet he does it anyway. And I have a problem with that.”…

FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls now puts Trump ahead of Joe Biden by 6.4 percent in South Carolina—half the lead the president held in February before the coronavirus pandemic tanked the nation’s economy. Yet even if Graham’s popularity continues to decline with Trump’s, Harrison still has to convince some crucial constituencies, including wary Black voters conditioned to believe that Democrats have no real chance in South Carolina, that he is the exception. Add to that the challenges of campaigning during a pandemic and Harrison’s path seems especially daunting. But his sizable war chest—including $10.2 million cash on hand at the end of June—has the potential to alter the race with a barrage of advertisements that few Democrats have ever been able to afford.