Lindsey Graham is terrified, and based on his fundraising totals and the latest polls, he should be.
The South Carolina Republican senator is facing a strong challenge from Democrat Jaime Harrison, with polls showing Harrison surging while Graham’s numbers are stagnant, with RealClear Politics now rating the race a toss-up.
And if indeed money is, as the old saying goes, the mother’s milk of politics, then Lindsey is sucking hind teat with The Washington Post noting that Harrison is swimming in cash with less than a week left until the election:
“Thanks to record-breaking fundraising to the tune of $57 million in the third quarter alone, Harrison has become a serious challenger to the incumbent.”
So when Graham was a guest on Laura Ingraham’s nightly Fox News show Tuesday, he kept urging viewers to go to his campaign website and kick in a few bucks, Newsweek reports:
“The left is going nuts. You need to get on the internet right now. My opponent has raised more money than anybody in the entire history of the United States Senate because I’ve been with Kavanaugh, Barrett and I’m helping Trump.”
Graham continued his whining and moaning, but at the end of the interview, when the senator again tried to get a plug in for money, the network cut him off in mid-sentence:
Lindsey Graham attempts to beg for money a second time in one interview and is cut off pic.twitter.com/SqSHt7Vwz5
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) October 28, 2020
All of Graham’s begging has helped, HuffPost reports, with the incumbent senator managing to raise $28 million in the third quarter, but that’s still less than half of what Harrison took in.
Lindsey is asking for money so damn often that CNN even made a supercut of him trying to gin up financial support:
In which @brikeilarcnn rolls the tape of Lindsey Graham repeatedly appearing on Fox News over the past few weeks to plead for money. pic.twitter.com/AIrEGJXZJu
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) October 27, 2020
Pathetic, isn’t it? Apparently, even Fox thought so and did the right thing by refusing to give Graham more airtime for his self-shilling. But if he loses, you can bet Lindsey will be back on right-wing media outlets trying to blame everyone but himself for his failure.