Part of: The 2026 South Carolina Senate Special Election
First poll after Graham's death puts Nancy Mace at 10 percent, tied for third, as pollster says 'no candidate begins as a clear favorite'
The first poll taken after Sen. Lindsey Graham's death, an Emerson College Polling survey for Nexstar Media fielded July 14 to 15, found no clear front-runner in the Republican scramble for his South Carolina Senate seat. Rep. Nancy Mace drew 10 percent, tied for third with Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and behind Rep. Ralph Norman (16 percent) and businessman Mark Lynch (13 percent). No candidate reached 20 percent, and 'undecided' led the entire field at 18 percent.
The first public poll taken after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died on July 11, 2026 finds no clear favorite in the Republican field racing for his seat, and it places Rep. Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) in the middle of the pack. The survey, conducted by Emerson College Polling for Nexstar Media and first reported by Newsweek and The Hill, put Mace at 10 percent, tied for third.
"No candidate begins as a clear favorite among voters to replace the late Senator."
That is how Spencer Kimball, Emerson College Polling's executive director, framed the result.
Below is a Maceopedia summary short of where the field stands. It runs about fifteen seconds and is built entirely from the poll's published numbers.
Maceopedia chart short from the Emerson College Polling / Nexstar Media survey, fielded July 14 to 15, 2026. Figures verbatim from Emerson's public release.
The ballot test
Emerson surveyed 500 South Carolina likely Republican primary voters on July 14 and 15, 2026, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.3 percentage points. Asked whom they would support in the Republican special primary for Graham's seat, respondents split like this:
- Rep. Ralph Norman: 16%
- Mark Lynch: 13%
- Rep. Nancy Mace: 10% (tied for third)
- Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette: 10%
- Rep. Russell Fry: 9%
- Gov. Henry McMaster: 8%
- Sen. Darlene Graham Nordone: 6%
- Former Gov. Mark Sanford: 5%
- Someone else: 5%
- Undecided: 18%
Maceopedia chart from Emerson's published toplines. Mace is tied for third with Pamela Evette at 10 percent.
What the number does and does not say
Two things are true at once, and the poll supports both.
Mace is tied for third, at 10 percent, in a crowded eight-name field. But the survey also shows a race with no leader: no candidate cracked 20 percent, and the single largest response, at 18 percent, was undecided. With a 4.3 point margin of error, most of the field sits inside one statistical cluster. Only Norman, at 16 percent, is clearly ahead of Mace beyond that margin; Lynch, Evette, Fry and McMaster are all bunched within a few points of her.
Emerson also ran a second version of the ballot test without the interim appointee, Sen. Darlene Graham Nordone, Graham's sister. In that version Mace moved up to 12 percent, into a second-place tie with Lynch behind Norman at 14 percent, with undecided rising to 22 percent.
How it fits the week
The poll lands in the same stretch that Maceopedia has been cataloging since Graham's death. On July 12, across CBS, Fox and CNN, Mace's answer on whether she would run kept moving, from "I would be an idiot not to at least look at it" to "I'm not pursuing it." A day later, prediction markets were pricing her near the floor of the same race. The Emerson survey is the first traditional poll of actual likely voters to put a number on it, and that number is 10 percent, tied for third, in a field the pollster describes as having no clear favorite.
Candidate filing for the special primary closes July 21. As of this writing, Mace has not announced whether she will file.
Sources & related coverage
- Emerson College Polling, "South Carolina 2026 Poll: No Clear Leader to Replace Late Sen. Graham on Ballot" (fielded July 14 to 15, 2026): primary release.
- Newsweek, "Nancy Mace's Chances of Replacing Lindsey Graham as GOP Senate Nominee, Poll" (July 16, 2026): article.
- The Hill, "No clear favorite in GOP Senate race to succeed Graham in South Carolina: Poll" (July 16, 2026): article.
- Related Maceopedia dispatches: Mace's shifting answer on the Graham seat · prediction markets put her near the floor.
This dispatch reports public polling data. Figures are quoted verbatim from Emerson College Polling's published release. A poll is a snapshot of opinion within a stated margin of error, not a prediction of the outcome.
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