Dr. Annie Andrews Is Running To Defeat Lindsey Graham—and Everyone Is Paying Attention

Yahoo

2 days ago

REBEKAH HULLIHEN
Last week, Dr. Annie Andrews officially launched her Democratic Senate campaign against Republican Lindsey Graham, and she hasn't stopped since.
'I'm feeling a combination of completely exhilarated, and overwhelmed and exhausted,' the mom of three and pediatrician says with a laugh.
While Andrews had braced herself for stepping into what is sure to be a very contentious race in 2026, she hadn't quite anticipated that her launch video would go viral immediately. The video, which features Andrews in her doctor's coat calling out the harmful effects of the Trump administration's policies on children, has racked up more than half a million views across social media. Many women were cheering her on for her no-nonsense approach, particularly the moment where she calls Graham 'full of shit.'
Andrews is not a career politician. Less than a decade ago, she had never even considered running for office. As a self-described introvert who had never stepped into the spotlight in this way before, Andrews made the jump into activism through joining her local chapter of Moms Demand Action, the grassroots movement against gun violence started and run by mothers. She slowly grew her confidence and voice, and when the opportunity presented itself to run against Republican Rep. Nancy Mace in 2022, she was able to say, 'why not me?'
The fact that Andrews has run for Congress and now has set her eye on the Senate, she says, is proof that it's possible for women like herself to seize their power.
'There are so many women out there who are scared and frustrated and overwhelmed by the state of the world, but they don't understand their agency,' she says. 'They don't know how to get off the sidelines and get involved. I like to talk about the fact that I was an uninvolved, regular working mom, and then I took this huge leap into politics in a very big dramatic way. When people learn about my story, I hope they understand that they can find their on-ramp, they can find their way into action.'
Glamour chatted with Andrews about how she plans to make a change in her state and how she went from advocate to candidate.
: Your campaign launch video went viral, getting more than half a million views on Instagram as of this writing and being shared all over social media. A week later, how are you feeling?
Dr. Annie Andrews: It's been really overwhelming and incredibly encouraging because it tells me that my instinct to do this was the right instinct. That night, I started reading through some of the comments on Instagram and I was honestly brought to tears. I was so overwhelmed with the support that I was getting from people all across the country and honestly some folks in other countries as well.
I think what people were responding to was that the video was authentically me. I co-wrote it with our media team. I purposefully didn't want to sound like every other politician because I'm not a career politician. I wanted it to be me, how I really feel, how overwhelmed and frustrated I am, but that I still have this fight in me still. And that it's okay to not take ourselves so seriously. It's okay to make jokes. It's okay to show my real life of carpooling and all that stuff. I think we struck a nerve with people who are still feeling lost after 2024 and looking for a direction, looking for leaders to step up, people they can believe in. I'm just so overwhelmed and grateful for the response that our campaign received.
How did you decide to get into politics?
It was really a series of events. One was the presidential election of 2016. My youngest daughter, now eight, was born six days before Donald Trump was elected. I remember vividly putting my older daughter to bed that night and telling her, when you wake up tomorrow, we're going to have our first woman president…As the election returns came in that night, I remember sitting in my bed in between nursing sessions, looking at my baby girl's face and just feeling so overwhelmed in the worst way and afraid and shocked about the world that I had brought these three beautiful children into. Something inside of me changed that night…things started to build after that.
The second thing that pushed me into action was February 14th, 2018, which was the day of the tragic school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I didn't know anyone who was in the building that day. I was not directly impacted by that shooting. But it was the first mass school shooting that I experienced as a mother of a school age child…When I dropped her off in the days after that school shooting at her public school in South Carolina, watching her march into that school building, noticing the school resource officer that was patrolling the drop off line, I remember just feeling incredibly vulnerable. Is my baby going to be safe in that school?
After that day, you called your Republican Sen. Tim Scott's office, which was dismissive, and then Sen. Graham's, which didn't pick up. What did you do next?
I went online on Facebook, found the local chapter of Moms Demand Action, and signed up to go to their next meeting. One day after working at the hospital, I forced myself to walk into that meeting. I am an introvert. I'm not a joiner. I don't like walking into rooms full of people. I don't know. But I forced myself to do that. And in doing that, it really changed the entire trajectory of my personal and professional life because by joining Mom's Demand Action, I learned so much about the power of my voice as both a mom and a pediatrician. I learned that I had agency and that if I got to work, I could affect change. And everything really just snowballed from there.
How did working on advocacy with Moms Demand lead to your decision to run for Congress in 2022?
I got to know some state level lawmakers. I got myself in these rooms where decisions were being made, and it became abundantly clear that I was very much smart enough to be in those rooms and I was fully capable of taking my advocacy to the next level. It wasn't on a whim, but my decision to run for Congress in the 2022 election cycle was not something I spent weeks and weeks and weeks pouring over, like is this the right time? What is the path to victory? I felt so driven to take that next step, to take a big step and elevate my voice at that level. And I saw an opportunity to run against a congresswoman who has no business representing our district who had taken bad vote after bad vote in ways that negatively impacted South Carolina's children. Honestly, I felt called to do it. Again, I didn't have an extensive pro/con list. Certainly I talked to my family about this choice that I was making, but I let my passion drive me.
I think that's something else that is so important because so many of our current leaders in this country don't come across as authentic because they're not driven by some true inherent passion. It's more of a sort of career path calculation for them. So when you find yourself feeling passionately driven to do something, even if it seems sort of crazy on paper, we just have to be brave enough to step into those spaces and just do it because we need more leaders who are driven by their true passion and inherent desire to build better communities.
What did you learn from that first race?
I think most importantly that it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be, that I am fully capable of running for federal office. That running just to win isn't the only reason to run. There's a million reasons for women to step up and run for office, whether it's city council, school board, all the way up to the US Senate, and we can't always make that calculation based on our chances of winning.
There are so many important reasons to just step up and run because voters deserve a choice. Voters want to see someone fighting for them. Voters want someone they can relate to a regular person, a mom from their community who steps up and takes their fight to the next level. That is what inspires people…I have absolutely zero regret about running, even though it was disruptive to my personal and professional life, even though I didn't win. I know I gave women in South Carolina something to feel hopeful about in a season when Roe was overturned. I know I shined a big, bright spotlight on the issue of gun violence and how it impacts my state in a way that most other candidates would not have done so boldly and all of that matters, and I'm a stronger person because I decided to run for Congress.
Speaking of Roe, South Carolina now has a . How do you plan to approach if elected?
Doing this work in a state like South Carolina is harder than it is in so many other states in this country because it is such an uphill battle. We currently have a Republican supermajority in our statehouse. But to me, that makes the fight more important. I have said many times, there's no one scrappier than a child health advocate, a gun violence prevention advocate, or an abortion rights advocate in a red state. You have to be so scrappy. You have to be full of grit and grace and understand that you're not going to win most of the fights you show up for, but that the actions still matter. And when you lose, you learn something and then you take that to the next fight.
When I decided to run for Congress, I didn't necessarily anticipate that Roe would fall during that campaign, but there I found myself as a woman, physician mom, on the ballot for this federal seat at this moment when the women in South Carolina really needed someone to look to and speak for them. I found that I was able to do that, and I think it was so incredibly important.
Let's talk about your run for Senate. You've been in a political campaign before, but running against Lindsey Graham, who is incredibly well-known nationally and gives this race a lot more attention. How'd you decide to do it?
It is definitely another level, and it's not at all what I thought I would be doing. Even if you had asked me four months ago, would I run against Lindsey, I would've said, 'no, I'm not doing that.' But since the day Trump was inaugurated, every single day has continued to make me feel compelled to find some bigger way to fight, in particular, the coordinated attack on our nation's healthcare system and the elevation of a grifter and conspiracy theorist in RFK Jr. to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. It's too much.
As a physician, I cannot stay on the sidelines while I watch Republicans gleefully attack our nation's Medicaid program, which is the largest insurer of children in this country, talking about cutting the Medicare program, slashing NIH funds, putting a microphone in front of true conspiracy theorists in a way that has already gotten children in this country killed because of the anti-vaccine rhetoric. And I knew that this was a moment where a voice like mine is just so important. A physician who has run for office before can run for office at this level against what I would call a national villain in Senator Lindsey Graham.
We have a long way to go before the midterm elections in 2026, but I think a lot of people are itching to get involved. Where do they start?
Just find a way in. Find a way to get a little bit more involved because it is so easy to doom scroll and to feel overwhelmed and to let that hopelessness creep in. The antidote to that is to get involved. Whether it's volunteering for a local campaign, knocking doors for a school board candidate donating to a local campaign or a candidate being more vocal on social media.
I think people are sometimes very hesitant to share their political beliefs on social media, but the more vocal I get when I speak about the issues I'm so passionate about, when I help people understand the link between public policy and our kids' well being, people are enthusiastically supportive of that. So be more vocal. Have conversations in the carpool drop off line at your HOA meeting about the things you're worried about, the things you care about, and understand the agency of your voice. And together we truly can create the change that our children so desperately need and deserve.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Originally Appeared on Glamour