Result verified August 26, 2026. Every price below carries the moment it was pulled.
Who Won The South Carolina Senate Runoff
Darline Graham won. She beat Congressman Ralph Norman for the Republican Senate nomination in South Carolina on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, and she did it by five points.
The count as reported stands at 193,396 votes to 175,327, or 52.5% to 47.5%, a margin of 18,069 votes out of 368,723 cast. Live 5 News in Charleston reported those totals, and they match the tallies compiled on the race's results page. These are the reported totals, not yet the certified ones. The Associated Press called it for Graham on runoff night, and CBS News projected the same result, as did NBC News' Decision Desk.
Norman conceded plainly. "I don't like it, but I accept it," he said, per Live 5 News.
⇒ The exchange has closed its books on it. Kalshi's runoff market
KXSCRSENS-26 is now finalized: Graham's contract, KXSCRSENS-26-DNOR, carries
result = yes, and Norman's carries result = no. That is the settlement record, checked
against the exchange this morning rather than inferred from a price. A contract that reads
Yes has paid a dollar and is closed.
| South Carolina GOP Senate runoff, August 25 | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Darline Graham (appointed incumbent) | 193,396 | 52.5% |
| Ralph Norman (U.S. Rep., SC-5) | 175,327 | 47.5% |
| Total | 368,723 | 100.0% |
She now faces Democratic nominee Dr. Annie Andrews, a Charleston pediatrician, in the general election on Tuesday, November 3, 2026. Certification of the runoff count follows in the days after the vote, and the numbers above can move by a handful of provisional ballots.
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The Hour The Price Cracked
Here is the part worth keeping. Graham was a two-thirds favorite for a week, and on election day her contract fell apart before it recovered.
She traded between 64¢ and 67¢ through Tuesday morning. She touched 73¢ in the mid afternoon. Then the number slid: 63¢ into the 5 p.m. Eastern hour, 61¢, and in the final hour before the polls closed she printed 55¢, her cheapest price of the entire day, on heavy volume. An hour later, with the first real returns on the board, the same contract was at 99¢. Kalshi's hourly candles show 3.3 million contracts crossing in that single hour, more than her contract had traded in the entire previous week.
Two things sat behind that slide, and only one of them was information.
The first was a poll. The Trafalgar Group's final tracking survey of 1,031 likely voters, in the field August 22 to 24, had the runoff tied at 48-48 with 4% undecided. It was the only genuine head-to-head poll of the runoff anyone published, and it missed by about five points, understating the favorite.
The second was the ordinary physics of an election night. In the hour before a count begins, nobody has new facts, so a market with real money in it drifts toward its most nervous holders. The people who wanted out got out at 55¢, and the contracts they sold were marked at 99¢ inside 90 minutes.
⚠️ The turnout assumption was wrong, and it was wrong in public. Runoffs are supposed to shrink. This one grew. The first round on August 11 drew 335,555 voters; the runoff drew 368,723, an increase of 9.9%. Our runoff turnout page tracked that board live as it repriced, and the crowd got it right: the "above 350,000" contract is bid at 99¢ this morning, the "above 375,000" contract is offered at 1¢, and the reported count of 368,723 sits precisely between them.
The November Board
The nomination is settled. The market that is still live pays on which party is sworn in for the term beginning in 2027, not on a named person, which is a distinction worth holding onto: if a nominee were replaced tomorrow, the contract would not care.
Prices below were pulled from Kalshi at 11:17 a.m. Eastern on August 26, 2026.
| November 3 general election (settles on party) | Kalshi price | Sportsbook equivalent | Contracts traded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Republican (nominee: Darline Graham) | 86¢ bid, 87¢ ask | -614 to -669 | 376,860 |
| Democratic (nominee: Annie Andrews) | 13¢ bid, 14¢ ask | +669 to +614 | 407,459 |
The Republican side held between 89¢ and 90¢ every day of the week before the runoff and sits two to three cents lower this morning, which is a smaller move than most people would guess for a night that removed a real uncertainty. Read that drift carefully rather than as a verdict, because this board is thin. It traded 118 contracts last Monday and 5,757 today, against the 4.9 million that crossed the runoff market on election day, so a couple of cents here is one or two participants re-quoting rather than a crowd changing its mind. The two sides sum to 100 cents at the midpoint, so there is no arbitrage sitting in the spread, and both books are quoted a penny wide.
We asked our price-blind model panel to score the November question again on Wednesday morning, after the runoff result was added to the data it reads. Eight of the panel's eight seats returned a number, none of them shown the market price.
| Seat | November Republican hold |
|---|---|
| DeepSeek | 96% |
| Claude Fable | 94% |
| Kimi | 90% |
| Gemini | 90% |
| Claude Sonnet | 90% |
| GPT | 89% |
| GLM | 89% |
| Claude Opus | 89% |
| Panel blend (seat median) | 90% |
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: GPT 84% on 6,249 graded calls · Gemini 86% on 4,952 graded calls · DeepSeek 80% on 2,583 graded calls · GLM 81% on 2,544 graded calls · Kimi 83% on 2,534 graded calls · Claude Opus 84% on 831 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 82% on 808 graded calls · Claude Fable 84% on 761 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
The panel's blended read, the median of the eight seats rather than their average, is 90%, where the market says 86¢ to 87¢. That is a four-point gap, which is small, and it is worth being honest about what a gap like that has been worth historically: when our panel and the market have disagreed by ten points or more, the market has been right about two-thirds of the time. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Kalshi contracts are CFTC-regulated event contracts, they can lose their full value, and they are for adults 18+ where legal. Every number here gets graded in public once the market settles, on the full graded scoreboard.
More live boards from the same panel: South Carolina Senate runoff turnout (above 350,000 bid 99¢, above 375,000 offered 1¢) · the case for Graham in November (87¢) · the case that was made for Norman (settled at 1¢). Prices fetched August 26, 2026.
Where The Panel Changed Its Mind
Each seat scored the November question alone, then read the other seven answers with the names stripped off and was invited to revise or hold. Most held. The movement that did happen came from one specific fact about timing.
"Slightly increased from 0.88 after peers highlighted that Sabato's Safe R rating was issued after the damaging debate." — Gemini
That is the whole argument in one line. The handicapper everyone treats as the strictest rater looked at this race one day after the debate that hurt Graham, and still called it Safe Republican.
"Held. No peer surfaced evidence I had not already weighed: the cluster at 0.88 to 0.90 leans harder on the national environment than the state's record supports." — Claude Fable
Fable was the second-highest seat on the board at 94% and did not move toward the group, which is the behavior you want from a panel that is supposed to disagree.
What Would Change The Panel's Mind
Four things, each one checkable, with the direction each pushes the November number.
- An independent general-election poll of Graham against Andrews. There has never been one. Every published head-to-head in this race was sponsored by the Democratic side, and none of them tested the woman who is now the nominee. A clean poll inside single digits moves the number down; a 15-point Republican lead confirms the 87¢.
- Andrews' third-quarter fundraising report, due in October 2026. She had $4.1 million on hand as of June 30 and had raised $10.8 million. Jaime Harrison raised a national record in 2020 and lost by 10, so money alone does not move this; a collapse in her number would move it up.
- A handicapper downgrade. Ten raters currently place this race between Lean R and Safe R, with none on the other side of the line. The first move to Tossup by Cook or Sabato is the signal that the nominee's weakness is priced into something other than commentary.
- A second Graham debate performance like the first. Her contract fell six cents in the days after the August 18 debate. A November-electorate repeat is a bigger event than a primary-electorate one.
The Settlement Timeline
| What | When |
|---|---|
| Runoff count certified | Days after the August 25 vote |
| Federal filing deadline, Q3 fundraising | October 2026 |
| General election | Tuesday, November 3, 2026 |
| Contract settles | On the party sworn in for the term beginning January 2027 |
This page is re-scored when the story moves. Prices as of August 26, 2026, 11:17 a.m. Eastern.
What We Said Before The Vote, And How It Graded
Our price-blind panel scored this runoff three separate times before anyone voted, and each of those calls was stored with its ask-time price before the result existed. That is the whole point of publishing them.
| Panel run | Graham's chance | Market that day | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| August 7, before the first round | 42% | 48¢ | Won |
| August 19, after the first round | 63% | not quoted | Won |
| August 23, two days out | 67% | 67¢ | Won |
Read the arc rather than any single row. The panel was below the market on Graham in early August, when Kalshi listed 11 contracts on this race, several of them for people who never filed, and the size of the field was the story. It moved to a two-thirds favorite once the runoff was a two-way race, and its final pre-vote number landed within half a cent of where the crowd had the contract. Right side, no edge, and the honest reading of that is that the market and the models were reading the same race correctly.
⛔ The Debate Answer That Moved The Price A week before the runoff, this stopped being a quiet race. At the final debate on August 18, asked about China, Taiwan and U.S. strategic interests, Graham said national security was not her area of expertise. CBS News reported her as saying she is "not that informed on national security". The clip went viral and drew criticism from both directions. She spent the following days answering for it, telling the Washington Examiner "I don't speak politician", and defended her resume at the debate itself. The Hill's account of the debate records the same exchange as the night's defining moment. Separately, Norman publicly questioned Trump's endorsement of her.
That episode is what the six-cent slide toward Norman between August 21 and August 22 was pricing, and it is a large part of why the last poll of the race had it tied. It did not decide the race. No ethics investigation, criminal matter, or financial scandal is attached to either candidate in the public record searched for this piece.
The Case That Was Made For Graham
This section is the pre-vote argument, kept as written, because a page that only says what happened after it happened is worth nothing.
Senator Lindsey Graham died on July 11, 2026, months after winning the Republican nomination for his own seat. His sister, Darline Graham Nordone, was appointed to serve out the remainder of the term. That appointment made her an incumbent senator and a candidate at the same time. A crowded special primary followed on August 11. Nobody cleared 50%, so South Carolina law sent the top two to a runoff.
| Candidate | August 11 primary |
|---|---|
| Darline Graham | 32.8% |
| Ralph Norman | 24.6% |
| Russell Fry | 19.7% |
| Mark Sanford | 14.9% |
⭐ The case for her rested on four things. She had President Trump's endorsement, which in a South Carolina Republican runoff is close to the whole ballgame. She finished eight points clear in a field of ten, which is an organizational result in a race nobody had time to prepare for. The name is the seat, and voters were being asked to send Lindsey Graham's sister to Lindsey Graham's chair weeks after his death. And runoff electorates are small, old and high-propensity, exactly the voters most responsive to a presidential endorsement.
⛔ The case against her was the arithmetic. Sixty-seven percent of South Carolina Republicans voted for somebody else on August 11. Russell Fry took 19.7% and Mark Sanford took 14.9%. Add the six smaller names and the eliminated field held 42.6% of the first round. To pass her, Norman needed close to 60% of that vote, which is a real number rather than a rhetorical one, and the largest single block of it belonged to Fry, who backed Graham. The market took that argument seriously enough to move six cents toward him in a single day, and his 24-hour volume overtook hers three days out.
The read written here on August 22, with her contract at 0.67 to 0.68 (-203 to -213), gave Graham the higher chance while arguing that the case for her was narrower than a two-thirds price implied. She won, and she won by five points, which is closer to a narrow result than a comfortable one. Both halves of that read graded out.
⚠️ What the pre-vote page got wrong was the turnout premise. It assumed a runoff electorate would collapse and that collapse would favor the organized campaign. Turnout rose 9.9% instead, and Graham still won. In a race this nationalized, attention was the variable, not fatigue.
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More on this: 2026 Senate Races: Every Kalshi Board We Track · Why Darline Graham (R) Will Win South Carolina's Senate Race · Why Ralph Norman Will Win The South Carolina Senate Primary · Why Michael Whatley (R) Will Win the NC Senate Race · South Carolina Senate Runoff Odds: Graham Vs Norman, Kalshi
The Bottom Line
Darline Graham is the Republican nominee for a Senate seat her brother held for four terms, and she got there by five points in a runoff that more people voted in than the primary that created it.
The number that will be quoted from this night is 99 cents. The number worth remembering is 55, which is where her contract traded for a few minutes in the last hour before anyone counted a ballot, with a tied poll in the field and no information available to anyone. Election-night markets are not smooth, and the hour before the count is the least informative hour of the entire cycle.
⇒ What is live now: the party contract for November 3. The market says 86¢ to 87¢ (-614 to -669) that a Republican is sworn in for the term beginning in 2027. Our panel's middle answer is 90%. Both of those are estimates about a state that has not elected a Democratic senator since 1998, against a nominee who has never been tested in a public poll.
These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Prices are measured at a stated moment and move constantly; every quote above carries its pull timestamp. Kalshi event contracts are CFTC-regulated derivatives traded on a designated contract market, not sportsbook wagers, and they can lose their full value. 18+, where legal.
OddsShopper covers betting markets as an independent analyst. No outcome here is certain, and the risk of loss is real.
Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style. Darline Graham portrait via Wikimedia Commons, public domain; cropped, toned and composited.
