Lindsey Graham

In less than a week, a few South Carolina voters will have winnowed the field for our next U.S. senator; two weeks more, and they'll have picked the winner.

Yes, we know: The winner of the special Republican primary to replace the late Sen. Lindsey Graham on the Nov. 3 ballot will have to compete against Democrat Dr. Annie Andrews, along with a smattering of third-party candidates. And it's possible one of them could win.

But do you really want to take that chance?

In a state that picks a new U.S. senator — what? — every two to four decades? Lindsey Graham served for 23 years. His predecessor, Strom Thurmond, was in office 44 years.

There's been a bit more volatility in the other seat — Sen. Tim Scott has served only 13 years, following Jim DeMint's eight years. But Fritz Hollings was in office for 40 years. As The Post and Courier's Nick Reynolds notes, our last senator to lose a reelection campaign was former Gov. Donald Russell, who was defeated six decades ago after he effectively appointed himself to the position in 1965. Most other short-timers also had been appointed to finish an unexpired term.

Our point being that South Carolinians don't elect a new senator very often, and if you don't participate in Tuesday's special GOP primary — or vote early today or Friday — you could spend decades being angry about who is representing you.

And the rest of us will spend those decades reminding you that you had a chance to change the outcome, and you decided not to.

A few of you — the ones who voted in the June Democratic primary or runoff — are legally barred from voting, and appropriately so.

But that still leaves 86 percent of you. Not just the people who voted in the Republican primary or runoff — who for the most part are farther to the right, or whatever you call the extreme in the GOP these days. Everybody who did not vote in the Democratic elections can vote in the special Republican primary.

The vast majority of people who vote in the Republican and the Democratic primaries are much different than the rest of electorate: They are much more extreme, much angrier, much more interested in keeping political score and less interested in actually governing.

Do you really want the angriest and most extreme Republicans making your choice for you? Not the ones who held their nose and voted for the current president because they considered him less awful than Kamala Harris. The ones who believe that Donald Trump is the best president we've ever had, that everything he's doing is not only right but perfect. Really? You want those people to decide who your U.S. senator is going to be for at least the next six years, and more likely dozens of years?

At the same time this primary is being held, the state Republican Party is trying to convince a judge to prohibit most of you — most of us — from participating in primaries going forward, to require us to sign a loyalty oath in order to be allowed to participate in the elections that effectively determine every statewide contest in South Carolina, along with nearly all congressional and most legislative seats ... and a whole lot of county seats. They claim Democrats are sabotaging their elections by picking the worst candidates. That would indeed be outrageous — if there were any evidence that it happens in significant numbers.

And if you're someone who's thinking about voting in order to pick what you consider to be the weakest candidate, in hopes of boosting the Democrat's chance of winning in November, stay home. That is not only dishonorable; it's also stupid, because this is such an extraordinarily red state that the odds are that your loser candidate will win in November.

What actually happens with the tiny number of Democrats and slightly larger number of independents who vote in the Republican primary is that, like the still-too-small number of Republicans who vote in GOP primaries, they vote for the candidate they believe would do the best, or at least the least bad, job. We believe the same is the case with those even-rarer Republicans who vote in Democratic primaries.

Perhaps the party hacks realize this. Perhaps what they actually object to is the idea that the nominee will come from the middle 80 percent of the electorate, rather than the extreme 10 percent, who won't compromise and who will only represent the loyal partisans and ignore everybody else.

They'll get exactly what they want if independents and Democrats and most Republicans sit out this special primary — like they always do.

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