U.S. Senator, South Carolina · Republican · in the Senate since July 14, 2026
The Executive Summary
Sen. Darline Graham (R–SC) is not yet ranked: no block of the legislator rubric can be measured for Graham, and this site never fills a blank with a guess. Sworn in July 2026, part-way through the 119th Congress, Graham has missed 8.1% of recorded votes: 5 of the 62 roll calls the Senate printed their name on — a rate over months of service, not the whole Congress. In the 119th Congress, Graham has sponsored 3 bills and resolutions, spread across 3 of the Congressional Research Service's topic labels; the two largest groups are Armed Forces and National Security (1 of 3) and Education (1 of 3). A filing label is where the Research Service shelves a measure so it can be found again — it says what a bill is about as filed, not what it did — and sponsoring is not passing. Every figure is drawn from the cited public record; the full breakdown — including what can't yet be measured fairly — is below.
Graded on 0 of 4 components — 0% of the rubric. Every block of the rubric is hatched below: none of them can be measured for Graham today, so no σ is published. The weight is held back, not handed to something else.
Block score:below chamber middleabovenot scored — no evidence, not a score of zero
Rubric component
Weight
Block score
Into the grade
South Carolina: how the state moved on their watch reserved
no South Carolina metric yet has a long enough series inside their Senate service to score a trend
33%
—
—
Bills they move (LES) reserved
no verified Legislative Effectiveness Score for this member
40%
—
—
Fiscal votes (CBO-scored laws) reserved
needs recorded votes on at least 3 laws carrying a CBO deficit estimate; 0 so far
13%
—
—
Attendance (missed votes) reserved
this member has served for too few recorded votes for an attendance rate to move a grade — with a denominator this small a single absence swings the rate by more than a point, so the figure is published without being scored
13%
—
—
A hatched slot is not a bad score, and not a zero. It is weight the rubric set aside because the evidence to fill it does not exist yet, and nothing on this page says which way Graham would have scored on it. That weight is never redistributed to the blocks we could measure, so no σ is published at all until at least one block can be measured. The weights are preregistered and identical for all senators — this measures a record against a fixed rubric, not a person’s worth or effort. How the grade works →
Darline Graham
U.S. Senator · South Carolina · Republican · in the Senate since July 2026
Chamber
Senate
not yet gradeable
South Carolina outcomes during their Senate service
Category
Latest
Score vs. peers
Education scale score
268 ’24
Too early
Air quality AQI
44 ’24
Too early
Water quality % of systems with a violation
1.5 ’25
Too early
Unemployment %
4.5 ’25
Too early
Health coverage % of adults 18-64 uninsured
13.5 ’24
Too early
Tax burden % of personal income
5.4 ’24
Too early
Energy cost cents/kWh
14.2 ’24
Too early
Cost of living index, US=100
93.8 ’24
Too early
Homicide age-adjusted deaths per 100,000
9.9 ’24
Too early
Teen births per 1,000 females 15-19
17.4 ’24
Too early
Wellbeing mean poor-mental-health days of 30
4.7 ’24
Too early
Obesity % of adults
34.6 ’24
Too early
Early literacy % of 4th-graders below basic
40.3 ’24
Too early
Gun deaths age-adjusted deaths per 100,000
19.5 ’24
Too early
Food-aid access index (higher = easier access)
0.7 ’23
Too early
Jobless-benefit access % of unemployed receiving UI
14.0 ’24
Too early
No South Carolina metric yet has a long enough series inside Graham’s Senate service to score a trend, so the levels above are context and carry no σ. “Latest” is a different year by metric (2023–2025); every row states its own. Each row’s window, source and last-checked date are behind its ? button.
Missed votes 119th Congress only, not lifetime career · “Not Voting” only; “Present” is a recorded position · U.S. Senate roll callsThe roll call records whether a member voted, never why they did not.
8.1%5 of 62 roll calls
Party-line votes share of their Yea/Nay votes cast with their own party’s majority — agreement with their party, not a left-right position · 119th Congress only, not lifetime career · U.S. Senate roll calls
98.2%54 of 55 recorded votes
Promises kept
In human review
A senator’s constituency is the whole state, so they are scored on the same verified state outcomes as the governor — ranked against other senators — alongside their own legislative record. Influence is shared with 99 colleagues and Governor Henry McMaster; the score shows relative movement, not sole credit. Methodology v3.0
The national debt on their watch
context — not this member’s grade
When Graham first entered Congress in 2026, in the Senate, the federal debt stood at $37.64 trillion (end of fiscal 2025; Treasury). As of 2026-10-15 it is $40.39 trillion (Treasury, daily). That rise spans presidents, majorities and economies — it belongs to no single member, which is why it is context here and part of no grade. What is Graham’s own: their recorded votes when the major fiscal bills came through, beside what the Congressional Budget Office estimated each law would do to deficits.
Total public debt outstanding, fiscal 2025–present, in nominal dollars — no adjustment for inflation or the size of the economy, so early decades understate their era’s burden. Y-axis starts at zero. Source: Treasury. Shaded spans and dashed marks (dated on the rail below the chart): exogenous events — recessions as dated by the NBER, the COVID-19 emergency as dated by the WHO, and NOAA-recorded $100B+ hurricanes — the outlier years are theirs, not any one officeholder's.
No recorded votes among the tracked bills that carry a CBO deficit estimate.
Debt figures as of the data refresh on 2026-10-18. These same votes feed the grade’s fiscal-conduct block (10%, methodology v2.5) — the debt itself feeds nothing: it belongs to no single member, and only their own votes are scored. The change is preregistered and dated in the changelog.
Integrity Record
facts from official records — not a score
No checkable commitment by Graham has been tested by a recorded vote in the harvested window. This panel holds facts, not a score: what Graham committed to on the record in words a computer can test, what their name was formally on, and what evenly-bipartisan bodies or courts have found — each line beside the record it rests on. Honesty is not numerically scored on this site; adjudicated findings, when final, cap the grade under a preregistered rule. Read the full rulebook.
1. Checkable commitments
spoken floor pledges a computer can test — window 2026-03-01 to 2026-08-31
No checkable commitment from Graham compiled in this window. A commitment appears here only when it names its own test — a specific bill, in the sentence itself — and the test can be read from a recorded vote or the bill’s official record. Vague promises are listed in the site-wide exceptions feed, never rated.
Transparency context: Graham spoke ~668 attributed words on the floor in this window, with 0 pledge-shaped sentences per 10,000 words. Strategic silence is visible here without being scored.
2. Name-vote consistency
formal endorsements vs. final-passage votes, same text only
No qualifying endorsement-vote pair for Graham in the 119th Congress so far. Qualifying is rare by design: the pair counts only when the text at the vote is essentially the text they signed, and committee amendment breaks that on most bills that reach the floor — every excluded pair is in the public exceptions feed with its reason.
3. Adjudicated record
findings by courts and evenly-bipartisan bodies — the only tier that can cap a grade
Record search: 1 of 6 sources connected — House and Senate discipline votes (roll-call record). Not yet connected: Federal court judgments (deception statutes, ADJ-3 map); House Ethics Committee public reports; Senate Select Committee on Ethics public actions; FEC enforcement (MURs with admission or knowing-and-willful finding); GAO / Inspectors General findings naming members. Within the connected sources, Graham has 0 qualifying events (as does every member — no adjudication event has scored site-wide). A final Tier 1 finding caps the overall grade at F, Tier 2 at C−, Tier 3 at B — caps only, never bonuses, under preregistered rule ADJ-7.
What this panel measures: matches between Graham’s formal signed acts, spoken checkable commitments, and the official record — plus findings by courts and evenly-bipartisan bodies. What it does not measure: truthfulness of speech in general, campaign promises, effort that leaves no record, or motive. Items the rules cannot decide from records are excluded and listed, never guessed. Dispute anything: challenge@politicalgrades.com.
recorded on 0 of 30 tracked laws · 3 measures filed
Two different kinds of record sit below and they are not interchangeable. The first is a recorded vote on a law that passed, whose dollars this site has read out of the enacted text and quoted line by line. The second is a measure Graham filed — a document introduced, which most often goes no further than a committee referral. A vote is not authorship: nothing here says Graham wrote the spending in any of these laws, and nothing here says the money did or did not work. And a filed bill carries no verified money breakdown at all — this site has read exactly 31 bills line by line, and a measure outside that 31 appears below as a title and a filing label, nothing more.
The tracked laws — Graham’s recorded position, and where the money went
H.R. 7148Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026not yet in Congress$2.15T
Continuous service began July 14, 2026; the last chamber vote on this law was Feb. 3, 2026.
H.R. 5895Energy and Water, Legislative Branch, and Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Act, 2019 (Public Law 115-244)not yet in Congress$266.2B
Continuous service began July 14, 2026; the last chamber vote on this law was Sept. 13, 2018.
Recorded on 0 of 30. Every one of these roll calls was taken before Graham was in Congress, so those rows are an absence of opportunity, not an absence of Graham. The bars divide each law’s tracked spending — the dollar figures written into the enacted text as exact amounts — which is not the same as the law’s fiscal size; authorisations, ceilings and pay-fors are excluded, and every category is quoted, item by item, on the bill’s own page — each category name under a bar links straight to its cited items there. Colours follow each bill’s own pie, so a category is the same colour here and on the bill page. 31 bills have been read line by line here; 30 of them carry a recorded roll call. H.R. 4820 was reported by committee and never enacted, so no member holds a position on it.
What none of this can tell you is your state’s share. Not one of the 967 verified spending line items across the 31 bills read line by line here names a state, and none states an allocation formula: the enacted text appropriates to accounts and programmes, not to places. Any per-state figure on this page would therefore have to be modelled by us, and a modelled number under a state flag is not a sourced number. So it is not published, and the gap is printed instead.
What Graham filed in the 119th Congress
Graham filed 3 bills and resolutions in the 119th Congress, catalogued by the Congressional Research Service under 3 filing labels. A policy area is a library catalogue term describing what a measure is about as filed. It is not evidence that anything was addressed, improved or affected — and none of these measures carries a money breakdown on this site.
CRS policy area
Measures filed
Share of Graham’s 3
Armed Forces and National Security
1
33%
Education
1
33%
International Affairs
1
33%
Denominator: Graham’s own 3 sponsored measures, of which 3 carried a CRS label when the source was built. Sponsoring is not passing, and volume is not effort. Filing labels come from the Congressional Research Service via the govinfo BILLSTATUS bulk data, as of Oct. 17, 2026; the same totals are read independently from the Congress.gov API and the two pipelines agree on all 533 of 533 members compared. The newest of these measures, each linked to congress.gov with its latest action quoted, are listed in the promise ledger above rather than repeated here.
Became law under Graham’s own number: 0 of 2 law-eligible measures (bills and joint resolutions; simple and concurrent resolutions cannot become law). Congress routinely enacts a measure’s text by folding it into another vehicle, and that enactment is credited to the vehicle’s sponsor, not to this one. A low count — or zero — is therefore not evidence of failure and is not printed as one here.
The 43-day shutdown — Graham’s record
Funding lapsed at midnight October 1, 2025 and ended November 12, 2025 — 43 days, the longest federal shutdown on record. Congress’s appropriations power makes funding the government its own duty, shared by every member — so every member’s page carries the same record: their recorded votes on H.R. 5371, the funding bill, on both sides of the lapse. Two continuing resolutions were before the Senate during the lapse, and neither could clear a cloture vote for weeks. The Senate rejected funding-advance votes on H.R. 5371 14 times before one was agreed to, and on S. 2882 7 times — both counted the same way from the Senate’s own vote record.
Positions from the chamber’s own roll-call record, staged only after the parsed tallies matched the officially published results exactly. The record states who voted how; it does not assign blame — that judgment is the reader’s.
No federal fiscal year has closed inside this term yet, so there is no spending chart here. The next one to close is FY2026, on Sept. 30, 2026, and OMB has not published it.
How Graham is graded
Graham is not yet graded. A senator’s rubric blends verified state outcomes over their own Senate service, the movement of legislation they sponsor (which needs a completed-Congress effectiveness score), and — once they hold at least three recorded votes on CBO-scored laws — the deficit footprint of those votes. None of these blocks can be measured yet, and this site never fills a blank with a guess; the card above says exactly what is missing.
Legislative Effectiveness Scores come from the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which benchmarks each chamber’s average to 1.0. The missed-vote and party-line figures are computed by this site from the roll calls the U.S. Senate publishes: every roll call the chamber printed this member’s name on, for this Congress only, with the numerator and denominator shown beside each rate. The roll call records whether a member voted, never why they did not. Independent trackers of the same record are worth reading beside ours — a figure nobody can check against anything is worth less than one that survives comparison: this member on GovTrack, which has tracked Congress independently since 2004 and computes its own figures on its own definitions, so its numbers will not always match these. The Honesty ledger — promises matched against this member’s votes — publishes only with an evidence trail and two agreeing human reviews.