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Before Democrat Annie Andrews made history in South Carolina's Senate race, she was spending a considerable amount of time making fun of Republicans on the internet.
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On Tuesday, Andrews defeated Republican Darline Graham, sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, to become the first woman elected to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate and the first Democrat to win a Senate race in the state since 1998.
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But long before her historic victory, Andrews was regularly posting comedy sketches on social media. Let's just say the humor is very much a product of its time. Take this April 2024 video, which uses the "We're [group], of course we..." TikTok format to poke fun at Republican women politicians.
In the sketch, Andrews delivers a series of increasingly pointed jokes, targeting GOP women's position on abortion, women's healthcare, gun control, and even their strictly public displays of religion ("We only wear our cardigans and crosses on TV," she quips).
"We're Republican women politicians," she says. "Sometimes we film our campaign commercials in the kitchen because they make us, even though we have no idea what we're doing."
"south carolina really elected the libbiest of resist libs to ever lib oh my god," one X user wrote on the old video the day after the election. (Complimentary). (I think?).
You can watch the whole clip here and decide for yourself:
Dr. Annie Andrews / Via x.com
This wasn't a one-off. Andrews was something of a prolific political satirist in 2024, posting videos about quite a number of prominent Republicans, including Lara Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
"If we're going to ban birth control, does that mean we're all gonna have to start wearing condoms all the time?" she asks in another July 2024 satire of Vance below a caption reading "J.D. Vance has some concerns about Project 2025."
South Carolina Republicans especially caught heat, with Andrews satirizing Senator Tim Scott, former Governor Nikki Haley, and Rep. Nancy Mace, whom Andrews had unsuccessfully challenged for her congressional seat in 2022.
She has also posted videos about Tennessee Governor-elect (then-senator) Marsha Blackburn, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and then-South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. Nobody was safe from the group-chat humor.
While Andrews wasn't holding elected office at the time, she became involved in political advocacy following the 2018 Parkland school shooting, joining the gun safety group Moms Demand Action before eventually running for Congress in 2022.
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She lost that race but continued her advocacy, particularly on issues affecting children and healthcare, telling The New York Times last April that she decided to run for office the day President Donald Trump appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the head of Health and Human Services.
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“He's been my professional archnemesis for decades, and any other pediatrician in this country would say the same thing," she said.
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Andrews announced her Senate run in May 2025 with a launch video that went viral immediately. In it, Andrews wears her doctor's coat and reprimands the Trump administration's policies about children, at one point calling then-Senator Lindsey Graham "full of sh*t.)
Speaking to Glamour in 2025, Andrews explained that she had deliberately avoided sounding like a typical politician (a theme among the Democratic winners this past midterm election), saying, "I purposefully didn’t want to sound like every other politician because I’m not a career politician."
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"I wanted it to be me, how I really feel, how overwhelmed and frustrated I am, but that I have this fight in me still," she told the publication. "And that it’s okay to not take ourselves so seriously. It’s okay to make jokes."
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"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," Andrews said.
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Not everyone enjoyed her earlier political jokes. Andrews' opponent, Darline Graham, tried using one of her videos against her one day before the election, sharing the Republican-woman parody on Monday, Nov. 2, and condemning it as "disgusting."
@DarlineGrahamSC / X.com / Via x.com
"Every Republican voter should watch this disgusting video of my radical opponent mocking 'Republican white women' and reject her at the ballot box tomorrow," Graham wrote. "Annie Andrews is not the 'moderate' she has painted herself as. She is deceiving the people of South Carolina."
The following day, Andrews defeated her by a 4.4% margin.
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