The Appointed Senate: What the Record Shows About Filling a Seat by Selection

A familiar door, quietly used

On Monday, July 13, 2026, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Darline Graham Nordone to the United States Senate to serve out the term of her late brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, until the winner of a special election is seated in January (CNN, July 13, 2026; Office of the Governor of South Carolina, July 13, 2026). When she takes the oath, she becomes the first woman to represent South Carolina in the Senate (Newser, July 13, 2026; CNN, July 13, 2026). She will not have faced a single voter to get there.

That is not unusual. It is one of the two ways people enter the Senate, and it is used more often than the public assumes. Since the Seventeenth Amendment moved Senate elections to the voters in 1913, 202 senators have entered the chamber by appointment rather than election (Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, 2020). Governors hold that pen in most states, and they have used it for more than a century to keep a state's two voices filled between the day a seat empties and the day an election refills it.

How the appointment power works

The mechanism traces to the same amendment that ended the practice of state legislatures choosing senators. The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, lets a state legislature empower the governor to make a temporary appointment until the people fill the vacancy by election (U.S. Constitution, Amendment XVII). Most states did exactly that, which is why a governor's phone call, not a primary, is the first move when a seat opens midterm.

South Carolina follows the common template. McMaster's appointee holds the seat only until the special election concludes, and candidates who want the seat outright have a filing window that opens July 21 for an August 11 special primary (CNN, July 13, 2026). The appointment settles who votes on the Senate floor this summer and fall. It does not settle who holds the seat for the next term, which is why an interim senator and a campaign can run on parallel tracks. US Political Rank grades the sitting chamber on its legislative record in the ranking of every senator by output, a record an interim appointee starts building at zero.

The path that opened the Senate to women

Read the history of women in the Senate and the appointment power is not a footnote. It is the doorway. The first woman ever to serve, Rebecca Felton of Georgia, was appointed in 1922 and served barely 24 hours before the elected successor took the seat, a symbolic tenure that still counts as a first (U.S. Senate Historical Office, 2024). Of the 64 women who had served in the Senate as of January 2025, 11 first entered the chamber by appointment rather than by winning an election (Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, 2020; CAWP, Rutgers, 2024).

The most consequential example shows how appointment and election can chain together. Hattie Caraway of Arkansas was appointed in 1931 to fill her late husband's seat, then won a special election, then won two full terms of her own, becoming the first woman elected to the Senate in 1932 (U.S. Senate Historical Office, 2024). The appointment did not substitute for the voters. It gave a candidate the incumbency and the record to take to them. Across the full count, women make up 18 of the 202 appointed senators since 1913, about 8.9 percent, a share that has risen as the modern Senate has (Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, 2020).

A milestone inside a slow trend

Darline Graham Nordone's appointment moves a number that has been stuck for a long time. As of late 2024, 17 states had never been represented by a woman in the United States Senate (Pew Research Center, November 2024). South Carolina was one of them. Seating a woman, even on an interim basis, reduces that group and lifts the count of states that have sent a woman to the Senate from 33 to 34.

The direction of travel is worth reading honestly and fully. A record 26 women serve in the Senate today, the most in the nation's history, out of 100 seats (CAWP, Rutgers, 2024). That is both a real advance and an incomplete one, and the honest read holds both facts at once: the chamber has never had more women, and a third of the states had still never seated one until vacancies like this began closing the gap. The appointment power, invisible to voters on any ballot, has quietly done some of that closing.

What the appointment settles and what it does not

An appointment answers the near term cleanly. It fills a vote, it protects a state's representation, and in a chamber where margins are tight it can preserve a majority through a vacancy without waiting months for an election. What it does not do is confer the legitimacy of a statewide win or a legislative record, and the interim label reminds everyone of that. The seat still goes to the voters in the special election, and the appointee's brief tenure is measured against a floor she did not campaign to reach.

The larger point is that the Senate has two front doors, and Americans watch only one of them. The elected door gets the campaigns, the debates, and the returns. The appointed door gets a governor's signature and a swearing in. Both are constitutional, both are common, and one of them has been the way a striking number of the women in Senate history first walked onto the floor. South Carolina just used it, and the state's record now reads differently than it did last week.