🍻 In This Week's Hill Spill: Ralph Norman Hates It for the State (Not for Him), a Twink Fascist Walks Into a Senate Race and Chuck Edwards Files Poetry as a Defense

🍹 Welcome to this week’s Hill Spill. It’s the last Thursday of recess. Nobody is behaving like it.

Ralph Norman lost South Carolina, skipped the prepared remarks, and spent the rest of the night being a hater. Mike Collins has another name in the personnel file. Oklahoma’s new Democratic Senate nominee just learned what happens when you win and an 11-month-old TikTok is still sitting there. Chuck Edwards sent the House a letter that had to specify, out loud, that poetry is not sexual misconduct. And Dolly left us Tuesday. We’re actually devastated about that one.

House is back Monday. They have a censure vote waiting.

Grab a drink. Let’s get into it. 🍸

The South Carolina GOP Senate primary runoff is in the books, and Darline Graham prevailed, riding a Trump-fueled surge through the Myrtle Beach area to the nomination.

Her opponent, Ralph Norman, did not appear to take it well. In fact, he took it badly enough on stage that the real question this week isn’t whether Graham won, but whether the way Norman lost leaves a mark heading into November…

Graham beat Norman 52.5% to 47.5%, a roughly 18,000-vote statewide margin. Norman took the Upstate. Graham carried the Midlands, the Lowcountry and the Myrtle Beach area, where Trump’s Friday rally in Horry County juiced her turnout.

Graham was appointed to fill the seat of her late brother, Lindsey Graham, who died July 11. Trump recruited, endorsed and campaigned for her, telling the Myrtle Beach crowd to pretend he was on the ballot, which appeared to help put her over the finish line.

What many argue did not work was Norman’s concession...

He opened by admitting: “I did not prepare a concession speech. I’ll tell you, that was not in the cards,” which is a bold thing to skip in a race everyone expected to be close.

What followed was, as one senior South Carolina source put it to us, stream-of-consciousness.

Norman leaned in pretty hard on one phrase: “I hate it for the state. I really hate it for the state,” he said. “I don’t hate it for me. I don’t hate it for the family.” He added: “We’re going to be fine, but we did this for service, and I hate it for the state. But the public, South Carolina, made their decision.”

Then he turned to Trump’s role: “The president got involved. He has that right. That’s his prerogative.”

He added, “Well, y’all, his policies are good,” before adding that he never understood why Trump got in the race, but “it is what it is, and I’ll accept it,” and promising vaguely that “something good will come out of this. I don’t know what it is, but something good will come out of it.”

So does the bitterness cost Graham? One GOP operative, speaking on background, wasn’t buying the doom talk, but wasn’t celebrating either. First, a little grace for Ralph, as the operative put it: “He just spent five or six million of his own money to lose statewide twice in three months. Probably worthy of a little grace to be a little salty.” Fair enough. He finished third in the June gubernatorial primary, then lost the Senate runoff on Tuesday.

Looking ahead to November, the operative’s read was that the party faithful fall in line: “Republicans always turn out and vote for the Republican in November. They held their nose for Lindsey for decades; they’ll do it for his sister.” They then hedged: “Ralph would have won comfortably. Every Republican would have voted for Ralph. There’s a risk of some sitting it out with her.” In their telling, a seat that should never be competitive now draws real Democratic money. “Shouldn’t even be a contest. And it didn’t have to happen. It’s all optional,” they told us.

Sources pointed us to the moment Norman hesitated before saying his opponent’s first name, and his wife, Elaine, made a face and offered “whatever her last name is.” Never a dull evening in Rock Hill.

Trump didn’t let the concession-speech shot go unanswered. The next day he took to Truth Social to post: “Ralph Norman had the look of a good Congressman (Not great, but good), but ruined his career when he endorsed Nikki Haley.”

Norman was the only House Republican to back Haley over Trump in the 2024 primary. Grudge: officially still warm.

What’s next is a real question for a guy who’s now lost two statewide races in a year. Rep. William Timmons (R-S.C.) suggested on X: “There is a seat open for county council in Spartanburg!” Brutal.

Graham now faces Democrat Annie Andrews, a Lowcountry pediatrician, in November. No Democrat has won a Senate seat in South Carolina since 1998.

Polling has them neck and neck.

Norman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If there is an unofficial record for Senate campaigns haunted by their own personnel files, Rep. Mike Collins is making a run at it. Thursday’s entry is Preston Parra, 24, a 2024 House intern who later took money from Collins’ leadership PAC, according to the Washington Post, and who spent today treating that exposé as a brand launch.

The Post reported that Parra interned in Collins’ congressional office for about two months in 2024, then worked as a contractor for Overhaul PAC. FEC filings cited by The Post show the PAC paid him $7,700 in May 2025 for fundraising consulting. Parra told the paper he worked for the group for several months, shortly before Collins announced his Senate bid. The Collins camp has stated that Parra has no affiliation with the campaign.

The Post, which published Thursday morning, said its search of Parra’s X account found a July post of a swastika built from the word “twink” and a June image that appeared to show him in Ku Klux Klan robes. The paper also described “White Power” posts, a Nazi-linked German lyric, slurs aimed at Black people, and a bio that read “twink fascist” until he locked the account on Aug. 24.

Parra told the publication the posts were “satirical,” called himself a provocateur and said the Klan image was made with Grok. He said Collins never saw the personal account because it was private.

“What, is there supposed to be some kind of CIA background check?” he said. He went on to tell the paper he is not a white supremacist, citing his religion and a Colombian father, then said he thinks “the white race contributes more to the world.”

He then proceeded to post through it after the story dropped. On the @PrestonDelToro account Thursday he wrote, “Let a n*** build his twink fascist regime…” Later came a “Twink Fascist Ameri-Euro Empire” that, “unlike Jon Ossoff,” “will not be bombing Gaza,” capped with “Free Twinks. Free Palestine!”

That would be a bleak story for any campaign in isolation. The Washington Post and other outlets have already mapped a longer Collins orbit of controversial figures.

The Collins’ campaign dismissed former chief of staff and campaign strategist Brandon Phillips after the campaign’s X account mocked the alleged sexual assault of the wife of an operative tied to a primary rival. Collins called the post unauthorized and “despicable” at the time. Separately, the Office of Congressional Conduct said in January there was “substantial reason to believe” Phillips hired someone he had a personal relationship with as a district intern who “did not perform duties commensurate with her compensation,” and referred the matter to House Ethics. Collins has called the probe a “nothingburger.” He and Phillips have denied wrongdoing.

In May, former Collins digital director William Paul confronted Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) at a bar with antisemitic insults, an exchange NOTUS reporter Reese Gorman witnessed. Paul was no longer on the payroll by then.

The family file is in the mix too. In July, CNN reported that Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has shared Nazi imagery and white-nationalist content online, including asking followers whether he should make a video titled “why Gen-Z doesn’t hate Hitler.” Collins told CNN that Scheer “has had no role in my campaign whatsoever” and that he does not support those views and “has always condemned racism and antisemitism regardless of the source.”

The Collins campaign asserted Parra “has no affiliation with Mike Collins’ office or campaign,” called the posts “vile, completely unhinged,” and said Collins “unequivocally condemns them.” The campaign also pivoted to what it called a rise in antisemitism “among Jon Ossoff’s allies,” naming Hasan Piker and Abdul El-Sayed.

Ossoff said Thursday: “Swastikas and the Klan. Another week, another scandal for the bigot Congressman Mike Collins and his collapsing Senate campaign.”

Sources tell us some Republicans worry the associations around Collins could become a problem in a race that could move a 53-47 Senate and the polling seems to back up those concerns.

We’ve got a very special guest this week: Erin Maguire, GOP strategist, CBS contributor, Party Lines podcast co-host, and one of our favorite gals to happy hour with, who joined us to goss about an array of topics!

We get into the Karoline Leavitt vacancy at the podium and what kind of person actually works in that job right now. She also gives us her take on Natalie Harp, making the case that Washington should leave alone.

Erin fills us in on why she thinks the 2028 GOP primary is going to be a bar brawl and because no gossip sesh is complete without it, we speculate on how many male politicians are secretly freezing their foreheads (the number who’ve confessed to us is much higher than one would think), plus our own hard-earned takes on hair extensions. For the record: we are pro.

There is a time and a place for recreating Mean Girls in your pink bedroom — when you’re eyeing a U.S. Senate run probably isn’t it.

Meet N’Kiyla Jasmine Thomas, the 31-year-old nurse and democratic socialist who won Oklahoma’s Democratic Senate runoff Tuesday over attorney Jim Priest. She’ll face Rep. Kevin Hern (R) in November for the seat Markwayne Mullin vacated to run Homeland Security.

It’s a deep-red state, so she was always going to be swimming upstream. Winning just made an 11-month-old TikTok worth someone else’s time.

She didn’t post it because she won. It popped off because she won — the clip is from September 2025. Within a day of the runoff, Republicans excavated it, and it did numbers — just not the kind you want after a nomination.

In the video, Thomas tears around a pink bedroom to the movie’s famous freak-out, pulls a “Burn Book” from a drawer, slots in a photo of Mullin, and reads him for filth — “terrible senator,” “Christian nationalist,” “mediocre white man.” She closed on the line virtually every millennial in the English-speaking world knows by heart, only swapped in Mullin: “Stop trying to make Mullin happen. He’s not fetch.”

Reader, we clocked it immediately. Mean Girls is one of our favorite movies. This is a bit — a stylized homage to Regina George’s spiral, not, as several very online critics seemed to genuinely believe, raw footage of a breakdown. The scream track is the joke. The pink room is the joke. “He’s not fetch” is the joke wearing a name tag.

The right-wing commentariat did what it does. Ted Cruz pronounced the whole thing “cray-cray.” Scott Jennings said he expected scenes like this on “3 of the 4 nights of the DNC in 2028.” A parade of accounts pivoted from “she’s satirizing a movie” to “she should be institutionalized.” A lot of the people passing the clip around skipped the very obvious Mean Girls parallel.

Asked about the video, Kevin Hern told us: “I think it speaks for itself” — a rare bit of restraint in a week that had very little.

Our take: a 30-something recreating Mean Girls in a pink bedroom for TikTok is a little cringe no matter your politics. The “how do you do, fellow kids” energy is strong here. Over at Sources Say, we’re equal-opportunity haters on cringe ads and social copy. On Wednesdays we wear pink. The rest of the week we’re writing up unhinged political news.

How cringeworthy can politicians get? The limit does not exist. ¯\(ツ)/¯

There are sentences you never want to send to the whole House. Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) picked a memorable one.

NOTUS first reported that Edwards circulated a 22-page Dear Colleague letter this week attacking the Ethics Committee report that called for his censure and asking members to vote no. The sentence already doing laps around the building: “Poetry is not sexual misconduct.” He also wants colleagues to accept that a gift, a compliment, and “socializing with a colleague” are not sexual misconduct either. If the defense has to name poetry specifically, the night is not going well.

Kate Santaliz, a friend of the newsletter, broke the initial story on Edwards’ misconduct toward the staffers. The committee later released a 25-page report finding “substantial evidence” that Edwards, 65 and married since 1980, engaged in “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct” toward two female staffers in their 20s. It recommended censure.

The report’s most circulated scene is a goodbye party for one of the women. Edwards grew “choked up and teary-eyed” reading a poem he had written for her while photos of the two of them ran on a screen. Staff in the room said it was uncomfortable. Edwards later told investigators he could see that. Thus the poetry paragraph.

The gift inventory in the report includes more than $1,000 in jewelry, designer handbags, engraved handguns (one pink, one blue), shoes, flowers, a laptop and a phone, a KitchenAid, a robot vacuum, trips, tickets, and dinners for two. One staffer said she felt “obligated to wear” a necklace he bought her, and that he told her he was disappointed when she did not. He sent another a custom Adam Sandler puzzle with a note inviting her to the show and to “dinner beforehand, or a drink or dessert afterwards.” He also had roughly 30 flavors of ice cream dropped at a staffer’s house to “cheer her up.” She texted that it seemed “a bit excessive.” His reply: “You looked like you needed a lot of cheering up! My heart was breaking seeing you like that.”

Edwards’ letter leans on what the committee did not find. He writes that investigators concluded he “neither engaged in sexual activity with nor explicitly propositioned any individual staff member.” He says no House rule bars members and staff from being friends. Conduct, he argues, is not harassment “merely because someone looking backward through thousands of pages can construct a theory under which it ‘could be interpreted as romantic.’” He notes that one staffer called him her “second dad,” and that a witness described one of the relationships as “father/daughter” and “mentor/mentee.” That is the argument.

Shorter version: if you are explaining to the floor that poetry is not sexual misconduct, the poem is not what people are voting on.

Edwards has already abandoned his reelection race. The letter is an attempt to beat the censure resolution itself. The House is expected to take it up when members return Aug. 31.

We love Dolly. We have always loved Dolly. Last week we raised a Dirt Road Martini to our queen, our president, our rhinestone patron saint, not knowing she was quietly fighting the fight of her life. She left us Tuesday at 80, and we've been a mess about it all week. So this week we're pouring something bittersweet, because that's exactly where we are: grateful she existed, gutted she's gone.

We went looking for a drink with a little smoke and a little sting to match the mood, so after a deep Google search on Dolly-themed bevs, we landed on Jolene’s bittersweet cocktail. It's got range, so did she.

Here's to Dolly, who farmed songs and happiness, gave away a hundred million books and never once did us dirty.