Have I ever mentioned how much I don’t like Lindsey Graham?

GREENVILLE, S.C. — Kicking the crap out of the Tea Party is the most fun Senator Lindsey Graham has ever had.

“More fun than any time I’ve been in politics,” Graham tells me at the YMCA here, where he’s about to address a couple dozen supporters. Little kids are streaming through the halls to their gym classes, and a smell of sweat hangs in the air. “Because people are being uplifting,” Graham continues. “People are really saying, ‘OK, enough already.’ They’re starting to push back from trying to define conservatism in a fashion where there is no room for solving problems.”

Ever since the rise of the Tea Party, Graham—a politician who seems to delight in sticking his finger in the eye of the Republican base—has been on the front lines of the struggle for the soul of the GOP. For years, they have heckled him and called him names. But now he is having the last laugh. Facing six no-name opponents in Tuesday’s primary, Graham needs 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff, and he is confident he will get it.

“This has turned into a referendum not just on me, but on you, right?” Graham tells his supporters. Winning the primary outright, he says, “will not only get me back to the Senate. It will legitimize everything I’ve tried to do for you. It will be a statement heard all over the country—a statement about the Republican Party moving forward, not backward.”