Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina on Tuesday defeated a better-funded challenger in a primary election, bringing her closer to being elected to a third term in the House. Her landslide victory also dealt a major blow to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy's efforts to exact political revenge against those who voted to remove him from office.
Once a centrist on social issues, Mr. Mace, 46, won his Democratic seat in 2020 and argued that all of former President Donald J. Trump's achievements were “erased” by his actions on Jan. 6, 2021. But Mr. Mace has taken a hard line to the right over the past year as he seeks his political future. The Associated Press declared Mr. Mace the winner about two hours after polls closed on Tuesday.
She was the most surprising of the eight Republican rebels who voted to oust Mr. McCarthy last year, transforming her from an ally of Mr. McCarthy to one of his biggest targets for revenge. Outside groups linked to Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican, have backed his opponent, Katherine Templeton, and have spent more than $4 million attacking Ms. Mace.
Mace said the effort motivated her to try harder.
“I want to embarrass him tonight,” she said Tuesday over lunch at a Waffle House in Beaufort between polling places. “I want to send him back under the rock he lives under. He's not part of America. He has no idea what hardworking Americans go through every day. I want to piss Kevin McCarthy off.”
A spokesman for McCarthy declined to comment, and Mace did not mention him by name in his victory speech Tuesday night.
Mace, a former Waffle House waitress whose background is a big part of her political background, ordered her hash browns with confidence — sprinkled, diced, covered, peppered — and barely touched them.
She said in an interview that she had lost 30 pounds from her already slim figure since her painful breakup with her fiancé in November. That same month, she overhauled her Washington office, firing or resigning all of her senior staff. Her former chief of staff, Dan Hanlon, even filed papers against her at one point, but never followed through.
In the months that followed, many former employees anonymously spread damaging rumours about Ms. Mace's bizarre behaviour, including that she had openly made inappropriate comments about her sex life in front of junior staff.
“I don't talk about my sex life in private because it doesn't exist,” Mace said, dismissing any embarrassing stories as “inside Washington nonsense.” (Still, she acknowledged that the rumors were hard to deny after she made a vulgar joke about her sex life in public at a prayer breakfast hosted by Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina. She said her constituents don't care about insinuations from anonymous sources.)
She said the campaign had been a welcome distraction from her personal struggles.
Mace, who is his own campaign chairman, accused McCarthy of damaging the Republican Party out of a personal vendetta. “If he wants to be chief of staff, spend that money on Donald Trump in Michigan,” Mace said at the luncheon, a reference to the idea that McCarthy wants to be Trump's chief of staff in the White House if Trump wins in November. “He's got to stop dividing the party.”
She maintained that her vote to remove McCarthy from his position as speaker was not an attempt to divide the party, but rather a tough vote based on principle.
Still, her vote set off a fierce primary battle: Shortly before Mace arrived at the Waffle House, a New York Times photographer saw a woman remove a row of Mace campaign posters from the lawn outside the restaurant, throw them into her car, and drive away.
“That happens all the time,” Mace said when asked about the incident.
Mace has long struggled to find his place within the Republican Party, but appears to have decided he has no place without repairing his rift with Trump, and has become one of his most vocal supporters.
“I'm fully committed right now,” Mace said Tuesday when asked about the fact that he had previously said he would not campaign for Trump if he became the party's nominee. “A lot has changed. Three and a half years of Joe Biden. I'm fully committed to Trump.” Mace said Biden's reelection efforts are akin to “elder abuse.”
Mace endorsed Trump over former New Hampshire governor Nikki Haley, who supported him two years ago when Trump backed a far-right challenger trying to unseat her and called Mace a “phony loser.” Mace also worked to win back Trump's support by appearing frequently on television shows Trump watches and slamming the Justice Department for prosecuting him.
Those moves were met with scorn from her colleagues in Washington, but paid off politically at home: Trump loudly endorsed her during the campaign, a crucial show of support that helped steer away some of the outside money that might have gone to her opponent if she had come across as weaker. And it resonated with voters, even in districts that had voted for Haley in the presidential primary.
“President Trump's endorsement of her was a game-changer for me,” said Richard Chelten, a Beaufort resident who said he had voted for her earlier in the day. “I don't even know who Templeton is. I'd rather go with what I know.”
Mace's two years in Congress have been marked by dramatic and confusing policy shifts, including a policy reversal against Trump, that have won him a few friends in Washington that he takes pride in.
Longtime South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson endorsed Templeton, and Mace said he confronted Wilson on the House floor about the endorsement.
“I told him I would never do what he did to me,” she said.
But her actions were better received nationally. Lynn Fontaine, the southern regional representative for the Beaufort County Republican Party, said Mace's vote against McCarthy was a redemption moment for her.
The much-anticipated Mace-Templeton fight turned out to be little more than a proxy war between McCarthy and Mace, with little difference between the two candidates when it came to the issues at stake.
But the fight turned ugly. Mr. Mace called Mr. Templeton, a former state government official, a “puppet” of the former speaker. Mr. Templeton said Mr. Mace was always “shifting his attitude for fame.” And just days before the primary, Mr. Templeton spread allegations that Mr. Mace had sought excessive reimbursement from a taxpayer-funded program that allows lawmakers to seek reimbursement for expenses incurred in Washington.
Since his firing, McCarthy has made little attempt to hide his characteristically intense hatred for Mace. “I hope that Nancy gets the help that she needs, I really do,” he told reporters in February. “I just hope that she gets the help she needs to rebuild her life, because she has a lot going for her.”
Mace said he had no regrets about voting to oust McCarthy, but acknowledged that when he cast his vote last October he had no idea how decisive it would turn out to be.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has unsuccessfully lobbied lawmakers to end efforts to unseat incumbent Republicans, appeared at a headlining fundraiser for Mace in Washington. “He's operating from a place of principle and honor,” Mace said.
Mace is not expected to fight a tough fight in the November general election, and his district is rated Republican by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
“Even if I won by the biggest margin ever, I wouldn't change a thing,” she said just hours before polls closed.
