Rep. Nancy Mace is about to learn how many fellow Republicans in her South Carolina district value her outspokenness and party-bucking, including a choice that created confusion and disarray by ejecting Kevin McCarthy as speaker.
Of the eight House Republicans who voted to topple McCarthy (R-Calif.), Mace is the first of the six who are seeking re-election to face voters. McCarthy is doing what he can to put his thumb on the scale by backing Mace’s leading opponent in Tuesday’s 1st District primary, former state labor secretary Catherine Templeton.
Also backing Templeton: their state’s longest-serving Republican congressman, Rep. Joe Wilson, and another former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich of Georgia. In Mace’s corner: Donald Trump and the current speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.)
The primary may boil down to a referendum on Mace, who has a unique political brand, more than a test of Trump’s sway with Republican primary voters in the only South Carolina district he lost to ex-Gov. Nikki Haley. The 1st District, which includes part of Charleston County and all of Beaufort County enveloping Hilton Head Island, is the state’s best-educated and highest-income district. Its other population centers of Berkeley and Dorchester Counties are more culturally conservative and Trump-friendly.
On Hilton Head Island, where the median household income is almost 50% higher than the statewide median, Templeton found a friendly audience in the gated Indigo Run community, where she mixed praise for Trump with disdain for Mace.
“If I spend as much time working as Nancy Mace spends in front of the camera, we’ll get 7,000 more things done,” Templeton told the Hilton Head Island Republican Club. Her promises? To be a “consistent conservative” and a “workhorse.”
Mace’s House colleagues “will not cooperate with her because she will not cooperate with them,” Templeton said.
The challenger framed Mace’s vote to depose McCarthy in terms of the downstream result: all business on the House floor stopped while Republicans regrouped and eventually installed Johnson as speaker. She focused on how that delayed US aid to Israel.
Party activist Xiaodan Li, who founded a Beaufort County group called Friends of Liberty, was among the Templeton supporters in the room. “Part of the reason that we like Catherine, she’s the exact opposite of Nancy Mace,” she said. “She’s a likable person. She’s relatable, but also she’s classy. She’s a team player, but she’s also a leader.”
Organizers said Mace didn’t respond to an invitation to the Hilton Head event. Mace’s team also didn’t reply to multiple Bloomberg Government inquiries about meeting on the campaign trail, though she did speak briefly outside the US Capitol this week, saying, “I am cautiously optimistic about Tuesday.”
Shifting Alliances
It’s an unusual primary that may flummox some voters because much has changed since Mace’s 2022 primary, which she won 53%-45% over a challenger Trump endorsed after Mace condemned his actions on Jan. 6, 2021 and said his “entire legacy was wiped out.”
Her constituent Haley helped Mace win that primary. This time, Mace endorsed Trump and some of the donors and at least one super-PAC that backed Mace in 2022 have switched to supporting Templeton.
“It’s a really nice look at the current division within the Republican Party, a district that Haley ended up winning even though Trump really was super-strong in this state,” Gibbs Knotts, a political scientist at the College of Charleston, said in an interview. “It’s just nuanced and complicated here by the fact that Mace wasn’t the Trump candidate in 2022, but now she is the Trump candidate in 2024.”
Mace’s allies include Club for Growth Action, a super-PAC promoting limited government that previously opposed Trump but is now aligned with him, and its allied Win it Back PAC. They’ve aired ads attacking Templeton’s state-government record on immigration.
Templeton noted that a major donor to Club for Growth Action is billionaire Jeff Yass, who owns a stake in TikTok‘s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance, and said the super-PAC intervened in the primary after Mace voted in March against a House-passed bill (H.R. 7521) that would ban TikTok in the US unless ByteDance sells the popular video-sharing app. Mace, who was among 15 Republicans who voted against the bill, said the bill was a government overreach.
A super PAC called South Carolina Patriots PAC has spent more than $3.8 million attacking Mace, including on a TV ad attacking her vote last September against a stopgap funding and border measure (H.R. 5525) that included most provisions from House Republicans’ border security package (H.R. 2).
Mace was among the 21 Republicans who voted no, helping sink the measure just days before the vote to oust McCarthy.
South Carolina Patriots PAC formed in March and raised $3.4 million through May 22. Almost all of it came from another super-PAC, America Fund, which had $1.2 million cash-on-hand as of March 31, before it began funding South Carolina Patriots PAC. The two super-PACs’ shared campaign-finance compliance firm didn’t return messages seeking more information.
Winning for Women Action Fund, which bills itself as the first super PAC dedicated solely to electing Republican women, flagged the same Mace vote and shifted its support to Templeton after it backed Mace in the 2022 primary and initially endorsed her for re-election in May 2023. The group has spent more than $652,000 on the primary.
Outside spending in the contest has topped $7 million. Compare that with the total spent on every ad aired in both the primary and general elections in that district in 2022, which AdImpact tallied at $4.9 million.
‘My Opponent Lies’
At a May 29 candidate forum sponsored by the Post and Courier newspaper, Mace said it was “asinine” to attack her on immigration because she’s backed more than 60 border security or immigration measures including H.R. 2, which the House passed in May 2023 but the Democratic-controlled Senate hasn’t taken up. The House Judiciary Committee last month advanced a Mace bill (H.R. 7909) to allow for deportation of undocumented immigrants who commit sex offenses or domestic violence.
“My opponent lies about everything almost every single day,” Mace said.
With the US public debt approaching $35 trillion, Mace defended her votes against large-scale fiscal measures like what she called a “horrific” debt-ceiling agreement McCarthy negotiated with President Joe Biden (Public Law 118-5).
Debt Limit Defector Mace Touts Independence As Key For Party
“We’re bankrupting our country, we’re bankrupting our kids, we’re bankrupting our grandkids,” Mace told spectators at the newspaper’s forum at a Mount Pleasant, S.C., brewery.
While Mace has cited Trump’s endorsement, she’s running more on her unique brand and record of accomplishment. She has a compelling story as a rape survivor who went on to become the first woman to graduate from The Citadel’s Corps of Cadets. After serving in the South Carolina House, she won the 1st District in 2020 by unseating one-term Rep. Joe Cunningham (D).
At the Hobcaw Brewing Co. event, some of Mace’s younger supporters wore white campaign T-shirts emblazoned on the back with a “Based Mace” image of the congresswoman with glowing eyes — “based” being a compliment for someone doing their own thing and unconcerned with what others think.
“Mace and Templeton on most issues are pretty close and pretty similar, but Mace has proven to be much more unpredictable over the last couple of years,” said Danielle Vinson, a politics professor at Furman University in Greenville and a native South Carolinian. “Some of that performance on her part may not be sitting well with some of the folks in her district.”
Neither Mace nor Templeton have been focusing on the primary’s third candidate, who has a chance to draw enough support to force a runoff.
First-time candidate Bill Young, a Marine Corps veteran, is running on a shoestring budget — he raised about $20,000 through May 22 — and relying more on getting his name out through word-of-mouth and local media interviews. His red, white, and blue campaign signs play up his Marine background — a selling point in a district that includes Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort and the Parris Island boot camp he attended.
“We’ve got five military installations here in this district and we’ve got close to a hundred thousand veterans in this district,” Young said in an interview. “So I think it’s very important that we have someone who served, who understands the needs of our veterans.”
His platform includes improving mental-health staffing and services at the Veterans Affairs Department, opposing the Biden administration’s “incoherent” foreign policy, and working with Panama’s government to shut down the Darien Gap migrant crossing between Central and South America. He’s also highlighted more district-specific needs, like helping the struggling local shrimping industry against foreign competition.
“A vote for Bill Young is not a wasted vote,” he said. “We will deliver for the Lowcountry.”
The Republican nominee will be favored to win the Nov. 5 general election in a district that leans Republican but not overwhelmingly so: in the 2020 election, Trump carried South Carolina’s 1st by 9 percentage points. Democrats Michael B. Moore, a business executive, and Mac Deford, a Coast Guard veteran who worked as a local government attorney, are seeking the seat.
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