Rep. Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, defeated a well-funded primary challenger on Tuesday, putting her on track to win a third term. His resounding victory also dealt a blow to former President Kevin McCarthy’s efforts to demand political retaliation against those who voted to oust him.
Ms. Mace, 46, who once focused on social issues, won a Democratic seat in 2020 and claimed that all of former President Donald J. Trump’s accomplishments had been “wiped out” by his behavior on June 6. January 2021. But she has taken a firm turn to the right over the past year as she tries to figure out her political future.
She was the most unlikely of the eight rebel Republicans who voted to oust Mr. McCarthy last year, which transformed her from an ally into one of his main targets for revenge. Outside groups with ties to Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican, have invested more than $4 million to support his opponent, Catherine Templeton, and attack Ms. Mace.
In the end, however, Ms. Mace won comfortably: With almost all the votes Tuesday night, she was ahead by 27 percentage points. And she said Mr. McCarthy’s efforts had motivated her to work harder.
“I hope to embarrass him tonight,” she said earlier Tuesday during lunch at a Waffle House in Beaufort, between stops at polling places. “I want to send him back to the rock he’s living under right now. He is not part of America. He doesn’t know what hard-working Americans go through every day. I hope I drive Kevin McCarthy crazy.
A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy declined to comment, and Ms. Mace did not mention him by name in her victory speech Tuesday night.
Ms. Mace, whose story as a former Waffle House waitress is an important part of her political biography, ordered her hash browns with confidence: scattered, diced, topped and peppered. Then she barely touched them.
She said in the interview that she had lost 30 pounds from her already slim figure since November, when she went through a difficult breakup with her fiancé. The same month, it overhauled its Washington office, where all of its senior staff were fired or resigned. Her former chief of staff, Dan Hanlon, at one point even filed paperwork to run against her, but he didn’t.
Many of those former staffers spent the next few months anonymously spreading unflattering stories about Ms. Mace’s erratic behavior, including that she had a habit of speaking openly and inappropriately about her life. sexual activity in front of junior staff members.
“I don’t talk about my sex life privately because it’s non-existent,” Ms. Mace said, brushing aside all the embarrassing stories as “inside the Beltway BS” (she nevertheless admitted it was a rumor hard to deny after making a ridiculous joke in public about her sex life, at a prayer breakfast hosted by Sen. Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. She said her constituents don’t care about the insinuations. anonymous.)
The campaign, she said, was a welcome distraction from her personal struggles.
Ms. Mace, who is her own campaign manager, accused Mr. McCarthy of hurting the GOP in his quest for personal vengeance. “If he wants to be chief of staff, go take that money and spend it on Donald Trump in Michigan,” she said over lunch, referring to the idea that Mr. McCarthy would like to be the Mr. Trump’s chief of staff in the White Parliament. House, if Mr. Trump wins in November. “He needs to stop dividing our party.”
She insisted she was not dividing the party when she voted to oust Mr McCarthy as speaker, but instead opted for a tough, principled vote.
Yet his vote sparked a bitter primary battle. Shortly before Ms. Mace arrived at Waffle House, a New York Times photographer observed a woman remove a row of Mace’s campaign signs from the restaurant’s front lawn, throw them into her car and drive away.
“This happens all the time,” Ms Mace said when informed of the incident.
Ms. Macé went back and forth for a long time As she tried to find a resting place for herself in today’s GOP, she seems to have decided there wouldn’t be one if she didn’t mend her rift with Mr. Trump, so she became the one of his loudest cheerleaders.
“I completely agree now,” Ms. Mace said Tuesday when pressed that she had said in the past that she would not campaign for Mr. Trump if he became the party candidate. “A lot has changed – three and a half years of Joe Biden. I’m all about Trump.” She said President Biden’s re-election amounts to “elder abuse.”
Ms. Mace endorsed Mr. Trump over Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor who stood by her two years ago when the former president called Ms. Mace a “big loser” then that he was supporting a far-right challenger seeking to unseat her. Ms. Mace has also worked to regain Mr. Trump’s support by constantly appearing on television programs he watches and lambasting the Justice Department for indicting him.
The moves earned her some eye rolls from her colleagues in Washington, but paid off politically at home: Mr. Trump vehemently endorsed her in the race, a show of critical support that also helped scare away some of the outside money that would most likely have been invested. her opponent if she had seemed more vulnerable. It also resonated with voters, even in a constituency that voted for Ms. Haley in the presidential primary.
“The fact that she was endorsed by President Trump was a defining decision for me,” said Richard Chelten, a Beaufort resident who said he voted for her earlier in the day. “I don’t even know who this Templeton guy is. I prefer to go with what I know.
Over the past two years, Ms. Mace’s tenure in Congress has been characterized by drama and confusing reversals, like the one she had against Mr. Trump. They won her some friends in Washington, a fact she wears with pride.
Rep. Joe Wilson, a longtime Republican from South Carolina, endorsed Ms. Templeton. Ms Mace said she confronted him about the endorsement in the House.
“I told him I would never do to him what he did to me,” she said.
But his actions translated better at home. Lynn Fontaine, southern regional director of the Beaufort County Republican Party, said Mace’s “vote against McCarthy was a redemptive moment for her.”
The high-profile race between Ms. Mace and Ms. Templeton amounted to little more than a proxy war between Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Mace, and there was little daylight between the two candidates on these issues.
But the competition went wrong. Ms. Mace called Ms. Templeton, a former state government official, a “puppet” of the former president. Ms Templeton said Ms Mace was “constantly flip-flopping towards fame”. And a few days before the primaries, Ms. Templeton promoted allegations that the MP requested excessive reimbursements a taxpayer-funded program that allows lawmakers to seek reimbursement for expenses incurred in Washington.
Since his ouster, Mr. McCarthy has done little to conceal his distinctive vitriol toward Ms. Mace. “I hope Nancy gets the help she needs – she really does,” Mr McCarthy told reporters in February. “I just hope she gets some help to turn her life around. I mean, she has a lot of challenges.
Ms Mace said she had no regrets about her vote to oust Mr McCarthy. But she admitted that when she voted last October, she had no idea how that would define it.
Speaker Mike Johnson, who has tried unsuccessfully to get his members to stop seeking to unseat incumbent Republicans, headlined a fundraiser for Ms. Mace in Washington. “He is acting from an honorable and principled position,” she said.
Ms. Mace is not expected to run a competitive race in the November general election. His district is ranked solidly Republican by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
“If I win by the biggest margin I’ve ever won,” she said hours before the polls closed, “I won’t change anything at all.”
