Mace seeks to ward off primary challenge amid GOP backlash

Rep. Nancy Mace (R) is looking to avert an upset in her South Carolina primary as she faces backlash from some members of her party.

Mace, who flipped her seat in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District back in 2020, is the front-runner heading into Tuesday’s primary against Catherine Templeton, a former agency official in the state government. However, recent polling has shown the incumbent is under the 50-percent mark, suggesting there’s a chance she could be forced into a runoff.

The primary comes as Mace has endured allegations of flip-flopping on key issues, criticism over her shifting support for former President Trump, anger from within the Republican ranks over her vote to oust ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), and turnover within her Capitol Hill office. At one point, her own former chief of staff filed to run against her.

“She’s controversial … She bounces from one position to the other with the ease of a bird flying in the air,” said Chip Felkel, a Republican strategist in South Carolina. 

“She uses the media pretty effectively, and she gets away with it — but when your chief of staff runs against you, I’d say that’s a warning sign. When you’ve had the staff turnover she’s had, I’d say that’s a warning sign,” Felkel said, adding that the lawmaker is following “Trump’s playbook.”

Just after taking office in 2021, Mace criticized Trump for his rhetoric around the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, argued the former president’s legacy was “wiped out” by the insurrection, and pushed the party to “rebuild.” In the midterms, Trump endorsed a Mace challenger, labeling the congresswoman “disloyal” to the GOP, though Mace in the end won reelection to a second term.

This time around, however, Mace has backed Trump as he seeks a return to the White House — and Trump has repaid the compliment by endorsing her. He’s called her a “strong, conservative voice” and touted her help after his South Carolina primary win against ex-rival Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor. Mace was also briefly rumored to be a potential name on Trump’s running mate shortlist. 

Mace’s shift toward Trump, which she defended last week, is one of the points her 2024 rivals have been hammering along the campaign trail. Templeton has called Mace a “fraud” who “claims loyalty” to the former president.

Alex Stroman, a former executive director for the South Carolina GOP, said that although voters may know Mace’s “fraught history” with Trump, his move to stand by her reelection bid may have eclipsed those earlier concerns and taken some wind out of her competitor’s sails. 

But Templeton, running to the right of the House incumbent, is also a Trump supporter, which may be leading to some voter confusion over which candidate is tied most closely to the former president, said Gibbs Knotts, a political science professor at the College of Charleston. 

Meanwhile, Mace has also come under fire from within her party for joining seven other Republicans last year with a vote to oust McCarthy from his top House leadership role, the first time in history that the lower chamber booted its Speaker. 

The South Carolina lawmaker was the only female Republican to vote for the removal, and she said in the days after that the move left her feeling “demonized” on Capitol Hill. 

Mace and McCarthy have feuded since the vote, and while the ex-Speaker hasn’t explicitly backed Templeton, he’s been involved with efforts to elevate challengers against the GOP lawmakers who fired him. Huge amounts of outside money have poured into the race, as groups linked to McCarthy have worked to boost Templeton. 

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who replaced McCarthy, is in Mace’s corner, while another former Speaker, Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), is behind Templeton. 

Mace has also come under scrutiny for a string of staff resignations and firings during her first year in Congress. Her former chief of staff, Dan Hanlon, filed to challenge her — reportedly after encouragement from McCarthy — though he later backed out. 

“She has some very real issues that I think have been exposed through her time in Congress,” Stroman said. “Obviously, she has no friend in the former Speaker, but she also has the Trump endorsement.”

“In a normal year, or normal times, I think that a lot of this stuff … might have disqualified her to a lot of voters,” Stroman said of Mace’s tensions with McCarthy and her changing support for the former president. But days out from the election, “it doesn’t look like it’s enough to get her out.” 

Dave Wilson, another South Carolina-based Republican strategist, suggested Lowcountry voters are dismissing the controversy around the lawmaker as “D.C. Beltway politics.” 

An Emerson College/The Hill survey from last month found Mace with a comfortable lead over Templeton.

But she was still just shy of skating through the primary at 47 percent, and with fellow Republican Bill Young also on the ticket, it’s not out of the question that Mace will be forced into a runoff.

“There’s always a possibility of a runoff, because in South Carolina you have to have 50 percent plus one,” said Wilson, adding there’s a chance Mace “can’t pull that off” with three GOP candidates in the ring.

A runoff would take place June 25.

“That’s just always risky — are your supporters going to come out again? Having to campaign for two more weeks, maybe an incumbent looks vulnerable, and maybe [that] would give the Templeton people a little bit of hope,” Knotts said.

On the Democrat side, Michael B. Moore and military veteran Mac Deford are running for their party nod, but a GOP win is all but assured in November. The nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report shifted the district into the “solid Republican” column last month. 

Still, the obvious tension within the GOP could open the door to Democrats clawing back some ground in the district in the future, argued Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist whose firm is based in the Palmetto State.

Mace has found herself “in the middle of the political roads, [getting] hit by cars coming from both sides of the political highway,” Seawright said.

The back-and-forth between Mace and Templeton in particular has grown intense, strategists said. Templeton knocked Mace in recent days over a Washington Post report that she expensed an average of thousands each month last year through a reimbursement program for members of Congress. 

Mace, in turn, bashed her challenger’s criticisms as “desperate cries of a desperate campaign who knows they are going to get their clock cleaned on Tuesday,” according to a release shared with The Hill. 

The race, which comes days after Trump was convicted in his Manhattan hush money case, could also be a test of the former president’s endorsement power after the guilty verdict. Political observers are questioning how the unprecedented trial will impact his presidential run — and whether it could wound the candidates he’s thrown his weight behind. 

“This is the place where you’re really beginning to see the presidential race play itself out,” Wilson said. “How well does a Trump endorsement play in this particular race? That tells you how well his messaging and his surrogates and his endorsees are going to be doing.” Mace notably won reelection in 2022 against a Trump-endorsed rival.

“I think so much of this is going to be a referendum on Nancy Mace, as much as a referendum on Trump,” Knotts said. “She’s certainly somebody who is in the headlines a lot. I think some people will like that. And then there’s probably other people who maybe don’t really enjoy the drama.”