FITSForum: America’s Craziest Congresswoman is Running for S.C. Governor

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by ALBERT EISENBERG

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“What happened to Nancy Mace?” is a question I hear a lot when I leave Charleston. The answer I give is that there is one clear throughline to her career. It’s psychological, not political. Whether positioning herself as a consensus-building moderate, a MAGA loyalist or an Epstein whistleblower, the hallmark of Mace’s public life has been constant attention-seeking. Everything is all about Nancy. Even in an era of exceptionally self-serving and shallow politics, she stands alone. Her constituents are not her consideration.

With her stellar biography and apparent pragmatic streak, Mace showed great promise when she rose from the South Carolina legislature to flip a light-red Congressional district to the GOP in 2020. By 2023 she had morphed into an anti-establishment firebrand, joining seven of her House colleagues to defenestrate former Speaker Kevin McCarthy from the right. Now, running for governor, she’s “Trump in heels.”

Throughout, she has shown a propensity to insert herself into policy and personality debates. This has spilled over into her personal life, which her constituents know too much about. 

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Witness her public engagement and then very public split from a prominent Charleston businessman, her explicit discussions of their sex life at a prayer breakfast and with her staff, her decision to use a Congressional floor speech to accuse a political opponent of a rape cover-up (with no evidence), and her “profanity-laced tirade” against members of Charleston’s airport TSA last fall. This latest rant was rebuked by everybody from our police chief to our state’s Republican senators. Afterwards, Mace chose to double-down on both social media and cable news, staking out her moral high ground by claiming she was the victim.

See, too, her constant insertion of herself into the fallout of the release of the Epstein files. While it is true that she has been a public advocate for their full release, she always seems to position herself in front of the microphone.

For most people, this behavior is erratic. But it follows a consistent pattern: Mace is unable to operate unless she is in fight mode. First, she sparks an outrage, or inserts herself into the middle of one. After provoking a negative reaction, she then claims she is being attacked. But the attention—most of it negative—only satisfies for a short while, and then it is onto the next crisis. That is why her Congressional staff, according to the Daily Beast, was instructed “to book Mace on a national TV outlet between one and three times per day.” 

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All of this has alienated Mace from her colleagues, as well as everybody else. Political insiders, and anyone who has worked for her, invariably roll their eyes at the mention of her name. When the Wall Street Journal recently interviewed “more than two dozen people involved in GOP politics, [they] found none who said they supported Mace.” After almost a decade in politics, a national publication could not find a single person to go on-record in support of our Congresswoman. That is embarrassing. In Washington, this leaves Lowcountry priorities—infrastructure, development, and defense—unlikely to be heard.

Most voters are turned off by such behavior. But a portion of both political bases enjoys the kind of “fighter” that Mace embodies. She is an avatar for our outrage-fueled, shallow political culture. These voters are by no means the majority, but they fuel a political culture that is more and more narcissistic and personality-driven.

It is not a surprise that in this year’s governor’s race, Mace boasts a high name ID. Whether this will help or hurt her among the remaining Republican voting base—those of us who are not looking for a perpetual psychodrama from our next governor—is an open question. Recent polling shows a competitive and unsettled race. Mace seems to view our state Attorney General Alan Wilson as her primary competition, which points to the source of her escalating and underhanded attacks on him.

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Rep. Mace would be better served to quietly reflect on whatever is driving her to embarrass herself, everybody around her, and all of her constituents so early and often in the most public ways possible. Maybe she could—to borrow an overused phrase from the political left—heal from whatever is ailing her. While we live, there is hope.

In the meantime, every voter can consider why we are rewarding the type of brazen politics she represents with our attention (and votes) on both the right and left. As for Mace, Republican primary voters will have our recourse in this June’s governor’s race.

My bet is that after that, she’ll have time to sit with her decisions and behavior outside of the public eye.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…

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Albert Eisenberg runs the political messaging agency Red Bridge. Based between Charleston, S.C,. and Pennsylvania, he has been featured in Politico Magazine, RealClearPolitics, Fox News and elsewhere. @?Albydelphia.

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