Who is Rep. Nancy Mace? Republicans question where she stands

Her move managed to further incense her colleagues, who had no insight into what Mace viewed as a path forward. Some were already fuming over her pattern of unpredictable decisions, including joining with seven hard-line Republicans in getting rid of McCarthy, which set off a chaotic 22 days in which the House stagnated without a leader.

The contempt for her was apparent when Rep. Dusty Johnson, a mild-mannered Republican from South Dakota, ripped into Mace after she interrupted his hallway interview in the weeks after her vote against the former speaker.

“Blind ambition has distorted this process enough. … Let’s be clear, Nancy Mace, it’s been a long time since she’s done anything productive to move forward this broader team,” Johnson said.

Mace’s decision comes after years spent vacillating between a persona of moderation and Trump acolyte. Her now-routine opposition to Republican-backed legislation before eventually voting for it has perplexed some of her colleagues and political staff around her. Her Charleston-area district, once considered a toss-up, was redrawn such that her constituents skew more to the right, which in part helps explain why she has again claimed the MAGA mantle to raise money and burnish her reputation as an ultraconservative.

But the lawmaker who came to Washington in 2021 in the waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency, seeking to position herself as a moral compass of the House GOP conference, has only reinforced the perception that she lacks a North Star — a refrain uttered by many of her Republican colleagues, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.

Mace’s highly publicized flip-flops have given her a reputation of an apostate more than a maverick, with no clear political identity or ideology, according to more than 30 lawmakers, staffers and operatives who work in South Carolina and on Capitol Hill.

“Unserious people get found out here very quickly,” one GOP lawmaker said. “She’s an unserious person.”

The final outcome of the speaker’s race only reinforced that image: Mace, who said she voted to oust McCarthy because of his failure to prioritize bills pertaining to reproductive rights, ultimately voted in support of now-Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has an extensive record of supporting restrictive antiabortion legislation and has championed a nationwide ban.

Mace, 45, sat for an extensive interview with The Washington Post earlier this year where she discussed her life in Congress, cautioned her party against taking extreme positions on abortion and expressed overall disappointment with the direction of Republican and Democratic leadership heading into 2024.

“It’s important to have women that are strong and don’t put up with the bulls—,” Mace said this spring about the treatment she’s received from some of her colleagues. “If you’re going to treat me in a certain way, then I’m going to punch you in the face. I’ll punch you right back. It’s not okay.”

She also marveled at what she viewed as her ability to lead “the national narrative on abortion issues for the party.”

Mace declined an additional interview with The Post in the midst of heightened scrutiny of her vote against McCarthy, with her spokesperson instead responding to specific claims.

“Congresswoman Mace is under attack from the left and the right for taking a strong stand against the Washington establishment,” spokesperson Will Hampson said in a statement.

He said Mace missed the aforementioned conference meeting because her “priority was to explain her vote” to her constituents. And he defended Mace’s vote against McCarthy, saying the former speaker had “lost trust and was ineffective.”

“Congresswoman Mace of course understands she and Speaker Johnson will regularly disagree on issues, as all members do,” Hampson said. “But she believes he will be straightforward with the conference.”

In a statement provided to The Post, Johnson praised Mace as a “smart, dedicated lawmaker who is fully devoted to the needs of her constituents. … She has my full support and I look forward to working with her in the fateful days ahead of us.”

Since her vote against McCarthy, who had pumped thousands of dollars into her campaign coffers since she was elected in 2020, Mace has jumped from one attention-seeking episode to another.

She appeared with fellow McCarthy defector Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” and solicited campaign donations off her vote on cable news. She showed up at another House GOP meeting sporting a white shirt emblazoned with a red capital “A” — a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” that Mace said was a commentary on her being “demonized for my vote and for my voice.”

Mace’s appearance on “War Room” was a full-circle moment. She had once voted to hold Bannon, the close Trump ally, in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. It was that vote, preceded by fierce criticism of her own party for the attack, that first pushed Mace’s career into the national spotlight.

“I would say I have a different flavor of Republicanism,” Mace said on “The Daily Show” last week. “I would like to think of myself as more of a maverick, right? So when I’m with my party I support them, I’ll vote with them and then I’ll call them out when I disagree.”

But Katie Arrington, a South Carolina legislator who unsuccessfully challenged Mace in the 2022 GOP primary, argued Mace “doesn’t care about politics — this is just her vehicle. … She just wants to be famous and get more press time.”

The effort to understand Mace has become its own political genre, with profiles published over the past three years that have both lionized her attempts to buck the party line and criticized her U-turns on issues. Some of her colleagues have come to a simpler conclusion.

In late September, amid a bruising stretch of strife in the House GOP conference over a temporary spending bill designed to prevent a government shutdown, a Republican lawmaker texted a group of colleagues to vent about Mace, who voted against the GOP bill. The lawmaker included a link to a video posted by a personal injury lawyer turned Instagram influencer titled, “How to talk to a Narcissist.”

A lawmaker on the thread said the video clarified his view of Mace.

“I didn’t get her at all, and was lost at sea for a few years but what [the video] was describing is what we all experienced,” the lawmaker said of his attempts to work with Mace on budgetary issues. “[Narcissists] love the drama.”

Women’s issues at center of Mace’s political persona

A series of articles this spring detailed Mace’s references to herself as a “caucus of one” and on a “lonely island,” amid claims she was seeking to woo back independent voters who fled the GOP under Trump. Styling herself as a moderating force on issues such as abortion and gun violence, she argued that Republicans need to stop coming across like “a–holes” to women.

That coverage stemmed from her resistance to debt ceiling legislation in May: She was initially a no on the bill, joining a chorus of hard-right lawmakers trashing the package’s failure to balance the budget in 10 years. She soon flipped her support, touting promises she had extracted from McCarthy to prioritize floor votes on a bill she introduced urging the Food and Drug Administration to give priority review to a range of over-the-counter contraceptives and her amendment on balancing the budget.

Mace has earned some admiration for bucking GOP orthodoxy and creating a platform to advocate for policies regarding reproductive rights. Earlier this year, she urged the FDA to ignore a judge’s ruling blocking its approval of an abortion pill and slammed her colleagues for taking what she called “extreme” positions on abortion rights.

But Mace’s voting record paints a different picture. She voted last year against a bill that would enshrine protections of Roe v. Wade into law; missed a vote on another bill that would reaffirm the right for someone seeking an abortion to travel across state lines; and over the summer, cast a vote in support of an amendment included in the National Defense Authorization Act to reverse the Biden administration’s policy on reimbursing travel costs for service members seeking abortions.

Mace has said she supports abortion until “15 or 20 weeks” of gestation with exceptions for victims of rape and incest. For now, she faces no real test of that belief: Under McCarthy, Republican leadership privately indicated that they had no plans to bring a national abortion ban to the House floor. It remains to be seen whether Johnson will follow suit.

But some of Mace’s colleagues disputed her depiction of McCarthy’s failure to keep his promises on bills Mace pushed for. They told The Post that when Mace was approached about working on those amendments, she privately admitted some were too politically risky for her to own.

Mace earlier this year also was among two dozen Republicans who voted against the Agriculture, Rural Development, and Food and Drug Administration appropriations bill. Mace cited a provision that would limit access to the abortion pill mifepristone and was expected to submit a brief amendment to address the issue. She never did, and people familiar with the matter said Mace instead suggested members of the New York delegation introduce it, or that leadership take up a Democrat’s amendment to strike the mifepristone restrictions.

Several lawmakers described a pattern of working with Mace on an issue that she conveyed as life or death to the press and colleagues, before abandoning it. These members have come to view her flip-flopping not as a negotiating tactic but rather a way to make headlines to maximize visibility. In an internal handbook distributed to staff in 2021 reported by the Daily Beast, Mace provided her staff with a weekly booking quota for getting her on television.

“Any single time there’s a tight vote, she will find a way to be on the other side of what Republicans are trying to do and it gives her a chance to be on TV,” a Republican lawmaker said.

Hampson rebuffed assertions that Mace is more interested in press than legislating, writing she has “sponsored or co-sponsored 27 bills which have been signed into law since taking office three years ago, all under a Democrat President. … Anyone who suggests she is not focused on legislating is ignorant or lying.”

From the Citadel to the Capitol

Mace is a publicist by trade, with a master’s degree in journalism and mass communication, who started her own public relations firm before fronting a tea party challenge against Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in 2013 at the age of 35.

She lost that primary against Graham but went on to work for the Trump campaign in 2016, then won a seat in the South Carolina House in 2018. In 2020, she won one of the most competitive congressional seats in the country by 1.2 percentage points. Then the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol happened, and Mace publicly broke with Trump.

It was a decision she started to wrestle with as Trump bounced back as the de facto leader of the Republican Party. Then, almost a year after taking office, Mace’s district became much redder when its boundaries were changed. Up against Arrington, her Trump-endorsed primary challenger, Mace sought to position herself once again as a devotee to Trump’s “America First” agenda.

Then a draft majority opinion from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade leaked at the start of May. Asked about her position on abortion during a May 23, 2022, debate against Arrington, Mace uncharacteristically touted a “record of voting pro-life 100 percent of the time” and claimed an A+ rating from the antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony List. She handily defeated Arrington in the primary.

Two months after Roe v. Wade was eventually overturned in June 2022, Mace polled her district and found it had swung toward Democrats. “I saw the numbers being mildly pro choice at 51 percent two years prior to 60 percent — it was a 10 point change, literally overnight,” Mace said this spring.

By August 2022, Mace was on national television blasting her party for pursuing restrictive policies. “’The Handmaid’s Tale’ was not supposed to be a road map, right?” she quipped on NBC News, referring to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel where some women are forced to become pregnant and bear children. She went on to win her 2022 reelection by 14 points.

Her stance on abortion is in part driven by personal experience: Mace was raped when she was 16 years old. Depressed and suicidal, she dropped out of school. She eventually found refuge in a waitressing job at a Waffle House and started taking classes at a local college. Two years later, she was accepted into The Citadel, and soon became the first woman to graduate from the military college.

Mace’s mother, Anne Mace, never anticipated politics being in the cards for her daughter, who was “not much of a joiner in high school,” but noted that her desire to make a difference was “always there, germinating.” Anne used to accompany Mace to her grass-roots campaign events when she was first starting out in politics, where her daughter’s spontaneous nature caused her some heartburn.

“The thing that used to drive me crazy was that she never had the talking points,” said Anne. “She never had notes. She always spoke from her head and her heart.”

That ability to speak from her heart prepared Mace for a seminal moment in her career when she publicly addressed her rape for the first time in 2019. During off-the-cuff remarks advocating for the inclusion of exceptions for rape and incest in a proposed six-week abortion ban, she reproached her South Carolina State House colleagues for the tone of their objections.

“For some of us who have been raped, it can take 25 years to get up the courage and talk about being a victim of rape,” Mace said.

She had hoped that sharing her deeply personal story would prompt lawmakers to rethink their positions. Instead, she was attacked. Weeks after the speech, one of Mace’s colleagues distributed cards from an antiabortion group that described abortion after rape as a “misdeed of the parent.”

Fast-forward to Mace’s freshman year of Congress, where Mace endured what she saw as similar treatment from some of her new colleagues. In 2021, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) described Mace as “pro-abort.” The slur came after Mace criticized Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) for using “racist tropes” when she likened Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to a suicide bomber. Greene rushed to Boebert’s defense, calling Mace “the trash in the GOP conference.”

McCarthy eventually delivered private scoldings to both Mace and Greene. But the situation rankled Mace, who was shocked that her condemning Islamophobia was chastised in the same way as the weaponization of her rape — a microcosm, she thought, of the GOP’s long-running issues with women.

Mace and McCarthy’s relationship continued to sour in the years since that episode. The tension was palpable shortly after Johnson won the vote to become speaker. McCarthy looked right at Mace before turning his back on her to shake other lawmakers’ hands as he walked down the center aisle of the House chamber as a part of Johnson’s entourage.

Mace’s penchant for speaking different languages to different audiences is perhaps most evident in her role as a subcommittee chairwoman on the House Oversight committee. There she has aired uncorroborated allegations about the investigation into the Biden family’s financial transactions. Without evidence, Mace has accused President Biden of bribery and money laundering and said that the family has been involved in “prostitution rings.”

In May, Mace said she no longer had a relationship with Trump but she didn’t “hold grudges against people who have come out against me in the past.” Since then, she’s become a vocal defender of the former president as he faces more than 90 charges across four criminal cases. She’s suggested to allies recently that she has a chance of being his running mate in 2024, according to people familiar with the conversations, and has publicly entertained the speculation. “It’s a conversation we need to have because I want my little girl to know that she can be president one day,” she said on “The Daily Show.”

But the appetite from constituents for the red meat Mace has been throwing could soon be changing. South Carolina’s new congressional map was the subject of a Supreme Court argument after a panel of federal judges ruled in January that the district was drawn in a way that discriminates against Black voters. The Supreme Court seemed inclined to reinstate the old map, leaving Mace in a precarious position.

Bakari Sellers, a Democratic consultant and former member of the South Carolina House, said that Mace’s amorphous views land her in the center of the conversation but cause obvious issues for the South Carolina lawmaker. Yet he conceded that her grit and intellect are underestimated, lending her unexpected staying power.

“She sees if her gut matches the direction of the wind and I think she will begin to understand what she believes in the longer she serves,” Sellers said.