As for any allies, “If you find them, please let me know,” she tells me. “It’s been a very lonely start to the year. I represent a district of islands, but I literally feel up here on the Hill that I am living on an island alone. And it is very lonely.” Mace says she wants to “rein in some of the craziness that is happening” because Republicans are “losing people from our party.”
“I feel like a unicorn also. It’s weird. I don’t know why I’m the only one talking about this.”
Mace’s idiosyncrasies are what happens when a conservative in a competitive district tries to find a place in a Republican Party that has Marjorie Taylor Greene as its mascot. After serving in the South Carolina House of Representatives, Mace first won her seat in Congress in 2020, defeating incumbent Democrat Joe Cunningham. She won it again this past fall by approximately 14 percentage points in the general election after a bruising Republican primary against a Trump-backed opponent. (Notably, another 2024 presidential hopeful, Nikki Haley, endorsed Mace in the primary.) Analysts will peg South Carolina’s First Congressional District, which stretches along the Atlantic coast, as a safe Republican seat. Mace argues—as does recent history—that it is purple. It is seats like Mace’s that Republicans must hold on to in 2024 if they hope to strengthen their majority in the House.
So when Republican leadership bafflingly chose to introduce antiabortion bills as one of its first moves in the majority, Mace told me at the time that she thought Republicans had “learned nothing” from the midterms. Still, she did vote in favor of both bills (she’s pro-life, after all, and those bills would go nowhere). Now, she says she’ll file a bill related to women just about every week Congress is in session. Among those she has filed to date: a resolution to protect every woman’s right to travel across state lines and a bill to create a list of resources available to pregnant women at the local, state, and federal levels; she says she will also be introducing legislation in the House to provide funding to clear the rape kit backlog.
Speaking with Mace, there is a sense that most things roll easily off her back. Almost casually she mentions that she had three death threats in the first four weeks of the 118th Congress. So she says she carries a gun whenever she is back in her district. Perhaps her stoicism can be attributed to life in the ultimate boys’ club: not Congress, but The Citadel. She boasts the accolade of being the first woman to graduate from the renowned military college in Charleston, South Carolina. “There were people that did not want us there,” another woman who also graduated from The Citadel shortly after Mace tells me. “They would do everything in their power to let it be known.” Given Mace’s status as the first to graduate, this person added, “I can’t imagine what Nancy went through.”
There was a bomb threat the day of Mace’s graduation, Mace says. “I was built for tough. I was made for tough,” Mace adds. “That whole experience changed who I was…. It definitely gave me the strength that I need to do what I feel I need to do regardless of the consequences.”
Only once does Mace’s mask seem to crack: when she discusses her sexual assault as a 16-year-old. Mace was raped—an experience that led to her dropping out of high school. “I made a lot of bad decisions in the wake of that trauma in my life and I’ve had to figure some shit out over the years and it still haunts me to this day,” she says in her office. I see tears welling in her eyes. That abortion bans are being signed into law without exceptions for rape and incest—or that lawmakers in some states are pushing to eliminate these exceptions in existing bans—that’s “batshit crazy,” Mace says.
“When I see people in my party be complete assholes to women who’ve been raped or girls or victims of incest, it’s hard not to take it personally…. I want to show women and girls that there are leaders within the Republican Party that care about you,” she says. “I want women to know that I have the same pain. I mean, there are so many people who have been through that and I am not gonna be an asshole….
“What are you gonna tell the 10-year-old girl who is raped repeatedly by her uncle?”
Despite her calls for moderation, Mace can often be found with the rest in her party: She introduced a bill to require Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to fly commercial during a Southwest shutdown that left thousands of passengers stranded; she blasted a former Twitter official for censoring information regarding the COVID vaccine; she still voted for the Born Alive bill.
And notably, in the moments she breaks from the ranks, she still has McCarthy’s ear. In January, Mace threatened to withhold her support for Republicans’ rules package—which would govern how the House operates—and in February, protested a controversial vote to oust Ilhan Omar from her committee assignment before eventually supporting it. She wanted a formal process to strip individuals of committee assignments; her explanation as to why was, unsurprisingly, biting.
“There are 535 members of Congress that vote in both chambers. There are a lot of dumbasses up here. People are going to say stupid shit,” she says. “Everyone has the right to say what they want but there should be consequences.”
McCarthy didn’t need Mace’s vote, but he did agree to building a formal process to remove members from committees and letting her office lead the charge on it. When asked if she has the support of leadership she says, “sometimes.” Though she noted that Republican leadership was with her “in the trenches” when she “had the biggest primary fight” of her life last year—even though it meant breaking from the Trump-backed candidate.
“My frustration right now isn’t really with leadership, it’s just with certain members of our conference that think that every district is an R district,” she says. “It’s just not.”
Not all those members have iced Mace out. Gaetz says he “wasn’t particularly aggrieved” when Mace took her complaints about him public. “I think it takes some panache to kind of punch up the way she does,” he says, before taking his own shot: “It is the triumph of boldness over intelligence.”
But it really is out of the fissures within her caucus—created by Gaetz and his fellow rabble-rousers—that Mace’s profile has grown. “The first thing you have to remember about Nancy Mace is that she is a public-relations professional by trade,” Rob Godfrey, a South Carolina political strategist and longtime adviser to Haley, says. “So you should never underestimate her capacity to be able to read the tea leaves about where she can be and needs to be to get the most bang for her buck in terms of her media exposure.”
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