It’s time. It’s just time. Nancy Mace needs to get out of the S.C. gubernatorial race and fix herself before she tries to fix all of us.
The last year has been devastating politically for the 48-year-old congresswoman who represents about 800,000 people in a long, skinny district from Charleston County to Beaufort County.
Always attracted to news cameras and controversial statements, Mace took to the U.S. House floor a year ago to accuse her former fiance and three others of physically assaulting her and other women in what became one of the most talked about special order speeches in congressional history. She vowed to go “scorched earth” on the men — and the lawsuits and impact that resulted continue to ring alarm bells in South Carolina and Washington, D.C.
In the months that followed, Mace announced a gubernatorial campaign, stumped around the state and seemed obsessed with getting media coverage. But in October, a foul-mouthed outburst of nasty comments to security officials at Charleston International Airport led to a backlash. It seemed to start a downward spiral affecting her gubernatorial aspirations and important relationships in Washington.
Weeks later without a chief of staff or campaign manager, she continues to fire off press releases so frequently that they’re almost irrelevant, revealing how desperate she is to manipulate her media image to show she is “doing something.” One day, she’ll give a weather report. Another, she’ll excoriate the Taliban or unveil another bill about protecting children from sex offenders. And most recently, she raised Cain about some books she claimed were at a library branch.
It’s all in a frenetic effort to be relevant politically. Unfortunately, Mace isn’t OK, as reported in a New York magazine piece this week that ripped through the political world like a firestorm. One former staffer put it this way in the article: “Something’s broken. The motherboard’s fried. We’re short-circuiting somewhere.” Another said last year’s floor speech appeared to be a breaking point “because you’ve now gone from standing up for people — whether rightfully, wrongfully, performatively or not — you were on this mission, and now this is about you. The whole frame shifted, and she centered herself in it all. That’s when it became apparent to me that this is broken.”
Nancy Mace should drop out of the 2026 governor’s race now so she can recover emotionally, mentally and physically from the trauma that she finds herself in.
No one should wish her ill. We hope for her best. But we also hope that for her own good — and of the state — that she gets out of public life and is not on a ballot in June or November.
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