Last October, when Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the house, one Republican of the eight who voted against him stood out as the odd bedfellow of the group: a junior representative from South Carolina named Nancy Mace.
The seven other Republicans, all men, were far-right rabble-rousers, loudmouths for whom grousing about the “establishment” rather than working with it was always the right political move. They were used to attracting and capitalizing on press attention. Yet in the days that followed McCarthy’s ouster, Mace outshone them all, showing up for work in a shirt with a red A on the front, a nod to the titular symbol in The Scarlet Letter.
Her staff, still picking up the pieces from Mace’s bombshell vote against McCarthy the previous week, was completely baffled.
“I thought it was just some fashion statement,” one staffer recalled. “I was like, OK, well, maybe this is an Abercrombie shirt or something.” Only after seeing Mace on camera at a meeting of House Republicans—swarmed by reporters—did the staffer put it together: The scarlet-letter outfit “was another attempt by her to be a part of the story.”
Or, as a second staffer remembered, it was an attempt to become the star of the story: “She wanted every single person to think—when they thought of the McCarthy ouster vote, not to think of the eight, but to think of Nancy Mace,” the staffer said.
In her own explanation for the scarlet letter that day, Mace lamented that she had been “demonized for my vote and for my voice” and would “do the right thing every single time, no matter the consequences.”
Probably because she was not being ostracized for, say, having a child out of wedlock in 17th-century Massachusetts, many people didn’t quite understand the connection Mace was making to the Nathaniel Hawthorne staple of high school English class. Mace, closely monitoring the reaction to her stunt, privately griped to her staff that those who didn’t get it weren’t smart—they were probably “Trump voters,” she said.
But most of the bafflement was about why Mace had voted against McCarthy in the first place. She hadn’t, after all, put up any roadblocks to his dragged-out election as speaker nine months before. She wasn’t allied with any of the Freedom Caucus–adjacent politicians who wanted McCarthy out; she’d called anti-McCarthy ringleader Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz a “fraud” during the first speaker fight in January. Neither her tactics nor her politics tended to the extreme.
Nevertheless, there she was, not merely giving leadership an earful but joining an unprecedented ouster of the man who’d fundraised for her and worked with her office to help her pass legislation. As one former senior McCarthy aide dryly put it to me about her vote against McCarthy, “She surprised us.”
These days, Congress is full of show horses who are less interested in a gradual, heads-down rise in the ranks than in rocketing to viral celebrity, however many enemies they may make along the way. But only three and a half years in, Mace has established herself as one of the thirstiest members of Congress in her unceasing quest for attention. She has kept everyone from lay congressional watchers to reporters to her staff to the speaker of the House and Donald Trump on their toes about her next move. What she may do on any given day feels downright random, even to the people closest to her.
But it isn’t quite random. In interviews with eight former Mace staffers—of which there are several dozen, because Mace’s Washington office has an exceptionally high turnover rate—the politician’s obsession with getting press was described as her sole motivational force. (The former staffers were granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. Mace’s office ignored repeated interview requests for this story and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.) The former staffers described how every move, however incongruous it may seem, is part of a larger effort for Mace to build her brand as a “caucus of one,” as Mace herself puts it.
Sometimes it works. Attention can be translated into power. But it has also alienated Mace from colleagues and GOP leaders. It lost her an entire D.C. staff over the course of a few months, culminating in a surreal episode involving the Capitol Police in December. Her McCarthy vote, followed up by the scarlet-letter stunt, was so egregious that it earned Mace a primary challenger in a race that will be decided this week. Even if she advances, as she’s favored to, rebuilding her reputation in the House will not be easy.
A former senior staffer said Mace used to trash members like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Gaetz for being in the Capitol just to make noise.
Now, the staffer said, “she has turned herself into what she hates.”
Only a few days into her first term in Congress, Mace wanted to get punched in the face. It was Jan. 6, 2021, and Mace was desperate for headlines about herself amid the news of the Capitol riot. As has been previously reported, during the attack she pitched her staff on a plan to put herself in harm’s way in order to get hit by a protester, a move that would result in massive media attention, maybe even enough to elevate her as a top anti-Trump Republican.
Several months before, in November 2020, Mace had narrowly defeated Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham in a swing district covering much of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Before that, she had been a state legislator and had worked in commercial real estate and public relations. She was most well known, however, for being the first woman cadet to graduate from the Citadel military college in Charleston, an experience she chronicled in a 2001 memoir.
Though she never went through with the getting-punched plan, Mace earned a significant amount of coverage for her outspokenness against Trump following Jan. 6. The day after the Capitol riot, Mace—who had worked for Trump’s 2016 South Carolina campaign—said in a television interview, “Everything that he’s worked for, … his entire legacy, was wiped out yesterday. And we’ve got to start over.” She did not vote for Trump’s impeachment, despite sharing, in a floor speech, her belief that “we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”
It didn’t take too long for the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction. Within a month, she was picking a fight with a proper Capitol Hill star on the left, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, over what had happened on Jan. 6. That landed Mace an appearance on Fox News.
“The idea was always to get her front and center in the national spotlight, and the media element drove the legislative element,” one senior staffer said of Mace’s tack. Her staff would try to hold 30-minute legislative meetings once a week with the congresswoman, “but she would get bored, and within, like, 10 minutes we would just kind of fall back into media strategy. And that was from Day 1. It was just like, ‘How do I get into the national story? How do I get into the national spotlight?’ ”
Her attention-grabbing antics could be random. Sometimes, Mace would go after far-right members within her own party and nab a spot on CNN. Other times, she would simply make a bewildering comment, such as last year, when she suggested at the National Prayer Breakfast that she had that morning declined sex with her then fiancé to make it to her speech on time.
When Mace was receiving the media attention she wanted, her office could be a thrill, a place where staffers were having the sorts of experiences that aren’t common for those who work for backbench freshman or sophomore members.
“When she was at the top of her game, we could go on any TV program,” one former staff member recalled. They’d travel out to Los Angeles to be on Bill Maher’s HBO show, or they’d help her put together the comedy roast that brought the house down at the congressional correspondents’ dinner in 2023. “After she does that, she’s like, ‘Wow, guys, that was awesome, what a big hit. You don’t need to come in early tomorrow—tomorrow, enjoy the day, have some drinks, celebrate.’ ”
The feel-good moments could evaporate in an instant, though. The other side of Mace was paranoid, punishing, and “chaotic at best.”
Staffers recalled onslaughts of text messages from her at 4 or 5 in the morning about what they were doing to get her on the news that day. They could be berated for using the wrong Instagram filter—“if it was in the wrong hex code of blue, I was going to hear about it,” one staffer said—and Mace had a rule that staff had to respond to her, no matter what, within eight minutes.
After a communications staffer ran afoul of the eight-minute rule on Christmas Eve 2022, Mace tried to get her then chief of staff Dan Hanlon to fire him. When Hanlon wouldn’t do it, Mace tried to get her then deputy chief of staff Richard Chalkey to do it; Chalkey also refused. Mace had also attempted, and failed, to get them to fire the same comms staffer the previous month, after he’d told a reporter that Mace was unavailable because she was traveling. This was true: She was unavailable because she was traveling—in Spain, with dozens of other members, on a sponsored trip—but she claimed that the admission had put her and her family in danger.
On the legislative side, staff members were expected to introduce bills at an exceedingly high volume, as has been detailed in a Daily Beast story about a strategy memo Mace wrote for her office. (Among other things, she was to be marketed as “THE freshman thought leader on federal issues.”) Her priority was to get her bills taken up as stand-alone measures rather than as parts of larger packages, even if that made the bills less likely to become law. She wanted her name on them—guidance that was taken quite literally with a 2023 piece of legislation that did pass the House, the MACE Act, which eliminated unnecessary degree barriers for certain cybersecurity jobs. The genesis of that bill’s name was that legislative staff came up with it as a joke about Mace’s ego. But the joke went over her head, and it stuck.
Stories about the tumult of her office environment have come up more and more in recent months, and Mace has fired back at former staffers with claims of her own. In an extremely unusual move, Mace sat down with the Daily Mail at her Capitol Hill townhome for an interview published in mid-May, during which she accused her ex-staff of having tried to “sabotage” her. Among her claims were that they signed her name to documents without permission, “submerged their electronic devices in water” to deny her access to them, tracked her private appointments, and left hundreds of thousands of dollars in unspent budget allotments on the table. (In the waning days of her primary, the return of unspent office funds is being used as a positive talking point about fiscal responsibility, as Mace combats a Washington Post investigation into the reimbursement requests she and other members have made.)
The Daily Mail interview shocked the ex-staffers I spoke to. The submerged electronic device, they argued, could only be a reference to an instance in which a staffer spilled water on a keyboard, then reported it to IT. They had had a stamp with her “signature,” as all congressional offices do, for signing certain documents that were part of routine tasks below the member’s pay grade. They also claimed that Mace procrastinated on approving a big expenditure for mailers and didn’t get it done in time, before the new year. She used Google calendars to track her personal and professional appointments and would approve, unapprove, and forget to reapprove staffers’ access, which they needed to do their jobs.
Those I spoke to had varying interpretations of what exactly might have compelled Mace to lash out at her former employees. “I think that article makes her look pretty nuts,” a staffer told me. But one distinct possibility they all suggested was that she probably felt as if she hadn’t been getting enough press attention lately.
Mace can be mercurial in her opinions on people or tactics, but her politics are broadly consistent. She’s mostly in line with the rest of the House GOP on fiscal matters, but to the left on certain social issues, like abortion and women’s health issues, legalizing marijuana, and the Second Amendment. She has often taken her party to task, for example, for its rigidity on early-term abortion bans and argued this year that it will “lose big” if it can’t find a “middle ground.” (It’s worth observing, too, that cable news bookers roll out the red carpet for Republicans who criticize their own party on social issues.)
Throughout last year, Mace tried to use the leverage that the House GOP’s narrow margins provided to extract promises on her pet issues, including a bill to improve active shooter alerts, another relating to women’s access to reproductive health care, and the aforementioned MACE Act. In particular, Mace took the opportunity of an April debt limit bill—for which McCarthy needed nearly all of his conference to support in order to have leverage in negotiations with the Biden administration—to hem and haw about how she might not be able to get behind it. This got her a meeting with McCarthy in April 2023. When the meeting ended, Mace announced her support for the debt-limit bill. Soon after, a “source familiar” with Mace’s conversation with McCarthy told reporters that she was guaranteed “floor votes” on women’s health legislation and the active-shooter-alert bill.
McCarthy’s team was displeased with the immediate leak and reached out to Mace’s office to ask what the staffers had been thinking by putting this out there—and whether they understood that this wouldn’t help them achieve their goals. Mace’s staffers assured McCarthy’s team that they agreed. The Mace leak hadn’t come from Mace staff.
The other reason McCarthy’s team was upset was that it’s exceptionally unlikely that McCarthy actually had made those commitments to her.
To avoid the same hostilities with the far right that had doomed previous GOP speakers, McCarthy brought its members into the fold, endowing some hard-liners with important committee positions and ruling over them with less of an iron fist. So, McCarthy could not just order Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, say, to move Mace’s bills—legislation that Jordan wasn’t interested in—through committee, much less guarantee her floor votes.
“Nobody in the room, including Ms. Mace, believed that a promise had been made that a bill would be marked up in committee or brought across the floor of the House,” one former senior staffer to McCarthy told me. “But as he did with all members, he said, ‘Absolutely I’ll work with you.’ ” Although McCarthy couldn’t order Jordan to take up these bills, in other words, he could—and did—see whether Jordan and his staff could work with them to get legislation to a passable place. That process took a while because, as the former McCarthy staffer said of Mace’s rape-kits bill, “the product was shit,” and it had to be redrafted multiple times. The final product passed the Judiciary Committee unanimously on Sept. 28, 2023. The active-shooter-alert legislation Mace championed ran into similar troubles with drafting and was an even taller order to get through committee.
Despite the efforts made on her behalf, Mace still insisted that McCarthy wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain. She would complain about him, in increasingly angry ways. This worried her staffers; no one in Mace’s D.C. office thought that her voting to oust the speaker would be a great idea. The main voice in her ear making the case for ousting McCarthy was Doug Stafford, a longtime former staffer and strategist for Sen. Rand Paul whom Mace had taken on as a consultant for her campaign. He would, according to staffers who interacted with him, appeal to Mace’s instincts for dramatic moves.
“There’s no planet on which I tell the media what I tell my clients,” Stafford told me over email, when I asked about his role in advising Mace to boot McCarthy. “I think nearly everyone would agree though that my clients believe in what they’re doing and do what they believe is right.”
Staff still didn’t know which way Mace would fall when she left the office to vote on Oct. 3. When she cast her vote against McCarthy, the staff text chain lit up with variations of, essentially, Fuck. Many staffers had already been looking for an exit, but they picked up their efforts to find new jobs. It was a hard enough work environment already, and now the boss had made herself a political pariah.
It was McCarthy, however, who put the employment of one Mace staffer in immediate peril. During a press conference just after he lost his job, McCarthy—not in the best of moods, and understandably so—gave his account of what had happened with Mace. He said he’d seen Mace on The View the previous day saying that she had been “made promises by the speaker that have not been kept.” (Some staffers believe that by popping off on the talk show, Mace had boxed herself into voting to remove McCarthy, and that she had wanted to avoid looking as if she had backed down.) McCarthy explained that he’d called Dan Hanlon, the chief of staff, after watching Mace claim on The View that he hadn’t kept his word.
“You know what her chief of staff said? ‘You have kept your word, 100 percent,’ ” McCarthy said. “Now, if somehow he gets fired, I’ll still get him a job.”
This was the beginning of the end of Hanlon’s tenure with Mace.
“McCarthy fucked Dan,” as one Mace staffer put it.
The MACE Act, meanwhile, had passed the House nearly unanimously at 7:01 p.m. on Oct. 2. That means that a Nancy Mace bill that was backronymed to her name was the final bill to pass the House of Representatives under Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
In November, Mace hired a new chief of staff, Lorie Khatod, a former Defense Department employee who had earned a doctorate in organizational leadership but had little Hill experience. Mace and Hanlon’s relationship had never fully repaired following the McCarthy vote, especially after the former speaker’s comment in the press conference, and Hanlon was demoted to senior adviser. The new arrangement didn’t last long: On Sunday, Dec. 3, Khatod called Hanlon to let him know that he had been terminated and that he would be expected to come in at 4 p.m. the next day to return his belongings.
At about 3 the next afternoon, Monday, Dec. 4, Khatod told the deputy chief of staff to send staffers home early for the day. Those in the office interpreted this as an offer that they could go home early, not that they needed to, so some stayed around.
At about 3:45, a slew of Capitol Police entered the office and told staff that they had no reason to fear anything, that they were there to protect them. The officers, according to witnesses, said that they’d heard that an ex-employee had made threats to some of them and that that ex-employee was expected to come into the office at 4. When Khatod showed up, she was livid that staff members were still in the office and demanded they leave.
The staffers who had remained there could not believe what was happening. Nobody I spoke to, at least, could recall Hanlon ever making anything remotely resembling a threat toward them, nor did they think that that was in his nature.
Khatod did not respond to multiple requests for comment about why the police were called or what threats were allegedly made. Hanlon, too, declined to comment on the episode.
The staff assumption was that either Mace, Khatod, or both had wanted to intimidate and humiliate Hanlon on his way out the door. It wasn’t just the police presence in the office either. Capitol Police had issued a BOLO—or “Be on the Lookout”—instruction for Hanlon on Capitol grounds, according to a senior House staffer with direct knowledge at the time. (A Capitol Police spokesperson told Slate, “The requested information is not publicly available.”)
Hanlon, having been tipped off to the police presence, returned his belongings later that day to Randal Meyer, Mace’s counsel, at Meyer’s home. Meyer and Chalkey, the deputy chief of staff, resigned shortly thereafter.
Ultimately, Mace achieved total staff turnover in her D.C. office between November 2023 and the following February. Everyone resigned or left for a new job, except in the case of Hanlon’s firing. Among those Mace had hired as replacements were two staffers from expelled Rep. George Santos’ office, one of whom has already left.
In the months after, Hanlon briefly considered a primary challenge to Mace. There was substantial interest among McCarthy loyalists in finding someone to go head-to-head with Mace as payback. But Hanlon ultimately opted against it. Instead, the anti-Mace contingent coalesced around the campaign of Catherine Templeton, a former businesswoman and member of former Gov. Nikki Haley’s Cabinet. On policy, Templeton has been hitting Mace over the border and her vote on the bill to force a sale of TikTok, and for leaving the House without a speaker in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. But Mace’s erratic and attention-seeking behavior has been the central talking point in Templeton’s campaign.
“It’s our responsibility to send an adult who can get results to Washington,” Templeton said when she announced her run. “We have serious problems, and we need serious people to solve them. We need a trusted leader who values service over celebrity.” She accused Mace of “flip-flopping for fame.”
Mace, meanwhile, has described Templeton as a puppet of McCarthy in a “bitter revenge operation.” Templeton would dispute the idea that she’s a puppet, but it’s no secret that McCarthy wants Mace gone. One of McCarthy’s closest political allies, Brian O. Walsh, is a senior adviser to a dark-money group, the American Prosperity Alliance, that has run attack ads against Mace in her district. Separately, a political action committee, South Carolina Patriots, has spent several million dollars against Mace. Its donors are still largely unknown, except for $15,000 in seed money from … the American Prosperity Alliance.
Polling of the district is scant, but an Emerson College poll from May 19–21 found Mace leading comfortably with 47 percent of the vote to Templeton’s 22 percent. A third candidate, Bill Young, earned 7 percent.
Templeton has garnered a decent share of endorsements for a challenger to an incumbent, including that of Mace’s previous challenger, Katie Arrington, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who is making good on his word to do anything he can to stop Mace after her vote to overthrow McCarthy. (When I called Gingrich to ask if he had a few minutes to talk about his Templeton endorsement, he said, “No, but I was glad to endorse her, and I think she’d make a good congresswoman,” then hung up.)
Mace, however, has the only endorsement that matters: Trump’s.
This was quite a turnabout on both of their parts. Trump had endorsed Arrington’s challenge to Mace in 2022, given the comments Mace had made about Trump in the aftermath of Jan. 6. But Mace began to speak more approvingly of Trump as 2023 went on, as it became clear which way the winds were blowing in the Republican primary. She officially endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign just before the New Hampshire primary—in a dagger for the campaign of fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley, who had endorsed Mace in 2022—solidly proving her loyalty. Trump returned the favor with an endorsement in March.
Not a single person I spoke to thought that Mace’s move to Trump was genuine. At least in the years that they worked for Mace, she had nothing but disdain for the former president. They recalled the day of Trump’s indictment in the New York case, last April, when staff had to band together to prevent Mace from tweeting, “This is what happens when you pay hush money to a porn star.” The staff succeeded. Not long after, Mace came around to believing that the New York case was a lousy one—especially after recognizing that Republicans who were defending Trump were getting more TV time.
If Mace makes it to another term and hopes to keep rising in the ranks, she’ll have a lot of work to do to repair the damage she has done to her reputation institutionally. It will be hard for any speaker to trust her again after seeing what she did to the previous one. Should Majority Leader Steve Scalise ever make it to the position, that also won’t be good for Mace, given that she refused to support his speakership candidacy because he “attended a white supremacist conference and compared himself to David Duke,” as she told CNN last fall. Don’t think the Scalise camp has forgotten that.
“Leadership doesn’t trust her, rank-and-file members think she’s a joke, she’ll never be able to be a chair of a committee because she’s not going to be able to fundraise in D.C. to the point that you need to get a chairmanship,” one former senior staffer said. “She’s done.”
Then again, how many committee chairs get invited to appear on Bill Maher?
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