Nobody is quite sure what Mace believes or stands for, though in her maladroitness and inconstancy she suggests that she stands only for herself.
In Giotto’s frescoes for the Arena Chapel in Padua — completed around 1305 and perhaps the first true masterpiece of Italian Renaissance art still preserved — the hauntingly vivid Christ cycle of the panels is accented below by a series of detailed miniatures representing various social virtues and vices. The most memorable of them all is the image of the vice of Inconstancy: a vaguely addled lady dizzily trying to maintain her balance whilst perched atop a giant spinning wheel.
I can think of no better analogy when attempting to describe the gyratingly unpredictable, ideologically incoherent career of Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina’s first district, who yesterday afternoon shocked most observers by joining Matt Gaetz and his gang of malcontents in voting to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House. Hers wasn’t the decisive vote numerically, but it certainly was the stupidest. And that is what has characterized Mace’s bizarre, oscillating political career in office to date, as she fights to survive primaries in what is an increasingly competitive seat in the general election as well. She is trying to please and balance too many competing political interests at once as she contemplates her future political ambitions. She lost whatever bearings she might have once had more than a little while ago, and she is one bad election cycle away from tumbling from her perch altogether.
Mace has been known to say some rather curious things — her musings about morning sex in front of a roomful of prim Republican ladies gathered for a prayer breakfast is a recent highlight — but she is better explained, politically, by first considering her district. A colleague of mine amusingly refers to South Carolina’s first — which is based around Charleston and upscale coastal tourist regions such as Hilton Head, though a Supreme Court case on the state’s lines is pending — as “the Cursed District.” That takes things a bit far, but because of its Charleston media base, it has become a crucible for forging influential Republican politicians in the state, and not always for the better. The district had been reliably Republican even before the Deep South flipped Republican en masse in 1994, but its gentrifying and educated demographics mean that as time goes on it is becoming more and more competitive as both major parties slowly exchange voter bases. (Under the present map it is the only remotely competitive seat in the state.)
The modern tale of the first district begins with Mark Sanford, who was elected to the seat in the Republican Revolution of 1994. This is actually the era that we older salts still think of as “the Good Sanford Era,” for it was only later in 2009 as governor of South Carolina that he disappeared from the state for an entire week, leaving no emergency-contact information, to “hike the Appalachian Trail” (i.e., canoodle with his mistress). The seat later fell to scandal-free and resolutely single Tim Scott, who needs no introduction and was appointed to the Senate by none other than Sanford’s protégé and handpicked successor as governor, Nikki Haley. In the meantime Sanford decided he’d had enough of hiking and staged a comeback, returning to Congress to pick up his old seat in 2012. Even more unpredictably, he generally conducted himself with integrity in his second go-round; his conscience in fact cost him his job in 2018 when his anti-Trump rhetoric (though not voting record) earned him a primary defeat by MAGA-branded Katie Arrington, who ran with Trump’s official endorsement.
Arrington promptly went on to lose the seat in November to Democrat Joe Cunningham in one of the biggest shockers of an already terrible night for House Republicans, which is where Nancy Mace enters the story. Retaking the seat in 2020 as a Trump-friendly but non-MAGA candidate, Mace had an appealing profile — the first female graduate of The Citadel military academy — but what stood out equally as much was her ambition: She ran for Senate against Lindsey Graham in 2013. (There’s “a woman in a hurry” and then there’s “primary Lindsey Graham first time out of the gate.”) In 2017 she parachuted into an open-seat state house special election and then won a full term the next year. Before that term was even up she was off and running successfully for Congress.
Mace’s troubles began almost immediately after her arrival in Washington due to her inability to navigate the topsy-turvy politics of the post–January 6 era. Sworn into office on January 3, 2021, she had a front-row seat for the Capitol riot and condemned Trump harshly the day afterward, saying “everything he worked for, all of that, his entire legacy was wiped out yesterday. We’ve got to start over.” She defended Liz Cheney from demands that she be stripped of her leadership position. Later that year, she voted to hold Steve Bannon in contempt for defying a congressional subpoena. Trump noticed. Even her refusal to vote to impeach Trump failed to stave off his baleful gaze: He denounced her personally and once again turned to Katie Arrington as an avatar of his vengeance in the 2022 primary. It was an extremely tough race for a first-term incumbent, which Mace won by less than 6,000 votes with major assistance from both Nikki Haley and Kevin McCarthy himself.
Let it never be said that Mace knows how to repay a favor. It would be easier to credit her vote to oust McCarthy yesterday as an act of principle were her reasons not so evidently farcical. Remember, she was not one of the gang of holdouts in McCarthy’s original epic 15-ballot January election saga; she supported McCarthy from the first ballot to the last. (Whatever else one can say about Matt Gaetz, his hatred of McCarthy is elemental and dates from Day One, perhaps even from centuries past.) Her complaints are so quotidian and unconvincing — she claims it was “a matter of trust” when McCarthy apparently failed to advance her pet contraception-access legislation quickly enough — that they bespeak either self-destructively personal pique or ham-handed political calculation.
My guess is the latter. Mace was not the deciding vote, and she voted to vacate the speakership only once it was obvious that McCarthy would lose and she could “get on the record” with this statement. In a particularly classy detail, she was fundraising off it on her website minutes after the final vote was cast. It was like watching a person decide that once their house has been set on fire by a deranged pyromaniac and it’s too late, they might as well just throw in with the pyro and toss an extra few logs onto the fire to get in on the act. (“Why should Herostratus get all the publicity? I helped too.”)
Whether Mace meant to send a message about her private beefs or to position herself as a candidate with MAGA-friendly “rebel” sensibilities in light of an upcoming primary with Donald Trump on the ticket, or both, this is her mystery achievement: She has assisted in the ruin of any House Republican agenda for the 118th Congress, which under a new speakership will be beholden either (1) strictly to the Matt Gaetz faction of the caucus, or (2) to Democrats under some sort of power-sharing agreement tailor-made to repel most Republicans.
Mace’s inconstancy is precisely what makes it difficult to get a bead on her character as a politician: The narrative, after all, is one of unreliability. The common through line is her ambition; she is always acting in her own perceived best interests. The last time I can remember a politician so openly and charmlessly trying to position himself for higher office is with Ted Cruz (whom I once described as believing he is Machiavelli in The Prince when in fact he is Vizzini in The Princess Bride), and even Cruz didn’t have to fight off internal battles within his party the way Mace must. The resultant political contortions look so random, swinging from “responsible moderate” to “henchwoman for the Joker,” that she is in danger of losing ground in her own district. (She should be safe in November 2024 even with Trump on the ticket.) Perhaps the intent is sell herself as a “wild card” or maverick before a vacancy opens up in the Senate. But she will advance no further in the House. And all along, her actions play as incoherent and self-obsessed.
Nancy Mace will be on Steve Bannon’s podcast this week, by the way. It’s her second time on the show. Because she is wherever she thinks she needs to be in the moment, and always clumsily so. Nobody is quite sure what Mace believes in or stands for, and in her maladroitness and inconstancy she suggests that she stands only for herself. It is not a problem that Mace is an ambitious politician who engages in electoral calculus; her true and far more mundane failing is that, metaphorically speaking, she is so bad at math.