Nancy Mace

CHARLESTON — U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace is willing to challenge just about anyone.

Fellow Republicans. Democrats. The Speaker of the House. Reporters. Once, even a constituent inside an Ulta Beauty store who asked about town halls, leading to an expletive-filled exchange that went viral.

Now the South Carolina Republican is betting her aggressive style will carry her into the governor’s office.

“I want to be that strong voice, that same strong kid from Goose Creek that fought her way out of a system and became successful. I want to do that for everybody across the state of South Carolina,” Mace told The Post and Courier.

And she’s doing it the way she always has: On her own terms.

Mace has advisers but no campaign manager. She has just one headline endorsement, and many of her donors live outside South Carolina. Her social media presence is relentless and indiscriminate. No topic is off limits, whether it’s pushing colleges to eliminate gender categories beyond male and female from their applications, to demanding the release of the Epstein files.

“It's not bullying when you're communicating a fact,” Mace said. “I'm very good at communicating facts, and I'm very good at identifying a problem and coming up with a solution.”

When people doubt her she has a simple response: “Watch me.”

Early years

Long before enrolling at The Citadel, joining Congress or her run for governor, Mace was a young woman trying to find her place. She was born at Fort Bragg, N.C., where her father, Emory Mace, served as a major in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, later rising to brigadier general. Her mother, Anne, was a public school teacher.

Mace grew up in a family of six as the youngest of three daughters, with one younger brother. It was the beginning of a childhood shaped by constant relocations.

By the time she was in first grade, she was already absorbing the rhythms of military life. On weekends, she joined her father for 5:30 a.m. runs, trying to show how fast she could finish a mile.

By 13, she had moved 10 times — a pattern of starting over that meant learning quickly how to prove herself in new places and oftentimes struggling.

“It was difficult to form lasting friendships. By the time I entered my teens, I was deeply confused about who I was and where I belonged,” Mace wrote in her memoir, “In the Company of Men: A Woman at the Citadel.”

The moves eventually brought her to South Carolina, where Mace would spend much of her teenage years in Goose Creek. She played the clarinet, ran track and in high school was a member of a local swim team.

It is also where her life split in two: before the assault, and everything that came after.

When she was 16, Mace said a high school classmate pinned her down and assaulted her even as she yelled no. She told only two people about it: her mother and her best friend.

Mace said she didn't report it to the police because she was afraid and ashamed about what people would think. The attack was largely why she dropped out of high school at 17, she has said, and later began taking classes at Trident Tech. She graduated from high school in 1995.

During that time, Mace said she "faded away."

"I was not the strong, resilient little girl that my parents knew and loved. I was completely different. It was the hardest time in my life and I wasn't sure how I was going to get through it," she told The Post and Courier in 2019.

When Mace arrived at The Citadel in August 1996, she was one of four women to join the Corps of Cadets following a Supreme Court ruling that required the all-male institution to begin accepting women.

Others had tried. When Shannon Faulkner arrived at the school in August 1995 she was met with protest and ridicule. She withdrew six days after her arrival, leaving in tears while some cadets openly cheered and celebrated.

Thanks to Mace's transfer credits and taking on a heavy academic load, she became the first woman to graduate from the military college in 1999, a milestone she often points to as proof that persistence — and stubbornness — can pay off.

Her studies continued at the University of Georgia, where in 2004, Mace earned her master’s degree in journalism and mass communication.

In 2008, she founded The Mace Group, a public relations firm whose political clients included U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, former U.S. Rep. Mick Mulvaney and S.C. state Sen. Tom Davis.

Political awakening

When asked about her own political awakening, Mace pointed not to a campaign or a candidate, but to a moment in May 2019 when she was sitting in church.

“I didn’t spontaneously combust,” she said, adding that she had been working through regrets and “took that pain over the years and turned it into purpose.”

The answer didn’t fully align with her political timeline.

By 2019, Mace had already run for federal office and been elected to the S.C. Statehouse.

Pressed on that, Mace downplayed the idea of any singular turning point that led to her political identity.

“There was no big grandiose moment in time,” she said. Instead, Mace described “a life full of experience” and “getting punched in the gut over and over again by a system that didn’t want me to succeed.”

She framed her political identity less as an ideological shift and more as something shaped over time by setbacks, persistence and survival.

“I’ve voted Republican my entire life,” she said. “I grew up in South Carolina — we’re a red state, so it’s not like a stretch.”

And of her time spent volunteering on libertarian principal Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign?

“I was curious about how people won elections,” Mace said, adding that’s when she realized, “Well, I can do this, and why don’t I run?”

Defining moments of your life

Mace pointed to several defining moments — some personal, others shaped by conflict.

“I never thought I would make it out of Goose Creek, and I did,” she said.

Becoming a mother, she added, was another turning point: “Giving birth to my children — those are the biggest moments that really change you.”

She named both of her children after her own parents.

But she lingered most on a recent trip to the Middle East, which she described as transformative.

“When you hear the sirens — the sound of missiles being intercepted, of munitions breaking apart — it’s the kind of thing that makes you feel like you’re standing at the gates of hell,” she said.

While overseas, Mace worked with the veteran-led nonprofit Grey Bull Rescue to help evacuate more than 150 Americans, including a South Carolina mother and four of her sons.

The experience, Mace said, has reshaped how she views leadership.

“And I've come back with certainly a new look on the responsibilities of being a leader, the responsibilities of being an executive, the responsibilities of sending South Carolina sons and daughters into war, which I will not support at this juncture in the fight in Iran,” Mace said.

Victories and losses

In 2014, Mace, then 36, set her sights on challenging Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Mace had moved back to South Carolina from Atlanta, where she was still known as the first woman to graduate from The Citadel Corps of Cadets. But she sought to cast herself to voters as a wife, a mother and small business owner.

“She is someone who is passionate about her country and she is someone who is seriously concerned about the direction it is going,” the press release announcing her candidacy declared.

It was her first run for elected office, and it taught her to trust her own instincts rather than relying on someone else telling her what she should be. At the time, she was, as she put it, "the candidate people wanted me to be" instead of herself.

She placed fifth in that seven-way GOP primary, where Graham won without needing a runoff. After that, Mace said she did not plan to return to the political arena as a candidate.

Her time spent on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign became an unexpected arc in her own political story.

From September 2015 until August 2016, she worked as coalitions director and field director for the campaign. Her work earned Mace more than $43,000 in 2016, and spanned seven states: Texas, Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska, Wisconsin, California and South Carolina.

And that experience, she has said, helped shape her own decision to run for office again — this time on her own terms.

In 2017, she ran in the special election for Berkeley County’s State House District 99 and won.

For her Statehouse campaign she wore her hair how she wanted (up or down, depending on the day), dressed how she liked (mostly all in black) and gave speeches without critiques from a consultant.

"That realism — that being yourself and speaking your mind and telling it like it is — is what people want right now," Mace said.

What defines you as a politician?

With high name recognition, much of her early campaign strategy has centered on generating headlines, threatening lawsuits and pushing back against perceived detractors — a posture that mirrors how she has long framed her own life story as a fighter against the odds.

The congresswoman has spoken publicly about surviving rape and sexual assault, stood with victims of Jeffrey Epstein and, last year in a speech on the House floor, accused several men, including her former fiancé, of sexual misconduct. She was sued for defamation by one of the men, but a judge ruled her speech was constitutionally protected.