South Carolina — 1st District

MOUNT PLEASANT — When Statehouse Republicans redrew South Carolina’s U.S. House lines in 2022, many thought they’d reworked the then-competitive 1st Congressional District to be firmly red.

Four years later, as GOP candidates across the county face an increasingly uphill midterm battle, Democrats are testing just how solid a hold their rivals have on the Lowcountry seat.

The race is open thanks to U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace’s run for governor, and Democrats nominated a candidate, retired Navy vice admiral Nancy Lacore, who they think is well-positioned for a down-the-middle run that can take advantage of rising prices and an unpopular war in Iran.

And the end of Lacore’s military career, when she was fired without explanation by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in 2025, has given her fundraising appeal outside of South Carolina and support from the national party in her run against Charleston County Councilwoman Jenny Costa Honeycutt, the Republican nominee and a construction lawyer.

It's enough for some to start thinking of 2018, when Joe Cunningham broke a decades-long GOP hold on the seat as part of a national “blue wave” before falling to Mace, R-Charleston, two years later.

But there’s also little doubt that Honeycutt is the favorite.

Voters delivered double-digit thumpings to Democratic nominees in 2022 and 2024, and the district is still clearly red, though several media prognosticators shifted their ratings of the race to be more competitive over the summer. Scant public polling, sponsored by Lacore backers, has reported Honeycutt with a small lead.

The seat stretches along the coast from Beaufort County to McClellanville, and cuts inland to skirt the Charleston peninsula and West Ashley to cover Berkeley County and a slice of Dorchester County.

“Nobody should pretend that this isn’t a difficult district for a Democrat, it is,” said John Moffett, a Charleston consultant who previously worked with Cunningham and other Democrats. “But at the end of the day, difficult and predetermined are not the same thing.”

The Admiral vs. the Local

Speaking to supporters in her campaign’s newly opened Mount Pleasant office earlier this month, Lacore was in some ways following national Democrats’ midterm priorities — affordability, Iran, corruption, more affordability.

“The people who make the rules in D.C. should not be lining their pockets when Americans can’t afford prescriptions,” she said, part of her call to ban members of Congress from trading stocks.

She describes herself as a former Republican who left the party after Donald Trump won the presidential nomination in 2016. She was even introduced at her campaign office opening by Mount Pleasant Mayor Will Haynie, a Republican who endorsed her earlier in the year, a crossover she invokes as part of her pitch to moderate Republicans and independents.

Many of her policy positions are accordingly centrist.

She wants to tighten oversight of federal immigration enforcement, but not abolish ICE. She wants a Roe v. Wade level of abortion restriction, but didn’t commit to any specific court reform to get there. And she says Israel’s conduct in Gaza isn’t meeting the standards needed to justify U.S. military support, but called the country a “good ally” and spoke of her previous work with the Israeli military.

Honeycutt, meanwhile, has tried to dismiss her rival’s claims to moderation, framing Lacore as a would-be ally to the Democratic leaders in Washington and the party’s growing left flank.

“If you end up in Washington as a Democrat, you will vote with the Democrats. You will be voting with (House Minority Leader) Hakeem Jeffries, and you will be with the farthest left wing of the party, the AOCs and the Bernie Sanders,” Honeycutt said Sept. 18 at the Sun City Hilton Head retirement community.

Lacore said she didn’t know if she’d back Jeffries, D-N.Y., as House speaker should she become part of a Democratic majority.

She’d rather talk about her military career, which ended as Chief of Navy Reserve and has become the centerpiece of her campaign — its logo features the three stars of a vice admiral, and her first general election advertisement was filmed from the deck of the aircraft carrier Yorktown at Patriots Point.

Lacore began thinking about running for Congress a few months after she was removed from her Navy post, she said, before she formally retired. Once out of the service, she left Washington, D.C., and relocated to Mount Pleasant last fall with her husband to be closer to family.

That turnaround from the nonpartisan career of a military officer to the hyperpartisan one of a congressional candidate means she has little public political history, compared to the culture war baggage other Democrats have had to shy away from.

But it also means the New York native is new to the Lowcountry, a fact that Honeycutt, who is from James Island, is happy to emphasize.

“I think the most important distinction … is that I’m from here, I’ve grown up here, my kids were raised here, family’s from here. I still live in the same neighborhood I grew up in and I think that’s really important to Lowcountry voters,” said Honeycutt, who was first elected to Charleston County Council in 2018 and won again in 2022.

That familiarity, she argues, would help her better secure the federal infrastructure needs of the district, and she rattled off a list of those priorities, such as the bridge over Highway 278 in Beaufort County and connecting the Berlin G. Myers Parkway to Interstate 26 in Berkeley County.

Both women also say Congress needs to be more assertive in controlling how the country enters military conflicts in light of the war in Iran, which Lacore has criticized and said she’d vote to end.

“I think that Congress needs to decide whether we should be at war,” Honeycutt said, adding that she didn’t have enough information to know how she’d vote on the question but that the country needs to “get that conflict wrapped up.”

Trump, who recently said his next move could be to “annihilate” the Iranian government, endorsed Honeycutt after she won the Republican primary. She was in Dallas for the GOP’s Trump-focused midterm convention earlier this month, and spoke during his rally for U.S. Sen. Darline Graham in August, calling herself a volleyball mom who opposes transgender girls playing in girls’ sports leagues.

Honeycutt hasn’t asked the president to come campaign for her in the 1st District. She attributed rising prices, which have generally been linked to his administration’s tariffs and strikes in Iran, instead to the increasing national debt.

And as the Social Security trust funds head towards depletion in 2032, Honeycutt says Congress should look at “tough choices” such as raising the retirement age to preserve benefits. Lacore said she opposes raising the age but that Congress should raise the cap on Social Security taxes.

Down the stretch

Lacore entered the general election campaign with a cash advantage, thanks in part to donations from outside South Carolina, which made up most of her fundraising before June 30, the latest quarterly figures available. Both candidates were supported by outside PACs during their primaries, which could well continue that spending into the fall.