Nancy Mace

Republican politician Nancy Mace is a study in contrasts:

• A high-school dropout, she went on to become the first woman to graduate from The Citadel, a previously all-male military college.
• Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican in 2020, she decried the January 6 attack on the Capitol, saying, “This is a sad day for our nation. I am heartbroken, disgusted, and I’m angry. Enough is enough.”
• A victim of sexual assault, she fought for exceptions for rape and incest in a South Carolina abortion ban but championed legislation that banned the first transgender member of Congress from using women’s bathrooms at the U.S. Capitol.

The three-term member of Congress embraces the contrasts, saying of herself, “I’m a fiscal conservative, I’m socially sensible.” She is running for governor of South Carolina in 2026, a role that could further elevate her in the ranks of the Republican Party.

Early years

Meet Nancy Mace

• Birth date: December 4, 1977
• Birthplace: Fort Bragg, North Carolina
• Education: First woman graduate of The Citadel, with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, 1999; master’s degree in journalism and mass communications, University of Georgia, 2004
• Current role: Member of Congress representing South Carolina’s 1st district; candidate for governor of South Carolina
• Family: Mace has been married and divorced twice. She has two children, Miles and Ellison.
• Quotation: “Am I an outspoken woman? Yes, but I’m also a dealmaker. I understand how this place works. But if you lie to me, we’re going to have problems.”

Mace is the daughter of United States Army Brig. Gen. James Emory Mace and schoolteacher Anne Mace. She was born at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Her early years were marked by sexual abuse, about which she has in recent years been remarkably open. She was molested as a 14-year-old at a swimming pool and raped by a classmate when she was 16.

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How Women with Military Backgrounds Are Changing the Face of Politics: Nancy Mace

Nancy Mace struggled with the trauma and dropped out of high school. She worked as a waitress at a Waffle House restaurant and took college courses so she could earn a high-school diploma. Mace told only her mother and her best friend about the attack, saying she was too ashamed to report it to the police. It would be decades before she would go public. “When you’re a rape survivor, it’s not like you get over it in a week or a year—it’s lifelong trauma that you have to deal with,” she told Politico in 2024 and added, “When I was raped, I quit. I quit school.” As she entered the next phase of her life, Mace was determined not to quit.

Read: How women with military backgrounds are changing the face of politics

The Citadel

Mace entered The Citadel in 1996. When she graduated three years later, becoming the first woman graduate from the corps of cadets in the institution’s 156-year history, she accepted her diploma from her father, then the commandant of cadets, and was the subject of news stories.

She wrote a 2001 book about her experiences, In the Company of Men: A Woman at the Citadel, which author and fellow Citadel alum Pat Conroy called “provocative, hilarious, illuminating and true.” Decades later Mace reflected on her time at The Citadel as being a key test for her, telling Politico in 2024,

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“Looking back on it now, I had something to prove to myself. And I wanted to prove that I could go to a challenging environment, I could face an obstacle and adversity unlike anything I had ever faced before and I wouldn’t quit.”

Mace went on to get a master’s degree in journalism and communications and started her own marketing and commercial real-estate company.

Early political career

Mace made her first foray into electoral politics by working on the unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, Republican from Texas. In 2014 she ran in the Republican U.S. Senate primary against incumbent Lindsey Graham and finished fifth in a seven-person race, garnering 6 percent of the vote. She worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign before having electoral success in her own right, winning a seat in the South Carolina legislature in a special election in 2017 and being elected again in 2018.

It was during the 2019 legislative session that Mace made national news with her insistence that legislation banning abortion after six weeks include exceptions for rape and incest. The so-called “heartbeat bill” called for banning abortions before most women knew they were pregnant. She took to the floor of the South Carolina House and, for the first time, used her personal experience to argue for legislation she had drafted:

“Rape is not a partisan issue.…And I hope and pray any wom[a]n or teenager who is raped or assaulted or a victim of incest would choose life. [But] I’m not going to take that [decision] away from anybody else. You have no idea what a woman or child goes through who is a victim of rape [or] incest.”

When the bill passed the South Carolina House, it included the exceptions Mace had called for.

Time in Congress

Mace’s high-profile departure from traditional conservative policy on abortion set her up for a run for Congress in 2020 in a district that stretched along the South Carolina coast from Hilton Head Island to Charleston. She narrowly defeated the incumbent Democrat, Joe Cunningham. In doing so, she became the first Republican woman elected to represent South Carolina in Congress.

Mace showed up for her swearing-in in Washington, D.C., with her two children but sent them home early. As she told CNN on the evening of January 6, 2021, “My motherly instincts said this doesn’t feel right, something is going to happen because of the rhetoric. And my worst fears came true today.”

In her first days in the House, Mace gained a reputation for actions—including denouncing the January 6 riot and Trump’s role in it—that infuriated fellow Republicans and won her praise in Democratic circles. One of her harshest critics was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, with whom she has sparred over such issues as 9/11, abortion, and racism. The two have attacked each other repeatedly on social media, often in language not appropriate for an encyclopedia. On the other hand, Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat from California, praised Mace as the kind of Republican that Democrats could work with and added, “If the Republican conference had everyone of Nancy Mace’s temperament and ideology, we’d be in a much better place in our country.”

In 2022 Mace ran for reelection, even as Trump endorsed her primary opponent. Her district had been dramatically redrawn in a way that has been called gerrymandering. As a result, the district she had won by fewer than 6,000 votes in 2020, she won by 38,000 votes in 2022.

In 2023 Mace surprised observers when she joined with some of the Republican Party’s most extreme members, including Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, to oust, for the first time in history, the sitting speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy.

Mace’s move to the right is seen by her opponents as pure political opportunism. She has been roundly criticized as taking positions that put her in the political limelight to further her ambitions. She has responded by saying that her male counterparts don’t face the same criticism as she does: “I don’t see Tim Scott or Lindsey Graham [South Carolina’s senators] getting attacked the way that I do and they’re on TV more than I am.” Voters in her district seemed to understand that Mace’s swing to the right was part of the game. “It’s politics—hello,” a Mace voter told The New York Times in 2023.

One of Mace’s most stark pivots in position, however, appeared to be on the issue of LGBTQ rights. As recently as 2023 the “socially sensible” Mace said she thought it was fine for children to change their pronouns, hairstyles, or clothing as they explored being “who you want to be,” and added, “Those are all things that I think most people would support.” Where Mace drew the line was gender-affirming surgery for minors. A year later, just after Sarah McBride was elected the first transgender member of Congress, Mace sponsored legislation to ban transgender women from using women’s restrooms at the Capitol. When asked if her legislation was aimed at McBride, Mace said, “I’m absolutely 100% gonna stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s restroom, in our locker rooms, in our changing rooms.”

In 2025, as she considered running for governor of South Carolina, Mace took to the House floor and delivered an hour-long speech in which she accused her ex-fiancé and others of sexual abuse and said South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson was failing to investigate her allegations. Wilson, a Republican who is a candidate for South Carolina governor in 2026, has tried to dismiss Mace’s criticism of him. Her ex-fiancé and other men she named during the speech have denied her accusations.

Run for governor

In August 2025 Mace announced she would run in the Republican primary for governor in 2026, becoming the fifth member of the GOP to join the race. The sitting Republican governor, Henry McMaster, is term-limited. Because South Carolina is a reliably Republican state, whoever wins the primary will likely be the next governor.

The first statewide race for Mace since her loss to Graham in 2014, the primary is likely to be a referendum on which of the contrasting views of Mace’s voters hold. For her part, Mace told The Washington Post that her campaign will address the needs of the party and her constituents, focusing less on the contrasts than on the consistency of her biography: “My voting record is very, very consistent for those paying attention.”

In the June 2026 primary Mace finished fifth in a seven candidate field.