Nancy Mace WINS South Carolina primary in blow to Kevin McCarthy’s vengeance crusade

Nancy Mace has emerged victorious after a controversial primary supported by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

The AP called the race at 8:40 p.m. in favor of Mace over Catherine Templeton, a state official who claimed to be more conservative than Mace. Mace won the primary with 57.6% of the vote at the time the race was called.

Mace won her last election 56-42 over Democrat Annie Andrews and is heavily favored to win in November.

The congresswoman drew McCarthy’s ire when she voted with seven other Republicans and all Democrats to remove him from the speakership.

McCarthy’s political action committee, Majority Committee PAC, made a $10,000 donation to Templeton in April and the American Prosperity Alliance, where McCarthy ally Brian Walsh serves as a senior adviser, has spent more than $2 million to defeat Mace.

The race has become one of the most expensive House races in South Carolina history — outside groups have spent nearly $5 million attacking Mace or boosting Templeton.

Mace is the first McCarthy enemy to face a credible primary threat.

Nancy Mace will face a primary challenger on Tuesday with the crucial behind-the-scenes support of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Catherine Templeton.

The race has become one of the most expensive House races in South Carolina history — outside groups have spent nearly $5 million attacking Mace or boosting Templeton, up there

Rep. Bob Good, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus who voted to impeach the speaker, will face Trump-backed John McGuire next week.

The 46-year-old mother of two has been accused by her critics of ‘flip-flopping for fame’, especially in her relationship with the former president. Donald Trump.

‘We make light of it, it’s quite funny. I sometimes joke that I am his lost daughter,” Mace told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview last month.

Trump had endorsed Mace — who was locked in a high-dollar primary — weeks after she snubbed her former friend Nikki Haley to support him.

Trump had once called her “crazy” and a “terrible person” and endorsed her main challenger in 2022. In 2016 she was blacklisted from his campaign events.

‘We project [McCarthy] is going to spend between $4 and 5 million in the primaries to try to buy this seat,” Mace said of the race.

Mace said the former chairman’s political career is “in trouble” and he now wants revenge on Republicans who voted to impeach him.

Mace is defending her seat in the Charleston area against front-runner Templeton, a former state agency head, and political newcomer Bill Young.

Mace said Templeton’s deeply conservative views and anti-abortion stance would lose her the general election if she were successful in the primary. “She was the last person they asked and the only one who said yes,” Mace said.

“I don’t toe the party line,” she said. “Forty percent of our electorate is made up of independent voters… I represent a pro-choice district.”

‘McCarthy has turned someone against me who is known to be against all exceptions. Opposition to exceptions for rape, incest, exceptions, opposition to exceptions for the life of the mother. So if you’re a young woman with an ectopic pregnancy, she’s okay with you dying. She’s fine. She officially said you should die.”

In February, McCarthy told reporters he hoped Mace “gets the help to get her life on track.”

“She has a lot of challenges,” he said.

Mace’s policy views fluctuate between moderate and deeply conservative. She opposes an outright abortion ban, but voted out McCarthy over the debt ceiling deal, which she said was not conservative enough.

She voted against a foreign aid package for Ukraine, but also voted against a bill that will ban TikTok if it does not divest from China’s ByteDance.

Mace has made a name for herself in women’s issues.

Mace drew the ire of McCarthy when she joined seven other Republicans and all Democrats in voting to oust him from the presidency

‘We have such a small majority anyway, and [McCarthy] did the same work in the 22nd cycle. “We lost seats that we should have won if we hadn’t stuck our hat in the sand on the abortion post-Roe.”

Life on Capitol Hill was “lonely” after she voted to boot McCarthy, Mace said. But she saw it as a “unifying event”: every Republican rallying behind current Speaker Mike Johnson after three crazy, speakerless weeks.

Since then, Johnson has lost more Republican votes than McCarthy in a motion to evict — 11 to McCarthy’s eight — but he kept his job with help from Democrats.

Mace once said Trump’s “entire legacy was wiped away” during the January 6, 2021 riot. She told staff she wanted to be punched in the face by rioters so she could be “the face of the anti-Trump movement.”