Nancy Mace Finishes Fifth in SC Governor Primary: The Full Story of What Went Wrong

Nancy Mace, Republican congresswoman from South Carolina's 1st District, finished fifth in the June 10, 2026 Republican gubernatorial primary with approximately 11.4 percent of the vote. Trump-endorsed Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette led the field with 29.1 percent and will face Attorney General Alan Wilson, who received 26.5 percent, in a runoff on June 23. Businessman Rom Reddy finished fourth at 14.9 percent, and Representative Ralph Norman came third at 16.5 percent. Mace conceded before 9 p.m. EDT and endorsed Wilson for the runoff.

The Associated Press called the South Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary just after 9 p.m. EDT on June 10, 2026. By that point, Mace had already conceded. She did not wait for the final count. When 65 percent of votes had been tallied and she was sitting in last place with 11.6 percent, she knew.

Here is how the full field finished with 95 percent of votes counted:

• Pamela Evette - 29.1%
• Alan Wilson - 26.5%
• Ralph Norman - 16.5%
• Rom Reddy - 14.9%
• Nancy Mace - 11.4%

That ordering is worth sitting with for a moment. Mace entered this race as the candidate with the highest name recognition. A Winthrop University poll taken in March 2026 showed 57 percent of South Carolina Republicans were either familiar or somewhat familiar with her, the highest of any candidate in the field. She was the only candidate with a national media footprint. She had been on Fox News more times than the other four candidates combined. She had 3 million Twitter followers, a book deal, and a campaign launch at the Citadel that generated national coverage.

She finished behind a businessman named Rom Reddy, who entered the race late and whose name many voters still could not quite place heading into primary day.

The geographic humiliation was just as complete as the overall numbers. South Carolina's 1st Congressional District, the Charleston-area coastal district that Mace has represented for three terms, is her home turf. These are the voters who know her best, who have elected her repeatedly, who have watched her career up close. In her own congressional district, she finished third or fourth depending on the county. She did not carry a single county in her home base.

To understand why Mace's campaign collapsed, you have to start with Donald Trump and the endorsement she expected to receive and did not get.

Mace's political biography is in many ways a story about Trump. She worked on his 2016 campaign. She won her congressional seat in 2020 partly on the strength of his support. When she stood up after January 6, 2021, and publicly condemned Trump for his role in the Capitol attack, calling it the worst breach of the Capitol since 1814, he turned on her immediately. He backed her primary challenger in 2022. She won that race anyway.

Then something interesting happened. Mace decided that losing Trump's support was not a price she was willing to keep paying. She moved back toward him, publicly and deliberately, through 2023 and 2024. She became one of his more visible defenders during the 2024 election cycle. She championed his causes. She amplified his messaging. By the time she launched her governor's campaign in August 2025, she was presenting herself as a MAGA candidate and expecting that the relationship had been repaired enough to earn his backing.

She was wrong. On May 31, 2026, Trump endorsed Pamela Evette.

The reason Mace gave, in multiple public statements, was the Epstein files. Earlier in 2026, Mace had been one of the most vocal members of Congress pushing for the Justice Department to release its files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender whose death in federal custody has generated years of conspiracy theories and genuine questions about powerful people who may have been connected to him. Mace acknowledged publicly that she knew pressing for the release of those files might cost her Trump's endorsement. She pressed for them anyway.

"I voted to release the Epstein files. NO REGRETS," she posted on X after Trump's endorsement of Evette was announced. "I demanded it because you deserved the truth, ALL OF IT, and as a survivor of a corrupt and broken court system, I will always pursue justice for those who deserve it. If sacrificing my values is the price of an endorsement, I will never pay it."

She told Politico directly: "I believe I did not receive the endorsement due to my Epstein vote."

Whether that is the complete story is genuinely unclear. Trump has endorsed plenty of candidates who took positions he disagreed with. The Epstein issue clearly created friction. But Evette had also been cultivating Trump's support for a long time, and she had something Mace did not: a history of institutional loyalty without the drama. Evette had not publicly attacked Trump. She had not voted against his endorsement interest. She had simply shown up, done the work, and waited. Trump tends to reward that.

The endorsement announcement came late in the race, just days before the primary. It landed like a sledgehammer. Evette went from leading in polls to leading by even more. And Mace, who had been selling herself as the true MAGA candidate even after the snub, spent the final stretch of the campaign in an awkward position: arguing she was still the right choice while the president had explicitly said she was not.

In the early months of the campaign, before the Trump endorsement had been issued to anyone, Mace looked like a genuinely competitive candidate.

Her March 2026 internal poll, conducted by Stratus Intelligence, showed her leading the entire field at 24 percent, with favorability climbing from 34 to 42 percent since January. Her campaign touted a positive trajectory. Wilson, Evette, and Norman were all seeing their unfavorability numbers rise as more voters got to know them. Mace was trending in the right direction and everyone else was trending downward.

That snapshot of March 2026 matters because it shows what the race looked like before Trump weighed in. In that world, Mace had a real path. She had name recognition, a compelling personal story, a national profile that could drive fundraising, and a differentiated message that mixed populist energy with genuine policy substance, specifically her elimination of the state income tax over five years, her law enforcement platform, and her focus on protecting women and children.

Then May arrived. Then the Epstein files debate heated up. Then Trump endorsed Evette on May 31. And then in the final ten days, Mace's polling numbers caved.

A Trafalgar Group survey released before the primary showed her falling to the back of the pack. While her March internal had her at 24 percent, she was in the single digits in some of the final public surveys. Her campaign maintained these were outlier results. Primary day proved them right about one thing: the outlier surveys understated her support slightly. She got 11.4 percent. Still last place.

The campaign itself had not been without drama beyond the Trump endorsement. In late May, a confrontation occurred between rival campaign supporters at an event that Mace publicly referenced. She at one point called on Evette to drop out of the race entirely following the incident. Evette did not drop out. The exchange felt increasingly desperate as the primary approached, the kind of move a campaign makes when the ground is shifting beneath it.

The June 23 runoff will feature two candidates who could not be more different in terms of where they come from and what they represent within the South Carolina GOP.

Pamela Evette is the sitting Lieutenant Governor, a businesswoman who built a national manufacturing company before entering politics. She has the backing of Trump and outgoing Governor Henry McMaster, who is South Carolina's longest-serving governor. Her campaign focused on economic competitiveness, keeping South Carolina business-friendly, and delivering results within the institutional framework of state government. She is the continuity candidate, the safe choice, the pick for voters who want more of what South Carolina has been doing and believe it has been working.

Alan Wilson is the state's long-serving Attorney General, a lawyer's lawyer who built his reputation on prosecuting corruption and child exploitation cases over more than a decade in the AG's office. He is the law-and-order candidate. His campaign leaned into his prosecutorial record and his standing within the more traditional, establishment wing of the South Carolina GOP. He and Mace had been bitter enemies for months leading into primary day, trading genuinely harsh attacks. She suggested that "if you're a pedophile, you definitely want Alan Wilson to prosecute your case." He called her an "entitled, spoiled brat."

And then she endorsed him on primary night.

That moment, Mace standing at a microphone in Charleston saying she wants a "law and order governor" and that "law and order governor is going to be Alan Wilson," was one of the stranger turns of a primary race full of them. Wilson accepted the endorsement graciously. He told supporters the two had "buried our hatchet" and said Mace has accepted an offer to work with his administration specifically on cases involving sexual criminals. For whatever their personal history had been, the handshake happened publicly and seemingly genuinely.

The practical effect is that Mace's 11.4 percent of the primary vote, or at least a significant chunk of it, now represents a potential asset for Wilson heading into the June 23 runoff. Whether those voters follow her to Wilson is not guaranteed. But in a race where Evette leads Wilson by roughly three points heading into the runoff, every percentage point matters.

Mace's concession speech was not a conventional political exit. She did not thank her donors, say she was proud of the campaign, promise to support the party's nominee, and walk off stage. She gave a speech that sounded less like a political farewell and more like a closing argument at a trial.

She called the election a "moral emergency." She framed the campaign as a "spiritual battle between good and evil." She said the fight was between those who "protect predators" and those who will "fight against them and put them in jail."

"I chose to stand against child rapists," she told the crowd. "I chose to expose the names hidden in the sexual harassment slush fund. I chose to expose DEI judges. I chose to expose the abusers of children. And apparently, I chose wrong if the goal was winning an election."

Then came the line that has been quoted everywhere since Tuesday night.

"I'm at peace with that."

She said she was not going to seek re-election to Congress, reiterating a pledge she had made previously to serve only six terms in the House. Her congressional seat, which she will not hold after January 2027, now becomes its own political story. Reports indicate a retired Navy admiral fired by Defense Secretary Hegseth is advancing in the Democratic primary for Mace's seat, setting up a potentially competitive race for a district that has been reliably Republican.

Her statement on X, posted shortly after she conceded, read: "Serving South Carolina has been the greatest honor of my life. Every vote I cast, every hearing I called, every fight I picked, it was always for you. I've seen what happens when good people stay quiet. And I've seen what happens when they don't. I would choose the latter every time."

That is Mace's political brand in three sentences. Whether voters found it compelling or exhausting depended largely on where they were sitting. About 11.4 percent of South Carolina Republican primary voters found it compelling enough to vote for her. The rest of the field found something else more appealing.

The South Carolina results contribute to a complicated picture of Trump's endorsement power heading into the 2026 midterms.

Evette finished first. That is a win for Trump. His endorsed candidate came out on top in a five-person field. But she did not win outright. No candidate cleared the 50 percent threshold required to avoid a runoff in South Carolina, which means the race goes to June 23 and Trump's candidate is not yet the confirmed Republican nominee.

The fact that Evette placed first but not decisively, in a state Trump won by more than 17 points in 2024, with a field that included two self-described MAGA candidates who were themselves endorsed by Trump at various points in their careers, suggests that the president's imprimatur is powerful but not determinative.

Compare that to the Iowa gubernatorial primary the week before, where Trump-backed candidate Randy Feenstra lost to a MAHA-backed farmer named Zach Lahn. That result genuinely surprised political observers and raised questions about whether Trump's endorsement power was waning in certain types of races.

South Carolina does not confirm that trend. Evette leads. But it does not dispel it either. Wilson, with Mace's endorsement and a closing argument built on his prosecutorial record, has a real shot at the runoff. If Wilson defeats Evette on June 23, it will be the second consecutive week in which a Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate lost in a primary, and that will generate a very specific kind of conversation about the 2026 midterm environment.

To understand why Tuesday night stings the way it does for Mace personally, you have to understand the full arc of her political career and what she was trying to build.

Mace grew up in South Carolina and attended the Citadel, the state's public military college. She was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel's Corps of Cadets, in 1999. That accomplishment defined her personal identity and her political brand from the start. She was not someone who had ever done things the easy way or waited for permission.

She ran for the South Carolina state legislature in 2018, lost, and ran again for Congress in 2020, this time winning, unseating incumbent Democrat Joe Cunningham in a race that nobody predicted she would win. She entered the House of Representatives in January 2021, days before the January 6 Capitol attack.

Her response to January 6 was sharply critical of Trump, at a moment when most of her Republican colleagues were staying quiet. She said it was the worst breach of the Capitol since the War of 1812. She called for accountability. Trump endorsed her primary challenger in 2022. She won anyway.

Then came the pivot. By 2023 and 2024, Mace had repositioned herself as a hardline culture warrior, leading Republican attacks on transgender bathroom policies in the Capitol, championing a range of MAGA-aligned causes, and visibly working to repair the relationship with Trump. She spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention. She was visible, loud, and present in exactly the spaces where Trump support was being built.

But the pivot created its own problems. Voters who had liked her because she was willing to push back on her own party now saw someone who had abandoned that identity. Voters who wanted a true MAGA loyalist questioned whether someone who had attacked Trump after January 6 deserved their full trust. The Epstein files push gave Mace a way to distinguish herself, something genuinely principled that she was doing against the party's preference. But it came at a cost she underestimated.

She ends her congressional career without a governorship and without a future House term. At 47, that is not necessarily the end of her political life. But it is a significant setback after what was supposed to be the race that defined her trajectory.

South Carolina law requires that candidates win an outright majority in a primary. Since nobody hit 50 percent on June 10, the top two finishers, Evette and Wilson, meet again on June 23.

Evette enters the runoff with a roughly three-point lead, the Trump endorsement, the backing of outgoing Governor McMaster, and the institutional support of most of the South Carolina Republican establishment. That is a strong position.

Wilson enters with Mace's endorsement, a prosecutorial record that appeals to law-and-order voters, and a closing narrative built around the anti-Evette sentiment that clearly exists in at least 40 percent of the Republican electorate, given that Norman, Reddy, and Mace all ran to Evette's right and collectively gathered more votes than she did.

The question is whether Wilson can consolidate the non-Evette vote. Norman has not yet issued an endorsement. Reddy has not either. If those 30-plus percent of voters can be moved toward Wilson, the runoff is genuinely competitive. If they scatter or stay home, Evette's lead holds and the Trump-backed candidate becomes the Republican nominee.

The Democratic side is settled. State Representative Jermaine Johnson won the Democratic primary outright with 59.5 percent of the vote, avoiding a runoff entirely. He will face whoever emerges from the Republican runoff in the November general election. South Carolina has not elected a Democratic governor since 1998, and forecasters from Cook Political Report and Sabato's Crystal Ball both consider the general election safe for Republicans. But Democrats are cautiously noting that Trump's national approval ratings are down, 2026 midterm enthusiasm on their side is building, and upset potential exists in environments where voters are paying attention.