Men In Women’s Spaces? Nancy Mace Should Look At Her Own Party’s Senate Lineup

Locker Rooms And Closet Cases: Welcome To South Carolina Politics

South Carolina started the Civil War. Generally speaking, I wish them all the worst, all the time. The state’s politics usually does that to them without me having to ask for any divine intercession. The state gave Trump a 54.9%-40.6% win in 2016, a 55.1% to 43.4% win in 2020 and last year a whopping 58.2% to 40.4% victory over Kamala. Basically, the Democrats win the Black Belt counties plus Charleston, Richland and Jasper. The rest of the state is red. (Kamala lost Jasper.) Gerrymandering— with the connivance of corrupt Democratic boss Jim Clyburn— has stuffed as many Blacks as possible into Clyburn’s district, making Nancy Mace’s and Joe Wilson’s unnaturally safe for Republican candidates.

Next year, South Carolina has two big statewide elections— one for Lindsey Graham’s Senate seat and one for the open gubernatorial seat. Both results will be determined by the Republican primaries on June 9 (with potential runoffs on June 23). Primarying Graham are former Lt. Gov. André Bauer (a closet case like Graham) and, as of yesterday, Paul Dans, one of the principal authors of Project 2025, plus a handful of lesser-known vanity candidates.

Yesterday, Lisa Mascaro and Meg Kinnard reported that Dans told the Associated Press that “What we’ve done with Project 2025 is really change the game in terms of closing the door on the progressive era. If you look at where the chokepoint is, it’s the United States Senate. That’s the headwaters of the swamp… [Graham has spent most of his career in Washington and] it’s time to show him the door.” Dans will formally announce his campaign tomorrow in Charleston

Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to Graham’s campaign who co-managed Trump’s 2024 bid, predicted in a statement to the AP that Dans’ campaign would “end prematurely.”

“After being unceremoniously dumped in 2024 while trying to torpedo Donald Trump’s historic campaign, Paul Dans has parachuted himself into the state of South Carolina in direct opposition to President Trump’s longtime friend and ally in the Senate, Lindsey Graham,” LaCivita said.

Challenging the long-serving Graham, who has routinely batted back contenders over the years, is something of a political long shot in what is fast becoming a crowded field ahead of the November 2026 midterm election that will determine control of Congress.

Trump early on gave his endorsement of Graham, a political confidant and regular golfing partner of the president, despite their on-again-off-again relationship. Graham, in announcing he would seek a fifth term in the Senate, also secured the state’s leading Republicans, Sen. Tim Scott and Gov. Henry McMaster, to chair his 2026 run. He has amassed millions of dollars in his campaign account.

… Dans, an attorney who worked in the first Trump administration as White House liaison to the office of personnel management, said he expects to have support from Project 2025 allies, as well as the ranks of Trump’s supporters in the state who have publicly tired of Graham.

After Trump left the White House, Dans, now a father of four, went to work at the Heritage Foundation, often commuting on weekdays to Washington as he organized Project 2025. The nearly 1,000-page policy blueprint, with chapters written by leading conservative thinkers, calls for dismantling the federal government and downsizing the federal workforce, among other right-wing proposals for the next White House.

“To be clear, I believe that there is a ‘deep state’ out there, and I’m the single one who stepped forward at the end of the first term of Trump and really started to drain the swamp,” Dans said, noting he compiled much of the book from his kitchen table in Charleston.

Among the goals, he said, was to “deconstruct the administrative state,” which he said is what the Trump administration has been doing, pointing in particular to former Trump adviser Elon Musk’s work at DOGE shuttering federal offices.

With Trump having already endorsed Graham, unless Dans wants to run an all-out-anti-gay campaign against Graham and Bauer, there’s not much chance Graham will lose the nomination (or the general election). The gubernatorial race might be more exciting, also a good opportunity to root for the worst of a slateful of horrible candidates. The ones whop have already announced are Lt. Governor Pamela Evette, state Senator and former Hate Talk Radio host Josh Kimbrell, neo-fascist Congressman Ralph Norman and Attorney General Alan Wilson. Crackpot Nancy Mace has been teasing a possible run but there’s no way to know what’s going on in her scrambled brain. There is also a possibility that disgraced former Governor Mark Sanford and state Senator Sean Bennett could run.

Yesterday Elizabeth Elkind covered the long-anticipated Ralph Norman announcement at a Sunday rally for Fox News. Norman told his supporters that he’s “running for governor to shake things up, clean up Columbia, and finally take down the corrupt political establishment once and for all. I owe nothing to the lobbyists. I owe nothing to the Columbia bureaucratic elite. My allegiance is to you, the people of South Carolina.”

He’s promising to establish a South Carolina version of DOGE and to implement term limits for state lawmakers, tort reform, and pledging to “let the people vote on judges” and is also promising “to use the bully pulpit to bring my case directly to the people” and to “use the veto pen.” His campaign speech also touches on socially conservative goals like advocating for school choice, and restricting school bathrooms by gender at birth. “And if that all doesn’t work, I’m telling you now that any so-called “Republican” RINO legislator that doesn’t stand for reforms the people are calling for doesn’t deserve to be in office and we’ll beat them in Republican primaries if that’s what it takes.”

In one-party states like South Carolina, Republicans have to turn their guns against each other and Ralph Norman is happy to do just that… as is the other congressfreak considering a run, Mace. The prospect of getting the two of them out of Congress is something every American should be celebrating.

“Norman,” wrote Elkind, “pointed out in his speech that both he and Trump have a background in real estate; both men led development companies that were founded by their fathers… He also cast himself as a disruptor who helped move ‘the needle by making our budget more conservative,’ in reference to the House Freedom Caucus’s push to move Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ to the right… ‘Some say I have earned a reputation of being uncompromising, always trying to make a bill more conservative,’ Norman’s speech says. ‘Well folks, I’ll take that as a compliment and I am proud of it.’”

Meanwhile Fox News assigned the Nancy Mace update to Paul Steinhauser and Kyle Schmidbauer. “I will,” said the loony tunes congresswoman [whose own staffers generally agree is certifiably insane], “be making a decision in the coming days. We’re definitely leaning towards running for statewide office in South Carolina for governor.”

In a speech in New Hampshire Friday she said as much as declared her candidacy: “we're going to.” potentially for that as well." Mace told Fox News Digital that there were a number of reasons why she would bid for South Carolina governor.

“We have the highest state income tax in the southeast, making us not competitive with other neighboring states, and a growing, booming economy under Donald Trump,” Mace said.

“But also law and order. My state has been run over by illegals and our leaders have turned a blind eye. And I want to protect women and kids. We've got this gender bending ideology in colleges and universities across South Carolina, and we've got to end it,” she argued.

… Mace said that if she launches a gubernatorial campaign, “we're starting out front, in the lead, and it's a two-man race” between her and Wilson.

And she pledged that “if I get in, I will fight to the finish, and I will take out South Carolina's Attorney General, because he's turned a blind eye on women and on children and on the state for a lot of reasons. He might force me to do this.”

Mace, in a bombshell speech on the U.S. House floor in February, alleged that Wilson ignored evidence of sexual assault against her and other women. In her hour-long speech, Mace accused four men, including her ex-fiance, of sexual crimes and said she was among the victims.

Wilson vehemently denied Mace's accusations, saying at the time “that allegation was never made to me— no one in my office.”

Wilson, in a statement to Fox News on Monday, argued that “Nancy Mace is a liar who will do anything to get attention to distract from her liberal voting record. I’ve served our country and dedicated my civilian career to protecting children.”

“Her attacks are, again, categorically false and are just a distraction from her liberal agenda,” he added. “South Carolina families need a Governor who will fight for our values, not someone who will compromise them for political gain and social media clicks.”

And Wilson's campaign highlighted that every sheriff in Mace's congressional district has endorsed his campaign for governor.

… Trump backed a primary challenger against Mace when she was up for re-election in 2022, but she successfully won re-nomination and re-election.

Mace later came to Trump's defense after the then-former president was indicted for mishandling classified documents. And she endorsed Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries.

Trump's grip over the GOP, thanks to his 2024 victory to win back the White House, is stronger than ever, and his endorsements in GOP nomination races are extremely influential.

Asked if she could land the president's endorsement if she ran for governor, Mace told Fox News Digital, “I’ll be working very hard if I get in to earn his support.”

Mace, who has leaned hard into cultural issues in recent years, didn't disappoint in her speech in New Hampshire.

“I love being here in the Granite State, because this is where real men protect women,” Mace said in her opening remarks.

“I’ve learned in my fight in Congress that we, as women, still have a war to wage with the far left, who want men in women’s spaces. They want men in our locker rooms. They want men showering next to our 12-year-old daughters,” she argued. “And they think men can get pregnant. I’m just here to say the biological truth is not that.”

So here we are again: a hellhole state that started a war to preserve slavery is now locked in an intra-party cage match between a conspiracy-addled congresswoman who’s never met a camera she didn’t treat like a confessional booth and a real estate mini-tyrant vowing to bulldoze what’s left of the government. And that’s just for the governor’s mansion. Over in the Senate primary, we’ve got a Heritage Foundation zealot trying to outflank Lindsey Graham by promising to nuke the administrative state from his kitchen table. The good news? In a one-party authoritarian system like South Carolina’s, the only way to get rid of national embarrassments like Ralph Norman and Nancy Mace is to let them chase their own careerist fever dreams right out of Congress. The bad news? One of them might actually win. And if they do, South Carolina will get what it so often does: exactly what it deserves.