Nancy Mace’s South Carolina Flameout Is Another Canary in the Culture-War Coal Mine

Nancy Mace bet her career on a bathroom, and last night, one of the reddest electorates in the country told her what the bet was worth.

In the Republican primary for South Carolina governor, Mace — a third-term congresswoman who gave up a safe House seat to run — finished fifth. Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette, whom Donald Trump endorsed, and Attorney General Alan Wilson advanced to a June 23 runoff. Behind them came Representative Ralph Norman and businessman Rom Reddy, who had never held elected office. Then Mace, at 11.4 percent — about 37,000 votes. She had largely stopped campaigning in the final days and conceded early. Polls in the closing weeks had her stuck in the low-to-mid teens; she finished below even that.

This is a person who, for the better part of two years, was arguably the most recognizable anti-transgender politician in America who wasn’t named Trump.

It wasn’t always the plan. In 2021, Mace told CBS News she was “pro-transgender rights, pro-LGBTQ.” She’d built a brand as a post-January 6 Republican willing to cross her own party. Then she found a better one. By late 2024, after Delaware elected Sarah McBride — the first out transgender member of Congress — Mace introduced a resolution to bar McBride from the women’s restrooms in the Capitol, then expanded it into a proposed nationwide federal bathroom ban. She sold “come and take it” bathroom-sign merchandise off the fight. She traveled to Delaware, the state McBride represents, to headline a state Republican event, where she said campaigning in “Sarah McBride’s backyard” was “just icing on the cake” and added that she had “no interest” in ever meeting her. According to the Advocate’s reporting, she also used a slur through a megaphone outside the Capitol and once chased a cisgender woman out of a public restroom, wrongly believing she’d caught McBride.

When Mace launched her campaign for governor at The Citadel, South Carolina’s military college, in August 2025, the trans issue wasn’t part of the pitch. It was the pitch. She promised to “ban pronouns in the classroom” — “I want kids coming home with A’s and B’s, not they and them” — to fight the “gender cult,” to veto funding for colleges promoting “gender ideology.” LGBTQ Nation’s headline on the announcement was not an exaggeration: it really was all about trans people. State issues — taxes, immigration, the things a governor actually runs — got a sentence each.

She was, in other words, the purest available test of a proposition the Republican Party has insisted on for five years: that being against trans people is a winning issue. Not a useful issue, not a base-pleaser — a winning one, worth more than your record, your seat, your relationships. Mace believed it enough to stake everything on it. And she ran the experiment in the cleanest possible lab: a Republican primary in South Carolina, an electorate that demographics and decades of state politics have built to reward exactly this. If the anti-trans playbook is a trump card anywhere on the electoral map, it is here.

It bought her fifth place. Behind a man who had never run for anything.

The people who built the bathroom fight have already told us, on the record, that they built it. Days after Mace’s 2024 resolution, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles took a bow: “We kind of brought this to the forefront.” Libs of TikTok called a trans woman using a restroom “a fetish.” Former conservative activist Charlie Kirk demanded McBride use the facilities matching her “chromosomes.” The controversy didn’t well up from voters demanding their representatives do something about congressional plumbing. The right manufactured it — they say so — and Mace volunteered to be its face.

Trump, for his part, declined to reward her. In a February Politico profile, Mace described sending him her polling numbers — “I didn’t send it to my dad. I sent it to the other fatherly figure” — and keeps a cardboard cutout of Trump, dressed in a “MACE” shirt and hat, in her office. Asked what she was looking for from him, she said: “What’s more important than an endorsement?” Then he endorsed Evette, who he said “never wavered, never let me down, and was the only South Carolina Gubernatorial Candidate to Endorse me as soon as I launched my 2024 Presidential Campaign.” The father figure picked someone else. Even the architect of the anti-trans agenda didn’t think the issue was load-bearing.

I wrote in April about Fox News’s own national poll, the one the network’s pollsters built to be as favorable to the right as a poll can be. It found Democrats leading on transgender issues by 13 points and less than 1 percent of voters naming the combined “wokeness / transgender issues” category as the country’s most important problem — a number that rounds to zero even after Fox bundled two of the right’s favorite topics into one answer. The party spent nearly $215 million on anti-trans network TV ads in 2024. The next year, in Virginia’s governor’s race, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears ran ads warning that Abigail Spanberger was “for they/them, not us” — roughly $30 million worth, by the Spanberger campaign’s count. A Republican strategist quoted in the coverage said the attacks hadn’t resonated “at all.” Spanberger won by 15 points.

Mace’s fifth-place finish is the same canary, in a different mineshaft. The Fox poll measured what general-election voters won’t buy. South Carolina measured what Republican primary voters won’t buy — and they wouldn’t buy it either, from the candidate selling it hardest, in the market most inclined to want it. The right has spent two cycles confusing fatigue with persuasion: reading “please stop talking about this” as “keep talking about this.” Last night added one more data point telling them the customer was never as interested as the salesman.

It would be easy to overread this, so I won’t. The bathroom fight didn’t sink Mace by itself. She carried plenty of her own baggage: she feuded with her party for years, ran a chaotic operation, lost Trump’s endorsement, and gave up a safe House seat for a race she was never going to win. A steadier politician holding her exact positions might have done better. Anyone who tells you the anti-trans brand alone destroyed her is selling the same overread from the other direction.

But that brand did exactly one thing for her: nothing. She staked her whole campaign on the issue her party swears is a winner, in the electorate most primed to reward it, and it gave her no floor — no base, no life raft, nothing to stand on when the rest collapsed. It didn’t cost Mace the race. It just sat there, worthless, while she lost it on her own.

Compare the trajectories. Mace made McBride the centerpiece of a national brand and finished fifth in a primary. McBride complied with the bathroom rule, kept her head down, and kept legislating — paid leave, healthcare access, the dull work of the job. She still sits in Congress. When YouGov measured the two of them last spring, McBride came out narrowly net-positive on favorability; Mace sat ten points underwater. The woman Mace cast as the villain is doing what we elect politicians to do. The woman who cast her is endorsing someone else for a job she won’t get.

None of this refunds the cost. Losing the bet did not make it harmless. Trans kids in South Carolina heard a candidate for governor turn them into a punchline at her campaign launch. McBride spent her first months in Congress as a prop in someone else’s merchandising. The cisgender woman Mace chased out of a restroom didn’t get those minutes back. And the people who manufactured the fight — Knowles, Libs of TikTok, the whole pipeline — still have their platforms and their reach. The machine doesn’t lose when its candidates do. That’s the part the canary can’t tell you.

But it can tell you the air is changing. Mace conceded last night and immediately endorsed Wilson: “I want a law and order governor, and that law and order governor is going to be Alan Wilson.” She was already chasing the next brand. In the whole concession, the issue she gave up her seat for never came up.

Sarah McBride had the last word. As the results came in, she reposted a split image of Mace beside anti-trans activist Riley Gaines — the former college swimmer — captioned “Conservative woman who placed 5th,” and added her own: “thoughts and prayers.” Then a statement: “I don’t like to punch down and I believe in the politics of grace, so I’ll just say, Happy Pride, Nancy.”