Reading · Don't Tread on Kids

I wear a lot of badges of honor. The only girl on my little league baseball team. State champion high school volleyball player. First doctor in my family. Mom of the world’s three best kids. Unfortunately I am also a person who lost to Nancy Mace. This is not a badge of honor. And to a not so insignificant number of people, when they hear about Nancy Mace, they think about me (not ideal, I know). I know this because for about the past 3 years, I have been on the receiving end of many many texts and DMs with links to crazy things Nancy has said. “Did you see this?” (Almost certainly, yes, I saw it.) “I can’t believe you lost to her!” (I’m sorry, I really tried.) “What is wrong with her?” (I don’t diagnose people who aren’t my patients and I am also not a psychiatrist.) “Is she ok?” (I don’t think so.) “Is she really this terrible?” (Yes.)

So anyway, I have received a lot of messages in the past couple of days. The one that really struck a chord with me though was about her electability in 2026. Now, let me be clear. I believe 2026 is shaping up to be an incredibly unusual election cycle. I believe anything is possible. I believe we MUST run competitive candidates EVERYWHERE. But the truth is, Nancy acts this way because she sees herself as politically invincible. Mostly because 1) she thinks Twitter is real life and 2) her GOP buddies in the SC Statehouse gerrymandered her district so blatantly, for admitted “partisan political advantage” that she is, in fact, about as invincible as they come.

And this is how gerrymandering is destroying our democracy. Candidates like Nancy really ONLY have to worry about competitive primary elections. That means candidates like Nancy can let their freak flags fly year round. Her goal is to accumulate Twitter followers by saying and doing the most outrageous things, convert those Twitter followers into small dollar campaign donors and names on her email list, build a campaign war chest, and defeat her next primary opponent by proving she is the most MAGA of them all. You don’t yell “F*ck You” repeatedly, in public, to a constituent, unless you aren’t worried about re-election. (I mean, most people would never yell this to anyone, ever, but Nancy isn’t most people). She doesn’t have to moderate. She doesn’t have to worry about back-tracking during general election season. It’s all MAGA, all the time. And so far, since the district was redrawn, that has turned out to be a winning political strategy.

Nancy wins. And we all lose.

An interesting wrinkle here though is that because of gerrymandering, SC-01 makes zero geographic sense. Charleston county, which is the heart of our community, but mostly drawn out of the district and into SC-06, is bluish purple. So Nancy spends her time (when she actually is in the district) in bluish purple areas. She walks around acting like she is in MAGA-land when she is likely surrounded by a bunch of people who didn’t vote for her. While I believe she is genuinely tone-deaf, and would act this way regardless of her geographic location, this discrepancy in the partisanship of SC-01 as currently drawn and the community of Charleston and its surrounding neighborhoods leaves Nancy to be a fish out of water, or more precisely, a crying banshee out of wherever crying banshees feel most at home. And the result is her posting, with pride, the absolutely unhinged interaction she had at Ulta (my Ulta :(), this weekend.

If we want better people representing us in Congress, for instance, people who don’t yell obscenities in public places, we must end partisan gerrymandering. Voters should pick their representatives, not the other way around. We need competitive general elections. We need independent redistricting commissions and we need them now. And until we have them, I will continue receiving well-meaning texts about what our not well-meaning Congresswoman has done.

What Nancy Mace’s unhinged visit to Ulta has to do with Gerrymandering

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