COLUMBIA, S.C. — Two days before South Carolina Republicans choose their next governor, Nancy Mace is doing something most politicians avoid: explaining exactly what she gave up and why she doesn’t regret it.
The congresswoman, running in a six-way Republican primary with the June 9 vote approaching, said in a recent interview that her decision to push for the release of Justice Department files on Jeffrey Epstein likely killed her chances of receiving Donald Trump’s endorsement. “I knew it was on the line when I voted to release the Epstein files, and I’m a survivor,” Mace said. “If the price to pay for an endorsement was to not release those files, I would never pay it.”
Trump went the other direction. Last week, he backed Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, calling her a “good friend, fighter, and WINNER” on his Truth Social platform and offering what he described as his “Complete and Total Endorsement.” Evette had crisscrossed the country for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and Trump made clear that loyalty — not the Epstein question — was the measure he was applying.
Mace was one of four House Republicans who signed a petition to force a floor vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which called on the Justice Department to publish its investigation materials on Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The vote put her on the same side as Democratic members and drew direct criticism from Trump’s political circle, which had long been skeptical of her reliability. The split became impossible to paper over once the endorsement landed with Evette.
Her assessment of what the endorsement actually delivered for her rival was blunt. Evette “got maybe a five point bump — not much,” Mace said, adding that the lieutenant governor is “going to be in a runoff” and that once it reaches that stage, “all bets are off.”
The prediction markets are not sharing Mace’s confidence about the runoff scenario. On Polymarket, she had a 45 percent chance of winning the Republican nomination as recently as December; by this week, according to Newsweek, that figure had fallen to under 5 percent. Evette climbed from 30 percent the day before the endorsement to 68 percent. The prediction platform Kalshi placed Mace’s odds of winning the nomination at under 4 percent.
A Trafalgar Group survey conducted June 2 through 4 — the most recent independent polling of the race — showed Evette leading the field, with Wilson and Mace trailing. The survey confirmed what several earlier data points had been suggesting: the Trump endorsement did not simply nudge the race, it scrambled the field. Whether it locked up a majority for Evette is still the open question, and it is the one Mace is counting on.
Under South Carolina election law, if no candidate clears 50 percent on June 9, the top two finishers meet in a runoff on June 23. Given that the field still contains Evette, Mace, Attorney General Alan Wilson, and Rep. Ralph Norman — with the late withdrawal of state Sen. Josh Kimbrell tightening things further — analysts at FITSNews have consistently argued a first-ballot majority is unlikely. Mace’s math, such as it is, runs through that scenario.
The rift between Mace and Trump did not begin with the Epstein vote. She drew White House displeasure in March when she posted publicly that she would not support troops on the ground in Iran even after a classified briefing, disclosing her position before any official announcement. Trump’s inner circle cited that episode, along with her willingness to side with Democrats on limiting war powers, as evidence of an unreliable ally. The Epstein vote came on top of an existing fracture.
What Mace did not say — and what the data does not yet resolve — is whether enough of the Republican grassroots in South Carolina share her read on the Epstein issue to actually move votes on Tuesday. She insisted the endorsement is “not going over well with the grassroots,” but the polling gap between Evette and the rest of the field after Trump’s backing makes that claim hard to sustain at face value. The gap is real. What is genuinely uncertain is whether a runoff dynamic could close it.
Trump also endorsed Henry McMaster Jr. — son of the term-limited incumbent governor — to run for the lieutenant governor’s seat alongside Evette, an arrangement designed to consolidate the state’s Republican establishment behind a single ticket heading into November. Democrats have not won a gubernatorial election in South Carolina since 1998, making the Republican primary the race that will effectively determine who governs the state.
“It’s a dog fight,” Mace said in the Fox News interview Sunday. “We’re in it and I’m gonna fight to the death.” Whether the Epstein gamble produces any political return for her — in South Carolina or anywhere else — is a question the primary will only begin to answer. The runoff, if it comes, would settle it.
The Eastern Herald has previously reported on the Epstein files engulfing Washington as the broader fight over transparency and the Justice Department’s handling of the probe continued to play out in Congress. Mace’s gubernatorial bid has placed her at the intersection of two contests — the South Carolina race and the national argument over what the files will ultimately show.
Earlier this year, EH also covered Ken Paxton’s defeat of John Cornyn in Texas — another race where Trump’s endorsement power and the limits of that power were both on display in the same cycle.
