South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace didn't just win reelection to a second term in the U.S. House.
She dominated.
Mace trounced her Democratic challenger Annie Andrews up and down South Carolina's newly drawn and Republican-slanted 1st Congressional District.Â
She won every county. She won in areas that just two years ago voted against her and for Democrat Joe Cunningham. And for nearly every precinct Andrews won, Mace won three.Â
Appearing on CNN the morning after the Nov. 8 election, Mace admitted from the halls of Washington, "I was actually surprised by the outcome of our own election."
Republicans nationwide had predicted a historic red wave that, so far, has turned out to be closer to a ripple. But in South Carolina's coastal 1st District, it was as if a red tsunami crashed over the Lowcountry.
Across the district's 335 voting precincts, Mace won 253 of them.
"There's just no escaping the fact that this was a good, old fashioned butt-kicking," said experienced Democratic campaigner Tyler Jones, the chief strategist for the Andrews campaign.
Raw numbers were 153,433 votes for Mace and 115,534 for Andrews, about a 56 percent to 42 percent finish that doesn't include numbers for write-ins and a third-party candidate.Â
Some of this can be explained by the map of the new district itself, which GOP state lawmakers retooled and redrew to be more Republican in 2021 after the seat ceased to be a reliably safe bet for their party after 2018, when a Democrat won it for the first time in nearly 40 years.
Mace narrowly won the seat back for the GOP in 2020, edging out then-incumbent Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham by 1.27 percentage points, or 5,415 votes.
This time, with new political boundaries, it was a double-digit rout. Mace defeated Andrews, a political newcomer, by 14 percentage points, getting 37,899 more votes than Andrews, a pediatrician who felt compelled to enter the political arena as an advocate for Lowcountry children and families.
The decisive win for Mace represents the realization of the political goal set into motion by state Republican lawmakers during the redistricting process. The GOP lawmakers have since acknowledged that they drew new maps of the 1st District to not only adjust for population growth but to also add and cram in more Republican voters from the Charleston metro area to Hilton Head Island.
"No matter what Democrats try and tell you, the 1st Congressional District is a Republican district, and we're proud but not surprised Nancy kept it that way," S.C. Republican Party Chairman Drew McKissick said.
The newly redrawn coastal district now includes all of Beaufort and Berkeley counties — giant Republican strongholds — and parts of Charleston, Dorchester, Colleton and Jasper counties.Â
And there's a chance it could change again.
The constitutionality of the 1st District lines — and whether the new map discriminated against Black people by diluting their voting power — are at the center of a federal trial in the U.S. District in Charleston that could determine whether the seat, as currently drawn, will hold for future elections.
In the Black community of Snowden, east of the Cooper River, Andrews beat Mace 318 to 7. By excluding Black-majority areas, or shoving them into Democrat U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn's 6th Congressional District, it helps get Republicans elected.Â
But Mace's victory cannot be reduced solely to the role redistricting played in buoying a Republican candidate. A Post and Courier analysis of precinct-level results from the six counties shows the district's voters are now decidedly more Republican.
Take Mount Pleasant, a booming suburban stronghold in Charleston County, where dozens of neighborhoods that had helped elect Donald Trump president in 2016 gave the majority of their votes to Cunningham, a Democrat, in both 2018 and 2020.
Now, the blue streak that once cut through those affluent neighborhoods east of the Cooper River has turned red: Twelve Mount Pleasant precincts that picked Cunningham over Mace in 2020 this time voted for Mace over Andrews.
The same pattern emerged elsewhere in Charleston County where two James Island precincts flipped, along with three Johns Island precincts. Edisto Island and the rural fishing village of Awendaw also voted for Mace after previously voting for Cunningham in 2020.Â
Charleston County was arguably where the race could have been the most competitive, but that didn't happen. Mace won 48 precincts and 44,601 votes in Charleston County, while Andrews won 31 precincts and 40,726 votes.
In every other county in the district, Mace led Andrews by double digits. Only in Charleston County did Andrews trail Mace by single digits. Mace won 52 percent of the vote to Andrews' 47 percent in Charleston County. The next closest margin was in Berkeley County, where Mace crushed Andrews by 16 points, winning 57 percent of the vote share to Andrews' 41 percent.
From McClellanville to Hilton Head Island, the whole district was a Republican blowout.Â
Beaufort and Berkeley counties are both home to enormous new subdivisions that have been filling up with people relocating from other states. The COVID-19 pandemic may have further fueled these relocations.
Mace won the precincts in Beaufort County by 14,157 votes; in Berkeley by 11,611; and in Dorchester by 7,243. Mace won both of Jasper County's two precincts, and one of the two precincts in Colleton County.
"I view this as the Floridafication of South Carolina one," said Austin McCubbin, Mace's campaign manager. "We've had more than 50,000 new movers here since that 2020 census. And the big question for us was, how are they going to fare?"
McCubbin said internal campaign polls showed Mace leading Andrews by "a handful of points" heading into Election Day, and said that they were unsure whether the district's new residents would tilt left or right in their political leanings.
"Just because you're not that liberal and moved here from New York doesn't mean copy-and-paste conservatism will work. You still have to be nuanced," McCubbin said, holding up Mace's position on abortion as an example.
In one of her TV ads, called "Common Ground," Mace addressed the issue straight-to-camera and told voters how she personally fought to make sure South Carolina's abortion ban included exceptions to protect the life of the mother and for victims of rape and incest.
The Andrews campaign also bet big on abortion in a district where voters in the past have shown a flair for bucking the party line. But Mace has bucked her party, too, most notably with her Republican primary win over Trump's preferred candidate.
Democrat Annie Andrews delivers her concession speech to supporters at The American Theater in Charleston, Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022. Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
Jones said Mace's bruising primary may have stamped her as a moderate in a way that no message crafted by the Andrews campaign could penetrate.
"The joke goes that moderate Republicans in the north are Democrats in the South, and moderate Democrats in the South are Republicans in the north," Jones, the Andrews consultant, said.
"But I'm not sure that there are moderate Republicans in the north either. They are partisan Republicans and these are partisan Republicans," he added, "Annie's election, I think, showed us that there were very few persuadable voters in the 1st Congressional District."
The results of the election will be certified Nov. 11.
David Slade contributed to this report.
