A retired Navy admiral fired by Pete Hegseth narrowly won Nancy Mace’s South Carolina House seat for Democrats after the Republican left Congress following a failed governor run.
The Associated Press called South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District for Democrat Nancy Lacore at 6:51 p.m. Friday evening, with nearly every ballot counted.
Lacore, a retired admiral, took 49.7 percent. Republican Jenny Costa Honeycutt finished at 48.6 percent with 99 percent of the vote in. Rep. Nancy Mace, the three-term Republican who held the seat, is due to leave Congress in January.
Race coverage framed the result as a Democratic pickup in a district Republicans had recently carried by wide margins.
Lacore served 35 years in the Navy and had been chief of the Navy Reserve before War Secretary Pete Hegseth removed her in 2025 during a sweeping leadership shake-up.
That ouster drew national attention. It also became part of her stated reason for running. She entered the race as a Democrat and converted the personnel fight into a political brand in a coastal South Carolina district.
Mace had looked secure on paper. She won reelection in 2024 by 17 percentage points. Two years before that, President Donald Trump carried the same seat by 13 points.
Those numbers made Friday’s squeaker harder to ignore. A district that had given Republicans double-digit comfort margins flipped by roughly one point once the incumbent stepped aside.
Mace did not lose a primary or a scandal-driven collapse inside the district. She left the ballot after an unsuccessful run for governor earlier in the summer, ending three House terms.
She had pressed the administration to release files from the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. After Congress, she has told reporters she plans to move into the private sector, grow her podcast MACED, and expand her media work.
Her departure turned a previously comfortable Republican hold into an open-seat fight. The Cook Political Report moved the contest to a “toss-up” in the week before Election Day, a late warning that the race had tightened far beyond 2024’s result.
Honeycutt kept it close. She finished just over a point behind Lacore with almost all votes tallied. In a district Trump had won by 13 and Mace had held by 17 only a year earlier, that margin was a collapse of the old cushion, not a landslide rejection of the GOP brand on every issue.
Open seats behave differently from incumbent races. Voters who backed Mace in 2024 did not automatically transfer to the next Republican on the ballot. Lacore’s military résumé and the public fight over her removal gave Democrats a concrete biography to sell in a place that still elects conservatives up and down the ticket in other cycles.
The AP call locked in the practical outcome. Mace leaves in January. Lacore, the Democrat Hegseth fired from the Navy Reserve’s top job, takes the oath for South Carolina’s 1st District instead.
Republicans who treat safe seats as permanent fixtures keep relearning the same lesson: when an incumbent walks away and the replacement race tightens to a point, Democrats only need one good biography and a late toss-up to steal a march.
