Well before her fateful vote to remove Kevin McCarthy from the House speakership, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) arrived on Capitol Hill as a freshman lawmaker with a grandiose vision of her role in government.
In a strategy memo she wrote in 2021, Mace described herself as “THE freshman thought leader on federal issues,” according to a copy obtained by The Daily Beast.
She even gave herself a brand name: “NATIONAL NANCY.”
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“Nancy is ‘thoughtful’ and ‘hard working’ on issues important to the Lowcountry,” the memo reads, referring to the swath of coastal South Carolina she represents. Former staffers told The Daily Beast it was written entirely by Mace.
Today, it’s fair to say Mace has indeed gone national. Her decision to join with seven other far-right GOP lawmakers to boot McCarthy, and literally wear a scarlet letter after doing so, instantly earned her a mix of scorn, outrage, curiosity, and bemusement on a national scale.
For Mace, though, what seems to matter most isn’t what kind of attention she gets—just that she’s at the center of it.
Drawing on Mace’s 2021 strategy memo, a current internal handbook for her congressional staff obtained by The Daily Beast, and interviews with three former Mace aides, a profile emerges of a politician obsessed with her public image and fixated on winning herself as much exposure as possible, often to the dismay of her staff.
One former senior aide to Mace recalled asking themselves one question more and more during their tenure in her office: “Are we in a PR firm, or working for a member of Congress?”
The office’s staff handbook, which two aides said was also written by Mace herself, demonstrates the boss’s relentless focus on PR and media—along with her grueling expectations for staff.
In the document, the responsibilities and expected deliverables listed for the position of communications director are extensive; the person is expected to send out at least one press release per day, for example, a frequency rarely seen on Capitol Hill.
Beyond drafting press releases, website posts, and tweets, staffers on the communications team were told they needed to book Mace on a national TV outlet between one and three times per day—a staggering nine times per week, at a minimum, according to former staffers who had seen past handbooks—and on local TV channels at least six times per week.
The most recent version of the handbook is notable in how much more detailed it is in explaining communications roles compared to legislative or constituent-oriented ones.
Still, those staffers were subject to what one former aide called “not realistic” expectations, such as filing “25 new bills per year,” passing “10 bills out of the floor of the House annually” and getting one bill “signed into law annually.” Out of the 62 bills Mace has introduced since 2021, only one ultimately became law—the renaming of a post office in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. (For most members, seeing a substantive bill they wrote become law is a rare event.)
“It is not normal for a member to prioritize media and comms over actual legislation like that,” another former Mace staffer told The Daily Beast. “In my experience with and in other offices, comms serves to promote what the member is doing legislatively. In Mace’s office, legislation served to get her more media opportunities.”
In response to questions from The Daily Beast, Mace spokesman Will Hampson said, “Congresswoman Mace is being attacked for taking a strong stand against the Washington establishment. They didn’t like a vote she recently took, so now they want to silence her. Good luck.”
Hampson claimed that Mace’s office currently has a seven-to-one ratio of legislative to communications staffers. According to the congressional database Legistorm, in her Washington office, Mace employs a chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, a communications director, a legislative director, two legislative aides, a policy director, and a staff assistant.
He also noted the last bill McCarthy put to a floor vote before Mace and other lawmakers removed him was her bill—titled the MACE Act—which focused on federal government cybersecurity.
“Anyone who suggests she is not focused on legislating is lying,” Hampson said. “If the GOP spent this much time going after Democrats or attacking wasteful spending instead of leaking to reporters, our country would be in a much better place.”
The fact that Mace has faced two tough elections likely fuels the intensity of her expectations for staff. With whatever good standing she had largely eroded among her House GOP colleagues, Mace could face an even steeper climb to re-election in 2024.
Mace framed her vote to strip McCarthy of his speakership as “a vote of principle and a vote of conscience” based on what she characterized as the Californian’s inability to keep his promises to advance legislation related to abortion and contraception.
But in the eyes of former staffers, “she saw the votes on the board and said, ‘Fuck it, I’m just gonna vote for it just so I can go on TV and talk about it,’” the former senior aide said.
In the ensuing weeks, Mace has been even more ubiquitous than usual. From the major Sunday political shows, up and down the Fox News morning and primetime lineup, and even all the way over to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, she’s been cross-pollinating disparate demographics.
On the left-leaning comedy show, she responded to a question from guest host Charlamagne tha God about being Trump’s vice presidential pick—a possibility she has privately floated herself, as The Daily Beast reported—calling the VP speculation “intriguing,” and that “it’s a conversation we need to have because I want my little girl to know that she can be president one day.”
While Mace’s knack for getting herself on TV is well-known in Washington, the inner workings of her office have mostly remained a mystery—though the Capitol press occasionally has covered her high rates of staff turnover.
The South Carolina Republican would hardly be the first member of Congress to be obsessed with the spotlight or to harbor unrealistic expectations of their staff. The legislative branch is stocked with politicians who crave CNN hits and Sunday show gravitas.
But aspects of the internal Mace materials stood out to current and former House staffers who reviewed some of the content. One House Democratic aide noted in particular that Mace allocated over one third of her office’s allotted annual budget—$500,000—for “marketing,” a phrase that is rarely used in politics or by members of Congress.
“Everyone here sees her as a show horse—when she’s spending over a third of her office budget on ‘marketing,’ that’s ‘yikes!’," the aide said.
Another former top aide to Mace said the congresswoman lived news cycle to news cycle, and in the best-case scenario she was planning things “month by month or week by week.” The former staffer said Mace would also emulate Donald Trump in her own way, where she would tweet on her own from the main campaign account and “we would wake up to a new news cycle.”
Internally, Mace’s own sudden pivots routinely threw her staff off guard—more so when they understood the reasons behind her moves.
After word came down in her first term that a major donor in South Carolina was unhappy to see Mace being booked on MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and ABC—outlets she had instructed her staff to prioritize in meeting their booking quotas—the congresswoman only wanted to appear on “Newsmax, OANN, and the various Fox networks,” and the staff were “forbidden from taking any bookings” from the mainstream channels, according to two of the former Mace aides.
“That’s when she stopped talking about Jan. 6,” a third former staffer told The Daily Beast, “and that’s why no former staffers were surprised when she flew up to NYC to film that cringey video in front of Trump Tower immediately after Trump endorsed her primary challenger.”
The former aide added that recent coverage of Mace as a “moderate” has really rubbed them the wrong way after seeing the congresswoman operate up close for so long.
“So many journalists, commentators, and politicos have just scratched their heads looking for Nancy Mace’s grand plan,” the former staffer said. “Stop looking for the logic in Mace’s actions, because there isn’t any.”
Mace would also perplex her staff through her embrace of consultant jargon and buzzwords and an overly formulaic approach to documenting everything in their go-to office software, Monday.com, which has faced security concerns related to hacks of their source code.
Although Mace’s cybersecurity bill was one of just two of her bills to pass the House—and ironically the last legislative action taken by McCarthy as speaker—former staff say they were told the Monday platform is technically not in compliance with House rules due to the security breaches.
Even after staff raised concerns around the software, Mace insisted on using it anyway and even bragged about creating the “boards” within the software herself.
“I think she’s very data-driven, she prides herself as a self-taught coder,” the former senior aide said. “Her Monday dot com operation provides data, analysis and specific points of information to measure what her office is doing. She’s running it like a PR firm, is essentially what she’s doing.”
In response to a question about the platform, the Mace spokesperson defended their use of the website.
“Our office does not use any platform that would compromise the safety and security of any personal information, nor do we use this platform for constituent services. The platform in question is an internal tool to track the work of our staff, and it is used by other offices on Capitol Hill and by major corporations all over the country. We look forward to seeing the deep dive stories on them as well,” the spokesperson said.
Despite her emphasis on gathering information, at times, Mace did not seem to have much patience for it. Staff recalled with a shudder how they were required to pitch Mace on a new bill idea every week.
“The running joke in that office has been the ‘leg meeting,’” a former senior aide to Mace told The Daily Beast. “That takes place on fly-in days, where you’ve got 15 seconds to catch her attention, or you’re done.”
Mace has also embraced the SWOT method—which stands for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats”—popularized by management consultants and MBA programs to assess an organization or brand.
In her 2021 strategy memo, Mace wanted to assess her “strong presence on conservative issues” compared to her weakness on “independent issues.”
The first former senior aide to Mace lamented how she undercut any opportunities she might have had to secure some bipartisan wins by helping to remove McCarthy. New House Speaker Mike Johnson is far more to the right than Mace on some of her key issues, such as access to contraception and LBGTQ+ rights. But she nevertheless congratulated Johnson on his election and framed the process she kickstarted as a win, anyway.
For the third Mace staffer, all of the metrics and consultant speak masks a phenomenon much easier to boil down.
“She talks about ‘principles’ and ‘standing up for the people,’” the ex-Mace aide said, “but at the end of the day all she cares about is maintaining her weird C-list celebrity status by any means necessary.”
