Rep. Nancy Mace said Donald Trump’s endorsement of Pamela Evette has barely moved the South Carolina lieutenant governor’s standing with conservative voters, a cut-rate boost coming just days before Tuesday’s Republican primary. Mace said Evette may have gained “maybe a five point bump” and warned that a runoff could upend everything.
Mace made the comments ahead of the June 9 primary as early voting was underway in South Carolina, where Trump last week lined up behind Evette and also endorsed term-limited Gov. Henry McMaster. But Mace said the backing is not landing cleanly with the grassroots Republicans who will decide whether Evette gets through the first round.
“It’s not going over well for her with the grassroots, which is why she didn’t get much of a bump,” Mace said in the interview. “She got maybe a five point bump — not much.” She added that Evette is “going to be in a runoff” and that “at that point all bets are off.”
The dispute sits inside a broader break between Mace and Trump that has widened in recent months. Mace said she was not shocked when Trump chose not to endorse her after she voted in Congress to force release of Epstein-related files, a move she tied directly to her own political risk. “I knew it was on the line when I voted to release the Epstein files, and I’m a survivor,” she said. “If the price to pay for an endorsement was to not release those files, I would never pay it.”
Mace was one of four Republicans who signed a petition last year to force a House vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which called on the Justice Department to publish its information on the probe into Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. That vote has become part of the personal and political fallout around Trump’s endorsement choices, even as he promoted Evette as a “good friend, fighter, and WINNER” and said she had his “Complete and Total Endorsement.”
For now, Mace’s read is that Trump’s backing is not the decisive force it was expected to be. If Evette does make the runoff, the contest may tell a sharper story: in South Carolina, a presidential endorsement can still matter, but it may not be enough to settle a race when the Republican base is already divided.
