Top Trump target in SC gets boost from 2 PACs tied to House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has not announced his official support for GOP Rep. Nancy Mace as she tries to hold onto her South Carolina congressional seat, but her fundraising shows that the influential California Republican is still behind Mace even as McCarthy has shown a willingness to purge his party of members who have been vocal critics of former President Donald Trump.
And McCarthy is not the only member of Republican leadership who has been quietly funneling campaign cash to Mace this election cycle.
A review of the latest quarterly fundraising reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show four separate political action committees with ties to three powerful members of GOP leadership shelled out thousands to Mace’s reelection campaign over Trump’s preferred candidate, Katie Arrington.
Of the four PACs that gave to Mace’s campaign coffers this election cycle, two are affiliated with House Minority Leader McCarthy. The two other PACs, respectively, are connected to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and GOP Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican member in the House.
The four PACs linked to GOP leadership gave Mace a combined $30,000.
And all of the contributions made by the PACs aligned with McCarthy and McConnell were made after Trump endorsed Arrington in the congressional race.
“When Republicans take back the House this fall, the Lowcountry needs a congresswoman who can work with leadership to pass the Republican vision for getting runaway inflation under control, ending illegal immigration and putting parents in charge of their kids’ education,” Mace said in a statement provided to The State newspaper when asked about the contributions from GOP leadership.
Filings show the leadership PAC controlled by McCarthy — Majority Committee PAC, or McPAC — gave Mace two separate $5,000 donations on March 30, the next to last day of the April fundraising quarter, for a total of $10,000.
That same day, Republicans’ flagship House super PAC, Congressional Leadership Fund, which is also tied to McCarthy, gave the Mace campaign $5,000.
McCarthy’s office did not return requests for comment about these contributions.
Meanwhile, McConnell’s Bluegrass Committee gave Mace $5,000 a week before on March 23, some 11 days after Trump held a rally in Florence, where he called Mace “crazy” and said she “has no idea what she’s doing.”
The Eye of the Tiger PAC associated with House Minority Whip Scalise gave Mace $5,000 on Jan. 13, before Arrington entered the race. But it also marked second donation the PAC had made to Mace this election cycle. It previously gave $5,000 to Mace on Oct. 15.
When Mace ran for the Charleston-anchored seat in 2020, she had the public backing of McCarthy and Scalise as she sought her party’s nomination in a crowded Republican primary.
This time, she has their money but, so far, not their vocal support.
“He knows that he needs to be able to keep control of his caucus,” said Scott Huffmon, a political scientist at Winthrop University. “When you look at some of the Republican representatives, like Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, you see people that have gone off the reservation and are not apt to follow traditional Republican leadership. They are taking their leadership from elsewhere and that’s Trump camp.”
Huffmon said the quiet way Republican leaders are supporting Mace could also speak to a reluctance for party leaders to publicly back someone who, in the past, has clashed publicly with Trump.
In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Mace became an outspoken Republican critic of Trump, saying his “entire legacy had been wiped out.”
But unlike U.S Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, Mace has retained the financial support of McCarthy this election cycle.
In that Wyoming congressional contest, McCarthy is not only backing one of Cheney’s primary challengers, the Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman, but McCarthy was one of the hosts for a fundraiser held on Hageman’s behalf last month, according to a report from Politico.
The day of that D.C. fundraiser for Hageman, which more than 100 House members also signed on to host, the Majority Committee PAC gave a combined $10,000 to Mace.
‘Intra-party, not an inter-party squabble’
Like Mace, Cheney also broke sharply from the GOP leader — and most of her Republican colleagues — as they continued to embrace Trump after the Jan. 6 attack meant to prevent Congress from affirming Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.
In one of her first votes in Congress, Mace stood alone as the only Republican House member in South Carolina’s Washington delegation who voted to certify the results of the 2020 election.
Though Mace stopped short of voting to impeach Trump, the political damage was done. The Berkeley County Republican Party sent Mace a letter of reprimand over her comments. And, last year, Trump called on “good and SMART America First Republican Patriots” to challenge Mace.
During the South Carolina Trump rally last month, Arrington called Mace “the Liz Cheney of the South.”
The Arrington campaign drew that comparison again when asked about the leadership dollars flowing into Mace’s campaign accounts.
“Yet another thing she has in common with Liz Cheney, Nancy Mace cashed a check from Mitch McConnell,” Chris D’Anna, a spokesman for the Arrington campaign, said in a statement provided to The State. “This comes as no surprise as she has proven to be a never-Trump, D.C. Swamp creature who uses others to get elected and takes checks from anyone if it helps her keep a taxpayer funded job — noted by the $100,000 in special interest checks she accepted this quarter. We wouldn’t expect anything different from a self-serving politician like Nancy.”
But Huffmon said what’s happening here in South Carolina could speak to the careful line that Republican leadership is trying to walk, in an attempt to balance the excitement Trump’s base injects into the GOP while also doing what it can to support members that will work with McCarthy and other leaders.
In 2020, Huffmon said, Republican leadership backed Mace in the primary contest because they saw her as the strongest candidate to beat Democrat Joe Cunningham in the fall, which was one of the top priorities for the GOP that cycle.
“Now we’re looking at an intra-party, not an inter-party squabble,”Huffmon said. “They don’t just want teammate who can beat the other, but a teammate who can run the plays that they want to run.”
Fundraising reports show Mace raised more than $1 million in the first three months of 2022 between her reelection committee and her Team Mace Joint Fundraising Committee.
Arrington, by contrast, raised more than $800,000 during the same timeframe, but most of her money came from $525,000 of own money that she has loaned her South Carolina congressional campaign.
A third Republican candidate, Lynz Piper-Loomis, an advocate for military veterans, is also running for the GOP nomination. Her filings show she raised just shy of $39,000 during the first three months of 2022, but she has about $4,300 cash on hand.
The Republican primary is June 14.
This story was originally published April 20, 2022 at 1:27 PM.
