SC Republican Nancy Mace holds onto lead in US House race against Joe Cunningham
Republican Nancy Mace held a narrow but consistent lead Thursday against Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham after election officials finished tallying votes in South Carolina’s competitive 1st Congressional District race.
The results show Mace with a 1.26% margin of victory, which is enough to edge out a mandatory recount. A recount would be triggered automatically if the difference between the the candidates was 1% or less.
With all precincts reporting in South Carolina’s coastal 1st District, the totals show Mace secured 50.58% of the vote to Cunningham’s 49.32%. The district includes all or sections of Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester, Beaufort and Colleton counties.
The Associated Press had called the race in Mace’s favor at 2:04 a.m. Wednesday, but the fully reported totals add a layer of finality to the race.
Unofficial returns show Mace won 5,359 more votes than Cunningham.
Mace, a 42-year-old state lawmaker from Daniel Island, led Cunningham in Beaufort, Colleton and Dorchester. Cunningham, meanwhile, held a 17,000 vote lead over Mace in Charleston.
The results will be certified on Friday morning.
Also on Friday, elections officials will address provisional ballots. Provisional ballots are usually small vote totals, though.
These are ballots that are in dispute, usually when there is uncertainty about a voter’s eligibility. Election officials decide which ones get counted while certifying results.
In an interview Thursday evening with The State newspaper, Mace said she exhaled when the final results came in but added she had been confident that she had the votes to win.
“We knew that mathematically it would be almost impossible for him to win, even with Dorchester coming in and the precincts still left to count,” Mace said. “To have that validated tonight means so much.”
Mace had already claimed victory in the nationally watched contest just after 10 a.m. Wednesday morning while standing in the parking lot of the Waffle House where she had worked 25 years ago in Ladson, S.C.
Mace said Thursday evening that Cunningham had not reached out to her to concede.
“Whenever you step into the arena and go into elected office, it’s not easy. It’s one of the most difficult challenges you can ever face,” she said in thanking the congressman for his service in office.
Cunnigham’s campaign on Wednesday morning issued a statement saying that “every ballot must be counted and every voice heard before an election result is called.”
At the time, though, thousands of ballots were still outstanding.
Elections officials in Dorchester County were just beginning to hand-count more than 14,000 absentee ballots that could not be counted on election night because of a printing error on the ballots.
Meanwhile, Beaufort County elections officials were busy tallying thousands of mail-in ballots.
Both of those counts concluded on Thursday.
Teams worked in pairs of two in Dorchester County to complete the counting process, which involved manually duplicating the ballots with both individuals reviewing the ballots for accuracy.
The ballots were then reviewed twice more prior to being scanned and officially counted.
“I am thankful for the teamwork and commitment to the electoral process shown. The respect for the process was apparent to all who witnessed it. All ballots were scanned, and all votes were counted,” said Todd Billman, executive director of the Dorchester County Election Commission.
Officers with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division were also present to safeguard the ballots, according to Dorchester County spokeswoman Tiffany Norton.
In a district where President Donald Trump won by 13 percentage points in 2016, Mace sought to convince voters that Cunningham was too liberal to represent the Lowcountry in Washington. She frequently tied Cunningham to more liberal figures in the Democratic Party, like U.S. House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
One of her pitches to voters was asking them to “send a new Nancy to Congress.”
Cunningham, meanwhile, refuted the partisan caricature Mace painted of him. He tried to convince voters to look past his political label and instead look at how he delivered for the district rather than for the Democratic Party.
Federal pre-election reports show Cunningham raised some $6.5 million in the race, while Mace raised just shy of $5 million.
Millions also poured in from outside groups, as national Democrats looked to defend their newfound territory while national Republicans sought to win it back.
Cunningham, 38, had never run for office when he was narrowly elected to represent South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District in 2018, a seat previously held by Mark Sanford.
Cunningham was the first Democrat in nearly 40 years to hold the seat and was elected on the so-called “blue wave” of the 2018 midterms when Democrats picked up 41 U.S. House seats.
Almost immediately, Republicans vowed revenge and identified Cunningham’s seat as a top target in 2020.
Mace will become the first Republican woman ever elected to Congress in the state of South Carolina.
This story was originally published November 5, 2020 at 7:00 PM with the headline "SC Republican Nancy Mace holds onto lead in US House race against Joe Cunningham."
