South Carolina House District 99 has a new representative this morning …
Nancy Mace – a former co-owner of this news site and the first woman to graduate from The Citadel military college – handily won a special election in the Palmetto Lowcountry on Tuesday.
The 40-year-old real estate executive fills the seat vacated last August by former state representative Jimmy Merrill, who resigned from the House after reaching a plea deal in connection with an ongoing investigation into corruption in state government.
With all precincts reported, Mace received 2,066 votes (56.4 percent) compared to the 1,587 votes (43.3 percent) received by her Democratic opponent, liberal activist Cindy Boatwright.
Mace’s victory was a foregone conclusion after she cruised to the GOP nomination last November, however Democrats still went “all in” to back Boatwright – including bringing in national party stars like former Maryland governor and 2016 presidential candidate Martin O’Malley to campaign for her.
It didn’t work …
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“I don’t look at this as a win for me. I look at this as a win for Berkeley and Charleston counties, for the Lowcountry and for the taxpayers of South Carolina,” Mace said in a statement emailed to her supporters. “More importantly, it’s a win for substantive solutions aimed at fixing our most pressing issues – infrastructure, the nuclear power plant mess, education and the sustainability and safety of our communities.”
Mace said she planned on bringing “common sense” and “uncommon effort” to the S.C. State House in support of her reform agenda.
“A lot of the reforms we need to implement will require hard work and political courage – but they aren’t complicated,” she said. “They simply require us to apply common sense and uncommon effort. I’m talking about letting people keep more of what they earn – especially middle income earners and small businesses who are overtaxed and overburdened at the state level. I’m talking about giving parents options in a true education marketplace – one driven by academic performance not loyalty to a broken system. I’m talking about overhauling inefficient bureaucracies and undoing unfair special interest deals – like the $10 billion nuclear disaster that hundreds of thousands of us are on the hook for.”
Sounds good to us …
This news site enthusiastically supported Mace’s candidacy.
“We’ve seen her skills at work, and we know how hard she works,” we wrote in endorsing her prior to the primary.
We look forward to seeing Mace hard at work in Columbia after she’s sworn in later this week …
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