Hi, y’all. Welcome back to The Opposition. One of my goals with this newsletter over the next few months is to bring you inside competitive congressional races around the country, giving you a flavor of the local dynamics and candidates that will determine what a Democratic majority might look like. These aren’t districts that Donald Trump carried by just a point or two; they’re much redder. But wave elections don’t happen unless Democrats compete on this kind of difficult political terrain. I’m going to start today in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, where national Democrats are betting on a former chief of the Navy Reserve—an admiral who was fired by Pete Hegseth—to flip the district. As always, let me know your thoughts in the comments and what other races you’d like to see covered here. It’s not easy or cheap to produce this kind of original, on-the-ground reporting. But we think it’s important—this is where democracy can be won or lost. To support our work, consider becoming a Bulwark+ member. You’ll get access to our locked content and can join in the comments—and you’ll be helping us grow. If you sign up today, you’ll get a free fourteen-day trial, which is plenty of time to kick the tires: –Lauren Can This Former Admiral Navigate Rough Political Seas?Fired from the Navy by Pete Hegseth, Nancy Lacore has plunged into South Carolina Democratic politics.
Mount Pleasant, South Carolina It wasn’t how Lacore’s thirty-five years in the Navy—working her way from a helicopter pilot to a three-star admiral before being put in charge of 60,000 sailors—was supposed to end. She and her husband—also a Navy helicopter pilot—had dedicated their lives to the service, moving countless times around the country with their six kids in tow for deployments and new duty stations. (Yes, you read that right, Lacore raised six kids while serving.) But on a Friday last August, Adm. James Kilby (who was running the Navy at the time, after Hegseth had fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti), called Lacore to his office in the Pentagon and, with tears in his eyes, informed her that the secretary of defense had instructed him to relieve her of her duties immediately. Hegseth hadn’t provided any reason for her dismissal.¹ “It was pretty miserable, to be honest,” Lacore told me. “It just changed [everything]. Other than the personal insult that it felt like to me, I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ All these thoughts that started spinning in [my] head. I’m like, ‘We gotta move. We just bought a house. We thought we were gonna have three more years of income, and I thought my retirement was going to be that much more money.’ . . . It was just this spiral of all the stuff that’s going to have to change now.” Shortly after her dismissal, Lacore and her husband moved to Mount Pleasant, a large suburban town across the harbor from downtown Charleston. And in January, Lacore launched her campaign for South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, which is being vacated by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who is running for governor.
If Democrats are going to have a massive blue wave this year—flipping somewhere in the range of forty House seats, as some pollsters and party officials have predicted—then it will require competing in Republican-held congressional districts like this one. Indeed, in the last wave midterm election, in 2018, Democrat Joe Cunningham flipped this seat and held it for a single term. The district has been solidly red since then; Donald Trump won it in 2024 by 13 points. As Trump’s approval rating continues to dip and gas prices soar, local Democratic officials believe that the district is in play. “If you were to go into a laboratory and make a district that would be most affected by a wave year, this would be it,” said Lachlan McIntosh, a South Carolina Democratic strategist who is backing Lacore. While top party committees have yet to commit to spending money in the race, Lacore is backed by The Bench, a new organization of longtime Dem operatives that recruits and supports candidates in competitive races around the country—part of a larger effort to reshape the party and usher in a new class of unconventional candidates. And as those operatives see it, South Carolina’s 1st district has larger implications beyond the congressional margin next year. It’s the type of place where Democrats will have to be more consistently competitive if they want to build lasting House majorities following the 2030 census changes. I SPENT LAST SATURDAY WITH LACORE, meeting up at 7:30 a.m. at her house overlooking the coastal salt marshes for a twelve-hour day of campaigning. I wanted to get a feel for the district and the type of candidate that Democratic operatives believe can broaden their coalition in red parts of the country. And I was curious about Lacore’s experience adjusting to the political arena after spending decades in the chain of command, where she was expected to keep her political views private. Lacore’s first electoral test is just under two months away: the June 9 Democratic primary. On our drive to the Lowcountry Indivisible candidate forum in Bluffton, she told me that she didn’t grow up in a political household and spent most of her life voting for Republicans until the 2016 election. She knew very little about how political campaigns operated and was shocked by the amount of fundraising that was required. No one in her family had ever been a political donor before she jumped into the race. When I asked whether it felt odd to adopt a party label after eschewing partisan politics for so long, she asked to go off the record to answer it honestly. Publicly, she keeps her message focused on restoring democracy, the high cost of living, and the need to protect South Carolina’s coast. “I spent thirty-five years defending the Constitution—defending the freedoms and rights that it guarantees. And that’s exactly what I intend to do in Congress,” Lacore said. At the candidate forum, Lacore clearly felt uneasy wading into thornier partisan issues. When a voter asked the four participating Democrats seated at the front of the room to commit to impeaching Trump for his unauthorized attacks on Iran, Lacore sidestepped the question. When another voter lamented that the Democratic party wasn’t talking more about abortion rights, Lacore mentioned her Catholic faith but said personal beliefs on the matter shouldn’t be imposed on others—before quickly noting that she’d been endorsed by EMILY’s List, a pro-choice organization. At times, it didn’t always seem like she was thrilled to be running as a Democrat. But Democratic strategists believe that Lacore’s obvious distaste for reflexive partisanship is exactly what makes her a compelling candidate, helping her score endorsements from both Democratic and Republican local officials. Strategists stressed that this district is fairly well-off—packed full of voters with college degrees and retirees who flock to communities like Hilton Head and Seabrook Island—and is also home to a large number of veterans. “It’s just not MAGA. These kinds of Republicans that live in this district are of your dad’s Republican party,” said McIntosh. At a roundtable event later in the day, Sydney van Bulck, a former teacher who described herself as “about as far left as you can go,” said she viewed Lacore’s Republican past as a strength in the race. “While I would love for all of our politicians to be as far left as I am, we don’t make progress that way,” van Bulck said. “I think that you need to kind of resemble the district that you’re representing.” If you value this kind of reporting—if it deepens your understanding of the nation’s politics in this midterm year—consider signing up for Bulwark+. Do it today and you’ll get a fourteen-day trial period to check it out for free: The race for the 1st Congressional District got one of its first major shakeups this week when Mark Sanford, the former Republican governor of South Carolina who also used to represent the district in Congress, announced that he would run to retake the seat. Sanford—who often warned about the “cult of personality” taking over the Republican party—was one of the first Republicans to pay a steep price for criticizing Trump. He lost his 2018 primary to Katie Arrington, who made the election all about loyalty to Trump. Sanford also ran a brief primary campaign against Trump in the fall of 2019. He is just one of nearly a dozen Republicans vying for the nomination this time around, and it’s hardly guaranteed that he will win. But his entry into the race has some local Democrats on edge. “There’s a lot of Democrats who really like Mark Sanford,” said Renee Harvey, a Charleston-based Democratic strategist. “He’s going to be the hardest to beat if he should be so lucky to win that primary. But you know, him breaking with the Republican party, I think that still is a bit of a liability for him in the primary.” The other most notable episode of Sanford’s career was when he disappeared from the state for a week in 2009, when he was still governor. He had told his staff he was hiking the Appalachian Trail; he was actually visiting a mistress in Argentina. That scandal and Sanford’s ensuing incredibly bitter divorce didn’t prevent him from completing his second term as governor and then getting elected to the House—and it would probably be even less damaging in today’s Republican party. The last time Democrats held the 1st district was in 2018, when Cunningham defeated Arrington by 1.4 percentage points by running largely on his opposition to Trump’s offshore drilling plan. Cunningham lost his re-election to Mace in 2020 by 1.2 points (this was back when she was pitching herself as a “new voice” of the GOP and not obsessing over transgender issues). But a lot has changed since 2018. The Republican-controlled state legislature redrew the 1st district in 2020 to be more GOP-friendly. Plus, running for office has become only more complicated for first-time candidates, who have to figure out how to balance traditional retail politics with a robust social media presence. A camera crew followed Lacore around for most of the day on Saturday, capturing interactions with voters that could be packaged for social media clips. Lacore ended her day in perhaps the most fitting place in the district for a former Navy officer: on a boat, touring the Charleston Harbor with Awendaw Mayor Chris Crolley, who eagerly explained the shrimp and turtle seasons and pointed out different bird species—from pelicans to snowy egrets. “You really don’t understand Charleston unless you’re on the water,” Crolley said, as Lacore nodded along in agreement.
While Lacore’s critics have pointed out that she doesn’t have deep roots in the district and it wasn’t her primary residence until a few months ago, she’s emphasized her connection to the water. She’s talked about living in other coastal cities during her service, including Norfolk, Virginia, and dealing with the threat of rising sea levels and flooding—an issue that tends to transcend partisan politics in districts like this. “I do feel drawn to the water,” Lacore told me, when I asked about her decision to retire in the area. “Every time I start talking about protecting the coast—that resonates with everybody.” My open tabs:— Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections — I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America — Bernie Sanders Is Back as a Left-Wing Kingmaker — Cali Dems Need to Get Their Sh*t Together, by my Bulwark colleague Andrew Egger
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Lacore told me that Kilby came storming into the office, clearly distraught by the position that Hegseth had put him in. “He knew that I was at risk, that all women in the Navy were at risk,” Lacore told me. “He took it very personally. He had been doing his best to kind of, you know, provide some buffer and keep us in our places as long as he could. And ultimately, it didn’t work.” You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletters or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
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