Nancy Mace outraises Joe Cunningham for first time in top SC congressional race
Republican Nancy Mace raised a staggering $2.5 million in the last three months, making her one of at least nine GOP challengers in the nation, so far, to outraise an endangered House Democrat in the final stretch of the 2020 election.
Mace, a Daniel Island state lawmaker, joins a list that includes Republican candidates seeking to flip Democrat-held seats in places like Iowa, Utah and California.
According to newly filed campaign finance disclosures, Mace’s latest three-month haul accounts for more than half of the total $4.4 million she has raised the entire election cycle as she seeks to unseat U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham in South Carolina’s most competitive congressional race.
The contest could determine whether Democrats keep their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, or whether Republicans net the 18 seats they need to regain control of the chamber.
Mace’s campaign characterized the totals as a sign of political strength in the high-stakes congressional race.
“I hear it every day on the campaign trail. The Lowcountry is ready to take back the first district and put a true fiscal conservative leader in the House,” Mace said in a statement announcing her fundraising totals this week.
After spending $1.5 million during the quarter, which covered July 1 through Sept. 30, Mace reported having $1.7 million cash in the bank. It’s a half-million dollar cash advantage over Cunningham and marks the first time she has ever had a cash lead over the incumbent.
Cunningham’s campaign finance disclosures show he raised $1. 8 million during the quarter and spent nearly double that, at $3.7 million. Most of those dollars, some $2.9 million, were spent on media buys. An additional $100,000 was spent on digital ads, reports show.
He entered October with $1.2 million cash on hand.
It is a major reversal of fortunes for Mace, who has struggled to overcome Cunningham’s financial firepower the entire election cycle.
‘A doubling down’
According to a review of federal election reports by The State newspaper, frontline Democrats across the country have consistently outraised their Republican challengers in quarter after quarter. To date, Cunningham remains among the top third of fundraisers among vulnerable House Democrats.
Cunningham, the incumbent, had been a seemingly unbeatable fundraiser this cycle, which gave him a financial head start in the race. Unlike Mace, Cunningham faced no primary challenge.
That freedom allowed him to focus his efforts — and his dollars — on the general election as early as January, when he ran his first TV ad of the year. Mace, meanwhile, had to spend her campaign resources on a four-way June Republican primary.
In the general election cycle, Cunningham went up on TV in July. It was weeks before Mace aired her first general election ad in late August.
With the late infusion of cash, the question now is whether this last-minute money for Mace can move the needle with voters in time for the Nov. 3 election.
Mara Mellstrom, Mace’s campaign manager, said the campaign has already decided how some of those dollars will be spent.
“This is going to be a doubling down on our ground game to make sure that everyone and their mother knows that they have an alternative, and it’s someone who will always put the Lowcountry first and protect Parris Island,” Mellstrom said. “We have ample funds due to Nancy’s national level of support and broad base of support among all Republican entities, state and federal.”
With Election Day less than 20 days away, political analysts say the last-minute deluge of dollars shows Republicans aren’t giving up on their chances of winning back a seat the GOP held for nearly 40 years.
When Cunningham narrowly won the seat in 2018 by 3,982 votes, the outcome stunned both the nation and Republicans.
“This quarter would be the one where she should be able to have all the Republican support,” said Gibbs Knotts, a political scientist at the College of Charleston. “Her strong fundraising shows that others see her — and this race — as a good investment for Republicans to try to either take back the House or make sure that Democrats don’t expand their advantage.”
Help from GOP leaders
During the summer, Mace got big-name help to raise these dollars.
Vice President Mike Pence and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy both headlined fundraisers for Mace in the district. Along with those fundraisers, both of the GOP leaders funneled some more cash her way this quarter.
Filings show Mace received $1,500 from Great America Committee, a political action committee associated with Pence, and $2,000 from Kevin McCarthy for Congress.
McCarthy, a California Republican who is the top GOP member in the House, is hoping to be Speaker of the House should Republicans regain their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Mace also received $5,000 each from a pair of PACs associated with South Carolina’s Republican U.S. Senators, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, respectively.
South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District stretches from Charleston south to Hilton Head Island, and includes parts of Berkeley, Dorchester and Colleton counties. It is one of 30 House districts President Donald Trump won in 2016 that is now represented by a Democrat in 2020.
Because of the district’s historically red voting record, national Republicans see the seat as low-hanging fruit that is ripe for flipping back to GOP control this cycle.
However, recent public polling has signaled it may not be the easy seat flip that GOP leaders once predicted.
What the polls show
An October poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for the independent-expenditure arm of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee found Cunningham leading Mace 55% to 42% in the district.
It also found just 3% of voters were undecided in the contest. The poll surveyed 400 likely general election voters in the congressional district and carried a 4.5% margin of error.
A New York Times-Sienna College poll also showed Donald Trump may be losing support in the coastal district that overwhelmingly voted for him four years ago.
The poll showed Trump leading former Vice President Joe Biden by 3 percentage points, 47-44, in a district where Trump won by 13 percentage points in 2016. That could be a challenge for Mace, who worked on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and reminded voters of her loyalties to the president during the GOP primary.
The polling comes after national prognosticators have been steadily shifting the race in Cunningham’s favor. In September, Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics shifted the state’s 1st District congressional race from “toss up” to “leans Democratic.”
Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report followed suit and shifted the contest out of its “toss up” category to “lean Democratic.”
On Friday, another election forecaster shifted the race to favor Cunningham. A new round of rating changes from the nonpartisan Inside Elections moved South Carolina’s 1st District race from “tilt Democratic” to “lean Democratic.”
When reached for comment about the latest fundraising totals in the race, Cunningham’s campaign noted their candidate rejects corporate PAC money, while Mace has said she will cash every check she gets.
“Joe has kept his promise to put Lowcountry over Party and deliver results for South Carolina families, and that’s why voters will send a resounding message on election day and keep him fighting for the Lowcountry in Congress,” said Allie Watters, Cunningham’s campaign manager.
However, a fundraising email sent Friday morning by Cunningham’s campaign deployed a more ominous subject line to spur its supporters to action. “This is bad,” it read.
This story was originally published October 16, 2020 at 3:16 PM with the headline "Nancy Mace outraises Joe Cunningham for first time in top SC congressional race."
