With GOP Rep. Nancy Mace’s embarrassing fifth-place finish in the South Carolina gubernatorial main Tuesday, three of the 4 House Republicans who compelled the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files will quickly not maintain elected workplace.
And their demise has occurred a lot sooner than that of different Trump apostates in the GOP — specifically the overwhelming majority of lawmakers who had backed his impeachment after the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol.
Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy’s main loss final month meant that, of the 17 Republicans who voted to question Trump in the House (10) or convict him in the Senate (7) in 2021, a most of three will stay in Congress subsequent yr.
Mace’s loss on Tuesday follows the discharge petition that she and three different House Republicans signed to power a vote on releasing the Epstein files.
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned from Congress earlier this yr after repeatedly breaking with Trump on Epstein and different points. And Trump final month marshalled a livid – and in the end profitable – main marketing campaign to oust Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, a chief of the discharge petition.
Trump has additionally focused the fourth signer of the petition, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert — particularly when she campaigned for Massie — however he did so too late for a primary challenger to file. Boebert is unopposed in her main and anticipated to win the basic election in a solidly Republican district.
It’s too easy to scale back Mace, Greene and Massie’s loss of energy to the Epstein files. Both Greene and Massie had been bucking Trump on lots of different issues, too. And Mace’s incessant political attention-seeking and often-bizarre behavior may properly have alienated main voters as a lot as the Epstein saga.
She’s at present taking simply 12% of the vote, and he or she even completed a distant third in her residence space, Charleston County.
But Mace has made clear she thinks the Epstein episode value her — together with by spurring Trump to endorse Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, who wound up qualifying for the runoff.
After Trump endorsed Evette late final month, Mace said: “If sacrificing my values is the price of an endorsement, I will never pay it.”
And Mace returned to the theme on Tuesday night time, whereas conceding her loss.
“I voted to release the Epstein files and lost some support for that,” she mentioned. “As a survivor, I chose to stand on principle and stand against the Epstein cover-up. I chose to stand against child rapists.”
Mace quickly added: “And apparently, I chose wrong if the goal was winning an election.”
The fast exits of most of the Epstein Four are, in a approach, fairly outstanding. When the files subject first started percolating, it was largely as a result of of right-wing Trump supporters — and infrequently Trump-aligned influencers.
The likes of now-FBI Director Kash Patel and his former No. 2, podcaster Dan Bongino, repeatedly promoted the concept that there was a scandal to uncover. Vice President JD Vance additionally promoted such theories.
But as 2025 wore on, it turned clear Trump — who was as soon as shut with Epstein and whose identify wound up showing ceaselessly in the files — was not at all keen on the transparency that his administration had promised. The New York Times on Wednesday printed a detailed account from reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recounting how the administration struggled to reconcile Trump’s reluctance with the base’s conspiratorial fervor. (Trump has lengthy denied any wrongdoing associated to Epstein or any allegation of sexual misconduct.)
But as time wore on, the base hued nearer to Trump’s nothing-to-see-here posture. MAGA voters didn’t absolutely undertake that posture, thoughts you. But they did seem to stop caring so much about the whole thing.
And regardless of the authorities’s gradual disclosures and Trump’s efforts to stop them, base voters more and more signaled in polls that they had been happy with the administration’s dealing with of the state of affairs.
That doesn’t imply voters went to the polls in South Carolina and Kentucky simply to punish Mace and Massie for forcing the disclosure of the files. But their actions certainly put a goal on their backs.
And their defeat — like that of the impeachment supporters, the Indiana state senators who bucked Trump on redistricting and Texas Sen. John Cornyn — sends a message: Republicans buck Trump at the peril of their profession. The best course for them is typically to simply do what the president desires.
And that apparently even contains when Republicans are following via on one thing the base was as soon as fairly eager on.