Nancy Lacore, a former chief of the Navy Reserve who served 35 years in uniform, won enough votes in South Carolina’s June 10 Democratic primary to force a runoff against Mac Deford, a retired Coast Guard officer. The winner of the June 23 runoff will carry the Democratic banner in the November midterm election for the state’s 1st congressional district, a Charleston-anchored seat that Republican Nancy Mace won by double digits in each of the last two cycles before she opted to run for governor.
Lacore’s entry into politics is a direct consequence of the sweeping personnel changes Hegseth has carried out across the defense establishment since taking office. She lost her post in August 2025 on the same day Hegseth dismissed Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, the Defense Intelligence Agency director, after Kruse’s agency prepared a preliminary analysis concluding that U.S. military strikes on Iran in June 2025 had set back Tehran’s nuclear program by only a few months. Hegseth publicly disputed that assessment, telling reporters, “You want to call it destroyed, you want to call it defeated, you want to call it obliterated – choose your word. This was an historically successful attack.”
No public explanation was provided for Lacore’s firing or for the removal of several other senior military leaders, including NSA Director Gen. Tim Haugh and NATO official Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield. Hegseth has described his personnel moves as a correction of what he calls a system that promoted officers based on “race” and “gender quotas” rather than qualifications. In a September 2025 address to military commanders in Virginia, Hegseth said, “For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons – based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.”
Lacore, at her campaign launch in January, said she was continuing her service in a new form. “I still have more to give, more to fight for, more work to do – and I am not done serving,” she wrote on social media.
Her campaign has drawn support from veterans’ advocacy organizations and Emily’s List, which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights. According to a New York Times analysis of federal campaign finance records, Lacore raised $500,000 in her first two weeks as a candidate and more than $1.4 million through late May. She is also one of 12 House candidates backed by the Bench, a Democratic strategy group that advises candidates running in districts considered difficult to win.
The eventual Democratic nominee faces a steep challenge in the general election. The 1st district has not elected a Democrat to the House since 2018, when Joe Cunningham won a single term. Mace reclaimed the seat in 2020 and won reelection by margins exceeding 10 percentage points in 2022 and 2024.
The runoff between Lacore and Deford will test whether a candidate with Lacore’s national security credentials and fundraising capacity can broaden the Democratic coalition in a district that leans Republican but includes a substantial suburban vote around Charleston that has shifted left in recent cycles.