SCDailyGazette.com
The former chief of Navy Reserve is joining at least 14 other candidates running for South Carolina’s coastal 1st Congressional District.
Retired-Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, who spent 35 years in the Navy, announced Tuesday that she’s running as a Democrat for the seat held since 2020 by U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, who is running for governor.
Lacore told the S.C. Daily Gazette that she was removed from her leadership role last August by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. She said she was given no reason why she was fired and declined to speculate.
The Associated Press reported at the time that the firing was among a series of moves targeting perceived critics of President Donald Trump.
Lacore said she and her husband, also a Navy helicopter pilot, moved to Mount Pleasant in October after buying a house there last spring.
A native of Albany, N.Y., she moved frequently while in the Navy. She spent the first 10 years of her Navy career on active duty. As a reservist, she was deployed twice: in 2011 to Afghanistan and 2017 to Djibouti, a small country on Africa’s northeast coast.
The mother of six said she decided to make her first run for elected office Dec. 1, the same day she officially retired from the Navy, because she worried about the country’s direction.
The 10 Republicans and four Democrats who have already announced runs to replace Mace include five other military veterans.
“I think our military is being politicized,” Lacore told the Gazette. “I think our democracy’s at risk, to be honest, and I want to be a part of the solution.”
While a fairly new South Carolina resident, Lacore said her ties to the Palmetto State include a daughter and her husband graduating from the University of South Carolina. They live in the Lowcountry, and she’s been vacationing in the Lowcountry for a decade, she said.
Lacore led about 59,000 sailors as chief of the Navy Reserve, a job she held for a year. She relieved Vice Adm. John Mustin in August 2024. Her successes included working with Congress to secure new airplanes for the reserve, she said.
The job is an appointed position, filled by a president’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation.
Voters last elected a Democrat to the 1st District in 2018. Joe Cunningham flipped the seat blue for a single term before Mace flipped it back.
Adrian Ashford covers campaigns and elections for the S.C. Daily Gazette. Before moving to South Carolina, he covered faith and religion for The Dallas Morning News. He studied religion and politics at Harvard and wrote a thesis about evolving interpretations of the First Amendment. The S.C. Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
