Last October, when Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the house, one Republican of the eight who voted against him stood out as the odd bedfellow of the group: a junior representative from South Carolina named Nancy Mace.

The seven other Republicans, all men, were far-right rabble-rousers, loudmouths for whom grousing about the “establishment” rather than working with it was always the right political move. They were used to attracting and capitalizing on press attention. Yet in the days that followed McCarthy’s ouster, Mace outshone them all, showing up for work in a shirt with a red A on the front, a nod to the titular symbol in The Scarlet Letter.

Her staff, still picking up the pieces from Mace’s bombshell vote against McCarthy the previous week, was completely baffled.

“I thought it was just some fashion statement,” one staffer recalled. “I was like, OK, well, maybe this is an Abercrombie shirt or something.” Only after seeing Mace on camera at a meeting of House Republicans—swarmed by reporters—did the staffer put it together: The scarlet-letter outfit “was another attempt by her to be a part of the story.”

Or, as a second staffer remembered, it was an attempt to become the star of the story: “She wanted every single person to think—when they thought of the McCarthy ouster vote, not to think of the eight, but to think of Nancy Mace,” the staffer said.

In her own explanation for the scarlet letter that day, Mace lamented that she had been “demonized for my vote and for my voice” and would “do the right thing every single time, no matter the consequences.”

Probably because she was not being ostracized for, say, having a child out of wedlock in 17th-century Massachusetts, many people didn’t quite understand the connection Mace was making to the Nathaniel Hawthorne staple of high school English class. Mace, closely monitoring the reaction to her stunt, privately griped to her staff that those who didn’t get it weren’t smart—they were probably “Trump voters,” she said.

But most of the bafflement was about why Mace had voted against McCarthy in the first place. She hadn’t, after all, put up any roadblocks to his dragged-out election as speaker nine months before. She wasn’t allied with any of the Freedom Caucus–adjacent politicians who wanted McCarthy out; she’d called anti-McCarthy ringleader Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz a “fraud” during the first speaker fight in January. Neither her tactics nor her politics tended to the extreme.

Nevertheless, there she was, not merely giving leadership an earful but joining an unprecedented ouster of the man who’d fundraised for her and worked with her office to help her pass legislation. As one former senior McCarthy aide dryly put it to me about her vote against McCarthy, “She surprised us.”

These days, Congress is full of show horses who are less interested in a gradual, heads-down rise in the ranks than in rocketing to viral celebrity, however many enemies they may make along the way. But only three and a half years in, Mace has established herself as one of the thirstiest members of Congress in her unceasing quest for attention. She has kept everyone from lay congressional watchers to reporters to her staff to the speaker of the House and Donald Trump on their toes about her next move. What she may do on any given day feels downright random, even to the people closest to her.

But it isn’t quite random. In interviews with eight former Mace staffers—of which there are several dozen, because Mace’s Washington office has an exceptionally high turnover rate—the politician’s obsession with getting press was described as her sole motivational force. (The former staffers were granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. Mace’s office ignored repeated interview requests for this story and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.) The former staffers described how every move, however incongruous it may seem, is part of a larger effort for Mace to build her brand as a “caucus of one,” as Mace herself puts it.

Sometimes it works. Attention can be translated into power. But it has also alienated Mace from colleagues and GOP leaders. It lost her an entire D.C. staff over the course of a few months, culminating in a surreal episode involving the Capitol Police in December. Her McCarthy vote, followed up by the scarlet-letter stunt, was so egregious that it earned Mace a primary challenger in a race that will be decided this week. Even if she advances, as she’s favored to, rebuilding her reputation in the House will not be easy.

A former senior staffer said Mace used to trash members like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Gaetz for being in the Capitol just to make noise.

Now, the staffer said, “she has turned herself into what she hates.”

Only a few days into her first term in Congress, Mace wanted to get punched in the face. It was Jan. 6, 2021, and Mace was desperate for headlines about herself amid the news of the Capitol riot. As has been previously reported, during the attack she pitched her staff on a plan to put herself in harm’s way in order to get hit by a protester, a move that would result in massive media attention, maybe even enough to elevate her as a top anti-Trump Republican.

Several months before, in November 2020, Mace had narrowly defeated Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham in a swing district covering much of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Before that, she had been a state legislator and had worked in commercial real estate and public relations. She was most well known, however, for being the first woman cadet to graduate from the Citadel military college in Charleston, an experience she chronicled in a 2001 memoir.

Though she never went through with the getting-punched plan, Mace earned a significant amount of coverage for her outspokenness against Trump following Jan. 6. The day after the Capitol riot, Mace—who had worked for Trump’s 2016 South Carolina campaign—said in a television interview, “Everything that he’s worked for, … his entire legacy, was wiped out yesterday. And we’ve got to start over.” She did not vote for Trump’s impeachment, despite sharing, in a floor speech, her belief that “we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”

It didn’t take too long for the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction. Within a........

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