The small crowd that awaited Nancy Lacore on a recent evening at a seaside home near Charleston Harbor was unusual for a Democratic campaign event. A political novice, she introduced herself to the mix of South Carolinian bankers, retirees and military veterans — most of them longtime Republicans — who leaned forward in their comfortable chairs when she described the toxic leadership she had witnessed first hand at the Pentagon.
“I had a front-row seat to the dysfunction of D. C.,” she said at the Oct. 8 gathering, speaking under a blue naval battle flag that read “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” in bold white lettering. “National security is now a talking point instead of a responsibility. Too many public servants have been cast aside because of politics. And now we are in an unconstitutional forever war that has done nothing but drive up prices for everybody and put our service members in harm’s way.”
Until 14 months ago, she was Vice Adm. Lacore — one year into a four-year job overseeing about 60,000 sailors as chief of the U.S. Navy Reserve. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired her without explanation, abruptly ending her 35-year career flying helicopters, commanding troops and deploying to far-flung places around the globe, including Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. It was personally devastating, but it was also a byproduct, she said, of larger problems in Washington.
Ms. Lacore’s race is one of a handful that may determine control of the House of Representatives. If she succeeds, it could set up one of the most karmic political payoffs in recent history. Among the first things Democrats are signaling they may do if they take power is commence investigations of Mr. Hegseth’s handing of national security and his leadership of the Pentagon. The word “impeachment” is even being batted around on Capitol Hill.
Ms. Lacore has succeeded in making the contest for South Carolina’s First District, which President Trump won by 13 points in 2024, a close race — she is down just a few points in most polls. She has largely followed the established Democratic playbook of the day, hammering pocketbook issues such as the price of gas and groceries, while reassuring centrists that she’s a moderate on social policies. To close the remaining gap, she’s betting the potential voters in the district, 11 percent of whom are veterans, will be swayed by the messy, damaging national security leadership of Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth.
Witnessing Ms. Lacore on the campaign trail deliver her stump speech and interact with voters, it’s clear that many understand how the administration’s dereliction in national security matters has hit their pocketbooks. Other Democratic candidates would benefit from spotlighting the wreckage. The country cannot afford to watch another blank check Congress acquiescing to a shoot-first-ask-questions-later commander in chief.
Even in veteran-heavy parts of the country, cultural shifts in the military are rarely a difference maker in elections, but the Pentagon hasn’t been this politically toxic since the Iraq war or even Vietnam. Launching an unhinged ideological rampage, Mr. Hegseth has dragged the armed forces into America’s divisive culture wars by firing or blocking the promotion of more than 80 senior military officers as part of a crusade driven by ideology. And her message appears to be getting through. Jon Gundersen, an Army veteran of the Vietnam War who later served as a Foreign Service officer, said he has long voted Republican but intends to vote for Ms. Lacore. “She’s the right candidate for this district,” he said.
Like other officers who spend decades climbing through the ranks, Ms. Lacore did not express political beliefs while in uniform. In fact, she was a Republican for most of her life. Now, she’s trying to convince Lowcountry voters that her personal history is what makes her ready for this moment. “I thought I was going to be in uniform until 2028,” Ms. Lacore said in an interview. “If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but I don’t want to just be the one sitting on the sideline.” If it does, Mr. Hegseth and the Republican Party will pay a price well into the future.
“The Secretary of Defense has ordered me to relieve you effective immediately.” That message, delivered reluctantly by the acting chief of naval operations on Aug. 22, 2025, was how Ms. Lacore says she learned one year into her stint as the head of the naval reserve that her career was effectively over. “Was there a reason?” she asked, stunned. No, came the admiral’s reply, and none would be provided. She returned to her office, boxed up her most prized items and drove home.
Mr. Hegseth has fired many female and minority officers with pristine records without explanation. He has also taken the extraordinary step of striking individual officers’ candidacy off promotion board lists. Last month at U.S. Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, Mr. Hegseth said that the Trump administration had reduced the number of generals and admirals in the military by 10 percent and was aiming for 20 percent. The goal, he said, was cultural change. “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors,” Mr. Hegseth said. “The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.”
The firings have drawn bipartisan criticism. Secretary Hegseth is politicizing the military by “interfering in the process of promotions and assignments,” said Kori Schake, a national security expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Officers who want to survive now have a reason to adopt overt political positions, which is antithetical to the way the military traditionally operates.
When Ms. Lacore’s former therapist learned that she had been fired, she texted her. They had last spoken years earlier, after Ms. Lacore deployed to Afghanistan, and they decided to restart the sessions after her dismissal brought on renewed bouts with depression. “It was definitely like post-traumatic stress,” she said, but “I got through it a lot quicker this time.”
Just as she did when she returned from Afghanistan, Ms. Lacore began running more intensely each day to push through the anxiety and depression. She and her husband, Pat, also a former Navy helicopter pilot, began talking about next steps. They had purchased a home in Mount Pleasant, S.C., that they wanted to settle into once Ms. Lacore’s retirement came in 2028. Now that she was out of the job, they decided to move early.
Uninterested in making money by consulting for defense contractors, as many other retired flag officers do, Ms. Lacore decided to run for the House seat being vacated by Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican. Ms. Lacore knew she had her work cut out. The district was redrawn to be more favorable to Republicans in 2021, but she wanted to try.
In launching her campaign, Ms. Lacore stressed her military career. The first general election advertisement filmed her on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Her logo includes the three stars that reflected her rank as a vice admiral. She described herself as a centrist and a former Republican who had abandoned the party in 2016 when Mr. Trump first ran for president. The nonpartisan pitch took root early, as Mayor Will Haynie of Mount Pleasant, S.C., a Republican, endorsed her and introduced her at the public opening of her campaign office.
In June, she defeated Mac Deford, a Coast Guard veteran and a former general counsel for the town of Hilton Head Island, in the Democratic primary. Two months later, she landed a coveted spot on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s national Red to Blue program, which opened access to resources to get her message out. VoteVets, the liberal political action committee known for supporting veterans running for office, told me it intends to spend $900,000 on television advertisements for Ms. Lacore in the closing weeks of the election. “We’ve got these little positive indicators,” she said. “The race raters have taken it out of solid red and moved it a little more toward us. So, I think there’s momentum.”
She has repeatedly reached out to military veterans down the stretch, holding around a dozen vet-focused events in the district. On the night I saw her, she was speaking at the home of Peter and Aarati Alexander in Sullivan’s Island, S.C. Mr. Alexander, who spent much of the 1970s and 1980s working on Capitol Hill as a staffer for Republican lawmakers, felt compelled to pitch Ms. Lacore to like-minded friends. “I’m a Lincoln Republican,” he said to the crowd as his cream-colored lab, Wallace, waddled around. “I know I might not agree with Nancy on every position, but I know she’s a reasonable person.”
Ms. Lacore took questions and spoke one on one with the assembled centrists. As she did, I remembered that she had described herself as an introvert. Here she was revealing intimate parts of her life, putting herself on the line in ways that other colleagues with similar stories have declined to do — either out of a sense of privacy or a fear of retaliation. “I’m the only one,” she said. “It’s not a very comfortable situation.”
She acknowledges that she’s an unlikely candidate making an unlikely pitch in a hard-to-win district. “I need Republicans,” she said. “And I believe that it is my background that really opens the door to people thinking about voting for a Democrat.”
Military veterans voted in favor of Mr. Trump by a wide margin in the 2024 presidential election. But as anger mounts over the Iran war, Democratic candidates who are military veterans now have a real chance to flip their House seats, not just in South Carolina, but also in districts in Colorado, Florida and Virginia.
Economic, diplomatic and military losses over the last two years may well endure for a generation, and there must be a reckoning. Ms. Lacore is spearheading a new line of attack. The way things are going in the Pentagon, and around the world, the Democrats will have a strong message to deliver for years to come — thanks to Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump.
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