Campaign Updates
April 23, 2026: Check back for updates.
Likely SC01 Democratic primary voters at home and on the go need to see and receive — across digital platforms, including YouTube, CTV/OTT, and programmatic, and through direct mail to households:
South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District is an open seat — and a genuine pickup opportunity. The DCCC has identified SC-01 as a target race, and with Trump’s approval sinking and costs rising, the district is in play. But Democrats can only win it with the right nominee: someone rooted in this community, with a proven record, and ready to compete from day one.
That candidate is Mac Deford.
MAC’S STORY
Mac Deford has spent the last 16 years building his life and career in the Lowcountry. He came here through the Coast Guard and never left. As a federal law enforcement officer and search-and-rescue crewman, he was responsible for port security and anti-terrorism operations and led maritime law enforcement teams in and around Charleston and the Lowcountry. He earned his undergraduate degree at The Citadel — graduating magna cum laude on the GI Bill — his law degree from the Charleston School of Law, and his MBA from UNC Chapel Hill. He went on to serve this community as Associate General Counsel for the Town of Mount Pleasant and General Counsel for the Town of Hilton Head Island, delivering results from one end of SC-01 to the other.
In 2024, Mac earned 60% of the vote in Beaufort County. Voters there know him, trust him, and are ready to send him to Congress. A recent poll shows Mac tied 40-40 with the Republican frontrunner in the general, and leading independents by more than 30 points after voters hear his record.
Mac is the Democratic candidate who can win this district.
VOTERS DESERVE THE TRUTH
Democratic primary voters need to know the truth about Mac’s opponent.
She moved to South Carolina just months ago and launched her campaign shortly after arriving. By her own account to a national reporter, the district wasn’t even her primary residence until a few months before she entered the race.
She is a lifelong Republican. In her own words: “I was definitely a registered Republican for most of my life.” She is now running as a Democrat, but when a reporter from The Bulwark asked her directly whether it felt odd to adopt a Democratic party label after a lifetime in the GOP, she refused to answer on the record. She asked to go off the record to answer honestly. SC-01 Democratic primary voters deserve to know she can’t be trusted to fight for Democratic values.
Her first South Carolina endorsement came from Republican Will Haynie, the Mayor of Mount Pleasant — a politician who backs MAGA candidates. Haynie supported MAGA Nancy Mace over Democratic incumbent Joe Cunningham in 2020. He also backed Republican Carl Ritchie for Charleston County Sheriff, helping defeat Democratic incumbent Sheriff Kristin Graziano. Upon taking office, Sheriff Ritchie promptly entered into a 287(g) agreement with ICE, which deputizes local police and sheriff’s departments to act as immigration enforcement agents — turning the local police your community pays for into an arm of ICE.
Her campaign is funded predominantly by out-of-state money and national special-interest groups, not by the neighbors and community members who will actually be represented in Congress.
On protecting abortion rights, she has hedged. At a public candidate forum, she cited her Catholic faith rather than stating a clear position.
This is not a candidate who came to SC-01 to serve it. She came to SC-01 to run in it.
Supporters who want to assist Mac with voter communication should ensure that likely Democratic primary voters in SC-01 see the contrast messaging on digital and streaming platforms. Digital communication will be especially critical in the final weeks leading up to early voting and Election Day on June 9.
MAC’S AGENDA
Mac Deford will fight for SC-01 on the issues that matter most to Lowcountry families:
- Cost of living: Opposing reckless tariffs, expanding affordable housing, making child care affordable and accessible, lowering prescription drug costs, and breaking up monopolies across health care, housing, and other industries that rig prices against working families and individuals.
- Health care: Lowering costs by reforming a broken system, strengthening the ACA, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, breaking up health care monopolies, expanding mental health care access and coverage, and protecting reproductive health care access.
- Social Security: Protecting and strengthening Social Security — no cuts, no privatization, no raising the retirement age. Mac will fight to extend Social Security’s solvency by lifting the payroll tax cap, so millionaires and billionaires pay the same rate on all their earnings that working families and individuals already pay on every dollar they earn.
- Rule of law and accountability: Restoring congressional oversight, protecting due process, holding this administration accountable, ending the political weaponization of federal agencies, and banning congressional stock trading and insider trading by federal officials.
- Making Congress work: Passing meaningful ethics reforms across all three branches, ending partisan gerrymandering, imposing term limits on Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, and forcing Congress to do the job voters sent them to Washington to do.
- War powers and executive overreach: Reclaiming Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war — not cede it to a president itching for a war with Iran that could cost American lives and treasure without a single vote from the people’s representatives.
- Infrastructure: Investing in the roads, bridges, and flood mitigation infrastructure that Lowcountry families and individuals depend on, and securing the federal funding necessary to modernize aging systems before the next storm season.
- Insurance reform: Fighting back against an insurance crisis that is pricing Lowcountry homeowners out of their homes and leaving families and individuals exposed to devastating financial loss from flooding and storms.
- Environment and community: Reversing the Trump administration’s harmful environmental rollbacks, protecting Lowcountry wetlands and waterways, funding land preservation programs for Gullah Geechee communities throughout the Lowcountry, and investing in clean water infrastructure.
- Community safety: Common-sense gun safety measures that protect Lowcountry families and individuals.
