Watching for a Blue Wave in South Carolina

Nancy Lacore found out she was fired as the chief of the Navy Reserve almost a year to the day after she got the job.

On a Friday morning in August 2025, Admiral James Kilby, then the acting chief of naval operations, called Lacore to his office in the Pentagon.

She went alone, and when she asked how Kilby was doing, his reply—“Not good”—told her all she needed to know.

By the time Kilby delivered the news, he had tears in his eyes, Lacore says.

He told her that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had directed him to relieve her of command effective immediately.

No reason was given.

“I kind of fell forward a little bit on the table,” Lacore told me.

“It just knocked the wind out of me for a second.” Lacore is among the dozens of military leaders that Hegseth has sacked or ousted over the past year and a half, many of them women and people of color.

She’s since taken a different path: Lacore recounted her story to me after a campaign event outside Charleston, South Carolina, where she is asking voters to send her back to Washington—this time as a member of Congress.

When Lacore left the Pentagon on that summer Friday, she never returned, her 35-year military career effectively over. (The Pentagon declined to comment.) By January, she had launched a bid as a Democrat for the House in South Carolina’s Low Country.

South Carolina’s First District is a reach for Democrats, but it is one of more than a dozen races across the country where the party is testing how deep into GOP territory it can advance in November.

President Trump carried the district by 13 points in 2024.

Democrats flipped the seat in 2018, during their blue midterm wave in Trump’s first term.

But Republicans won it back two years later and then redrew the district’s lines to cement their advantage.