BLAKE HOUNSHELL: Winning when Trump is against you -- a how-to guide

Are you a Republican who broke with Donald Trump but hope to win your upcoming primary?

Maybe you said that Joe Biden is the duly elected president, condemned Trump’s demagogy on Jan. 6 or merely suggested that he tone down his social media posts.

This handy guide is for you.

So what explains why some Trump critics succeed and others don’t? Here, based on a review of the results of this year’s primaries and conversations with roughly a dozen Republican strategists, are a few lessons:

Four others — Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse of Washington, and Peter Meijer of Michigan — have yet to face the music.

Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who did not vote to impeach Trump, made the former president’s enemies list for criticizing him on television after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. He called her a “grandstanding loser” and mocked her for filming a video praising him in front of Trump Tower in New York.

But she never got fundamentally out of step with the South Carolina Lowcountry, a libertarian-leaning area with a history of electing iconoclastic lawmakers. Mace grew up in Goose Creek, just outside Charleston. That local familiarity gave her an intuitive feel for navigating issues like offshore drilling, which is unpopular in the coastal region.

“She did a much better job of staying aligned with her district,” said Mick Mulvaney, a former South Carolina congressman who was White House chief of staff during Trump’s first impeachment.

Rice, by contrast, “almost took the attitude to dare people to throw him out,” Mulvaney said — standing emphatically by his impeachment vote despite representing a district that Trump won by more than 18 percentage points in 2020.

The backbone of Rice’s district is fast-growing Horry County, a historically conservative region filled with “angry retirees,” according to Chip Felkel, a Republican strategist based in Greenville.

But just down the coast in Mace’s more upscale district, Trump outperformed his approval ratings in 2020 — a sign, Felkel said, that there are “a lot of people who like Trump’s policies but don’t like Trump.”

Mace has been described as a moderate, but that’s a misnomer: She holds a 95% lifetime rating from the Club for Growth and a 94% score from Heritage Action, two groups that gauge lawmakers’ fealty to conservative principles. Rice scored 83% on both indexes — dangerous territory in the deep-red Pee Dee region of South Carolina.

Although the Club for Growth stayed out of her race, Mace did benefit from $160,000 in spending from Americans for Prosperity, another conservative outside group funded by the Koch brothers. No national outside groups spent money on Rice’s behalf.

Even minor heresies, like Mace’s support for legalizing marijuana, underscored her carefully cultivated image as an independent thinker and gave her a useful measure of distance from Trump.

“Nancy polished the ring; she didn’t kiss the ring,” Felkel said.

Katie Arrington, a former state lawmaker and Pentagon official who won Trump’s endorsement against Mace despite his private doubts about her candidacy, is another story.

Voters certainly heard about the former president’s preference: At least 75% of voters in the district were aware that he had endorsed Arrington, according to the Mace campaign’s internal polling.

Mulvaney, who campaigned for Mace, noted an additional factor: that Arrington had lost the district to a Democrat in 2018.

“Trump doesn’t like losers, and that’s what Katie was,” Mulvaney said.

Although Arrington had Trump in her corner, Mace had the backing of Nikki Haley, a popular two-term former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador under Trump who now lives in the district.

Haley raised more than $400,000 for Mace and appeared at two of her campaign rallies, in addition to recording get-out-the-vote videos and robocalls and sending texts. She also cut a television ad calling Mace “a fighter,” a “strong, pro-life mom” and a “tax-cutter” that ran for six weeks, airing 446 times in two ad markets. Mace’s campaign also mentioned Haley’s endorsement in its closing TV spot.

Rice made the puzzling decision to invite Paul Ryan, the former House speaker, to stump for him in the closing weeks of the campaign. Ryan, who tangled often with Trump before quitting politics to join the board of Fox News and starting a small think tank, hails from Janesville, Wisconsin — about 1,000 miles from Myrtle Beach.

Although Trump held telephone events for Arrington and brought her onstage at his MAGA rally in Florence, a city in Rice’s district, he never showed up in the Lowcountry.

“There’s always negatives with an endorsement,” said Terry Sullivan, a longtime Republican strategist, who added that taking full advantage of the potential upside of Trump’s imprimatur requires vigorous negotiation and careful planning. “You’ve got to work to get the positives.”