Mark Sanford filed paperwork Monday to run for Congress in South Carolina’s 1st District, months after Olivia Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé alleged the former Republican lawmaker had an affair with the journalist.
Sanford is running in the expansive House district being vacated by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), who is seeking the GOP nomination for governor in South Carolina.
“People have been telling me it’s time to get off the bleachers,” Sanford, 64, told the Post & Courier newspaper.
In between two separate stints in Congress representing the First District – 1995 to 2001 and 2013 to 2019 – Sanford served as governor of the Palmetto state from 2003 to 2011.
He also ran for a longshot presidential campaign for the 2020 GOP nomination but dropped out before the Iowa caucuses.
The First Congressional District runs along the South Carolina coastline, from Hilton Head Island up north past Charleston. The district is rated “solid” Republican by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
“Sanford: Fiscal Conservative,” reads the tagline on his campaign website.
“Our nation’s debt is the issue that will define whether this country survives in the form we’ve known it,” Sanford said in a statement. “It will also define how young and old fare over the years ahead, because inflation and interest rates, the value of the dollar, and our ability to afford all that goes with building and sustaining our lives will be driven by what happens next in confronting Washington’s addiction to spending money we don’t have on programs we can’t afford.”
The Post & Courier notes that Sanford will enter the crowded GOP primary race with a $1.3 million war chest – unused money from previous political campaigns.
Sanford, who in 2009 infamously claimed he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when he was actually in Argentina with his mistress, was accused by journalist Ryan Lizza last November of having an affair with Nuzzi (Lizza’s ex).
“Mark, I am sorry. I can’t say that I wish I hadn’t touched you, hadn’t,” read an incomplete, handwritten letter purportedly drafted by Nuzzi and intended for Sanford on March 5, 2020.
The note, obtained by The Post, was one of three draft letters Lizza claimed to have found and alleged Nuzzi intended to leave for Sanford – whom she covered during his 2020 White House bid.
Nuzzi admitted to becoming “infatuated” with Sanford after an interview and sending him “risqué pictures and texts” on the campaign trail, according to Lizza.
Nuzzi insisted she “only had sex one time” with Sanford at his South Carolina home, Lizza wrote in a Substack post about the alleged tryst.
The Sanford scandal surfaced after Nuzzi left her job at New York Magazine following her alleged “sexting” relationship with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Sanford, who did not respond to The Post’s request for comment, does not appear to have publicly addressed the allegation.
