Do voters prefer a serious legislator who does his job and reflects the values of his district to a headline-grabbing neophyte? We’re about to find out.
Do voters prefer a serious legislator who does his job and reflects the values of his district to a headline-grabbing neophyte? We’re about to find out.
S tate senator Chuck Edwards isn’t well-known outside of North Carolina, but that won’t be the case for long if his bid to knock off Representative Madison Cawthorn in an upcoming Republican primary election succeeds.
Voters in North Carolina’s heavily Republican 11th congressional district are unlikely to choose a Democrat in November. The mountainous district, which covers 15 counties in the western end of the state and borders Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia, last elected a Democrat, Heath Shuler, in 2010. The Cook Partisan Voter Index rating of the district is R+9, meaning it is estimated nine points more Republican than the nationwide average. Even as an inexperienced first-time candidate running for the open seat in 2020, Cawthorn won by twelve points. So the May 17 primary is likely to decide who holds the seat come next year. Early voting in the eight-way race begins today — Democrats cannot vote in the primary, but unaffiliated voters are allowed to register as Republicans to cast ballots — and Edwards needs to hold Cawthorn under 30 percent of the vote to set up a head-to-head runoff in June.
Toppling an incumbent in a primary is no small feat, but Edwards has represented state senate district 48, in the heart of Cawthorn’s 11th district, since 2016. He has never won less than 56 percent of the vote in his three campaigns, and was reelected by 18 points in 2020. He can lay claim to more experience and accomplishments than the controversial, headline-grabbing Cawthorn, and he boasts endorsements and fundraising help from major North Carolina Republicans including Senator Thom Tillis, state house speaker Tim Moore, state senate president pro tempore Phil Berger, and state senate majority whip Jim Perry. Approached at a recent Edwards fundraiser, Moore told a local TV station, “If you have clowns in office who aren’t serious about what they’re doing, you can’t get somewhere. . . . I’m just kind of without the words to describe what Congressman Cawthorn is doing and saying.” Richard Burr, North Carolina’s retiring Republican senator, declined to get involved in the primary but said recently of Cawthorn, “Clearly he’s been an embarrassment at times.”
Edwards has the support of Americans for Legal Immigration, the North Carolina Police Benevolent Association, Asheville’s firefighters union, and the pro-gun-rights group Grassroots NC. He touts an A+ rating from the NC Values Coalition and an A rating from the NRA. His website boasts of his support for school choice and having “stood against the Democrats forcing mandates, school closures and the teaching of radical Critical Race Theory on our children.”
Cawthorn, by contrast, doesn’t even have an endorsement page on his website. An anti-Cawthorn Democratic operative on Twitter claims that “I contacted 18 of his 2020 endorsers. 10 county commissioners, 3 county sheriffs, 3 members of county boards of education/superintendents, and 2 former NC legislators. NONE of them have endorsed Madison Cawthorn in 2022.” (Cawthorn does have the nominal support of Donald Trump, who endorsed him back in March 2021, before Cawthorn had an opponent or even decided which district he was running in.)
Then again, Cawthorn won his primary in 2020 with essentially no endorsements; his opponent was backed by Trump, Mark Meadows — who had vacated the seat to become Trump’s chief of staff — Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, and the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List. Cawthorn got just 20 percent of the vote running second in a twelve-way primary in March 2020, but won by 30 points in a June runoff where turnout was half as high.
The 26-year-old Cawthorn has been no stranger to controversy since coming to Washington, and his mounting troubles in the past two months suggest almost willfully self-destructive behavior on behalf of a young man who enjoys the celebrity that comes with being a member of Congress but doesn’t have much interest in doing the job. In early March, he told a town hall in Asheville, N.C., “Remember that [Ukrainian leader Volodymyr] Zelensky is a thug. Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.” He was publicly rebuked later that month by House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), after he’d publicly claimed to have been invited to orgies by his colleagues and seen them do cocaine — a story he subsequently refused to back up and tried to “clarify” away into meaningless generalities. After meeting with Cawthorn, McCarthy was quoted as saying, “I just told him he’s lost my trust, he’s gonna have to earn it back, and I laid out everything I find is unbecoming. And, you can’t just say, ‘You can’t do this again.’ I mean, he’s, he’s got a lot of members very upset.”
Then came this week, which started off badly for Cawthorn and only got worse. On Monday, a Washington Examiner report by Andrew Kerr concluded that Cawthorn “may have violated federal insider trading laws as he hyped up an alleged pump-and-dump cryptocurrency scheme” involving his investment in the Let’s Go Brandon meme cryptocurrency, which lost half a billion dollars of market value between late December and late January. On Tuesday, Cawthorn was stopped by the Transportation Security Administration while attempting to bring a loaded gun onto an airplane — the second time he’d been caught with a gun in his carry-on at an airport. On Wednesday, Tillis called for a House Ethics Committee investigation into Cawthorn’s alleged insider trading. “Insider trading by a member of Congress is a serious betrayal of their oath,” Tillis said. (Cawthorn’s legal troubles don’t end there, either: In May, he is scheduled to appear in court on a misdemeanor charge of driving with a revoked license.)
So Cawthorn is running for reelection amid a parade of terrible headlines. And much like neighboring freshman congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, he will also have to overcome the buyer’s remorse of voters who didn’t necessarily sign up for what they got if he hopes to secure another term. Edwards himself recently told Matthew Kassel of Jewish Insider: “I had supported Congressman Cawthorn. I had introduced him to friends. I had made contributions to his campaign. And I wanted to see him be successful. . . . [But] right now, the U.S. House floor is not a training camp for folks to learn how to lead legislatively.”
Edwards is not the only one who feels this way:
Former Henderson County Sheriff George Erwin, who was instrumental in getting a majority of western North Carolina’s Republican sheriffs to endorse Cawthorn in [2020], has publicly apologized for doing so. . . . Erwin said that to his knowledge few of those sheriffs will now back Cawthorn because of his actions in cheerleading protesters prior to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to disrupt the presidential-election certification, as well as his blatant refusal to follow the law prohibiting carrying weapons — in Cawthorn’s case a switchblade “combat knife” — on school grounds. “I am very adamantly opposed to him, and I don’t see how anyone in law enforcement can support him now,” Erwin said.
If that weren’t bad enough, Cawthorn doesn’t have the huge war chest Greene enjoys; he “has pulled in nearly $2.9 million since the beginning of 2021 but nevertheless entered the new year with just over $280,000,” raising questions about where exactly the rest of all that cash has gone. “Cawthorn is broke,” Kassel quoted an anonymous fundraiser as saying. As of March 31, 2022, Cawthorn reported $242,304 cash on hand, compared with $390,796 for Edwards. A Tillis-affiliated super PAC has reportedly spent more than $300,000 on ads attacking Cawthorn. Of course, Edwards could still use more money to get his message out to voters, given that polls before the recent controversies continued to show Cawthorn with a commanding lead.
That lead has since come under pressure. A GOPAC Election Fund poll conducted April 25–26 showed Cawthorn leading Edwards 38 percent to 21 percent, with 20 percent undecided and another 21 percent splintered among the other six candidates, who are all languishing in single digits. That represents a significant erosion in Cawthorn’s support from early March, when the same poll showed him leading Edwards 49 percent to 14 percent. Moreover, according to the pollsters:
The race is closer in certain key subsets of voters. With voters who participated in all 4 of the most recent GOP primary elections, Cawthorn leads Edwards 32% to 29%. With voters who participated in 2 or more or 3 or more of the past 4 primaries, Cawthorn leads 35% to 25%. Most importantly, among voters who have an opinion of both Edwards and Cawthorn, Edwards leads 32% to 31%.
They go on to say plainly that, “by every metric, Cawthorn’s campaign trajectory is terrible,” noting that “50% of voters agree with this statement: ‘With there always being some sort of negative news regarding Madison Cawthorn and his personal life, it may be better for another candidate to win the Republican Primary for Congress.’”
Cawthorn spent the closing months of 2021 deciding where he wanted to run for a second term. In November, he filed to run in a redrawn district closer to the center of the state and the Charlotte media market, abandoning his western constituents. The move chased Moore out of the race for that seat. Tom Fiedler of the Asheville Citizen-Times opined at the time that “the emerging opposition to Cawthorn in his current district appears to provide a political rationale for skipping into the new . . . district.” Fiedler detailed the bitterness engendered by Cawthorn’s effort to anoint a Detroit native as his successor in the district he was leaving. Eventually, after further redrawing of the district maps, Cawthorn came slinking back to the 11th district, after Edwards and others had already filed to run for what they thought was now an open seat. “I was extremely surprised when he left this district,” Edwards told Kassel. “And then I was even more surprised to see that he had changed his mind and decided to come back.”
I caught up by phone today with Edwards — no mean feat, given that his cell service was tested to the limit as he crisscrossed the mountainous terrain of western North Carolina. Edwards, who started working behind the counter at a McDonald’s when he was 16 and now owns six franchises, said he got into politics after running a business showed him “how invasive government is.” Without dwelling on Cawthorn, he stressed his local roots and his record in the state senate, saying that a district that has run through two congressmen in two years needs someone with “stability and experience” to defend “the true interests of the mountain people.” “The experiment is over,” he told me; voters want someone with “life experience” and legislative experience who is “not exposed to distractions” of the type that have made Cawthorn infamous.
Edwards is a staunch conservative; he noted that, in his tenure in the state senate, he has helped lower taxes dramatically compared with where they stood before Republicans took over the legislature in 2011, outlaw sanctuary cities, balance state budgets, and pass voting-integrity laws. He cites his work on the state’s budget as a reason for supporting a balanced-budget amendment in Washington. And without naming the former president, he cites Trump as a model for his campaign: “In 2016, voters chose a successful businessman with conservative values who loves this country and had accomplished things in life.” Asked what Republicans could focus on if they retake the House, he immediately cited the need to close the southern border and stop the flow of illegal drugs, gangs, human trafficking, and, potentially, terrorists. When he announced his run for Congress in November, he also pointed out that “I helped fight for Christian values, and I helped fight for the unborn” and “reinforced our support for law enforcement and our military.” In the state senate, he has earned the trust of leadership, co-chairing a pair of joint committees.
Edwards is, in short, everything Cawthorn isn’t: a serious legislator who actually does his job and reflects the values of his district. We will soon find out whether that is worth more to the voters of the 11th district than Cawthorn’s taste for headlines.