Madison Cawthorn was elected to represent western North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District on Tuesday, making him the youngest member of Congress at age 25, which is the constitutional minimum.
Cawthorn defeated retired Air Force Col. Moe Davis, a Democrat who served as a prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay.
Cawthorn was catapulted to national prominence after he defeated candidate Lynda Bennett in a runoff primary election in June. After his Trump-supported opponent lost, Cawthorn was invited to speak at the Republican National Convention (RNC). He explained his worldview in a profile with the Washington Examiner:
Acknowledging he is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, Cawthorn said he believes too many conservatives have cared only about the politics that have always worked, while letting the culture slip away to the Left. “They said, ‘Oh, well, we don’t need to worry about culture. We don’t need to worry about what the sheep think.'” He pointed to younger politicians such as Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw and congressional candidate Anna Paulina Luna as examples of those who use social media effectively to convey to their generation that “the policies the Left wants to push are both morally and financially bankrupt.”
“I think a lot of people realize that there is a generational time bomb going off in the Republican Party,” Cawthorn said. “And if we don’t start defusing it right now, then 20, 30 years down the road, maybe even sooner, we’re going to lose every single election for the rest of time.” He believes the GOP needs to start reaching out to young people and passing the torch or else “it’s going to be very, very bad.”
The contest between Cawthorn and Davis was a contentious one, which featured unearthed tweets from Davis that were violent and vulgar against Trump supporters. As The Daily Wire reported:
The Democratic candidate for North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District is drawing scrutiny after profane tweets he made have resurfaced in the wake of his recent debate against his Republican opponent.
Moe Davis, a retired Air Force colonel who is running against 25-year-old Madison Cawthorn to represent western North Carolina in the House of Representatives, was asked to explain vulgar posts he made on social media in recent years after local radio host Pete Kaliner brought them up to him during the Sept. 4 debate.
“Colonel Davis, on social media you’ve suggested Mr. Cawthorn’s a white supremacist, a racist, a Nazi, a Nazi sympathizer, or all of those things,” Kaliner said. “You’ve called him a far-right hateful extremist, alt-right, a bigot, ignorant, a liar, a poster child for Donald Trump’s fascism, uneducated, unable to compete, pretty and pampered, lacking any moral core.”
Kaliner went on to list some of the epithets Davis has hurled toward the president, as well, in which he claimed Trump is “a 100% purebred worthless scumbag [expletive]” with a racist agenda and described first lady Melania Trump as his “foreign-born nude model 3rd wife.”
Kaliner also laid out the times Davis demonized Trump supporters, likening the Republican Party to the KKK, the MAGA hat to a Klan hood, and a rally held by evangelist Franklin Graham to a Klan rally.