The congressional race just got interesting here in NC-11. This Wednesday from Business Insider:
Twenty-five-year-old Republican congressional candidate Madison Cawthorn is facing a tougher fight than expected in the race to replace former Rep. Mark Meadows in North Carolina’s 11th congressional district.
A new internal poll conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and exclusively shared with Insider shows Cawthorn leading his Democratic opponent, retired Air Force colonel Morris “Moe” Davis, by just five percentage points, 46% to 41%, in the district, with 6% supporting other candidates and 7% undecided.
The poll was conducted before Cawthorn’s stinging profile published Monday in Jezebel. More about that in a minute.
“Write your congressman” lost all meaning in NC-11 when Meadows moved up Pennsylvania Ave. to become the acting president’s fourth chief of staff. He timed the move to set up a local T-party activist as his successor (and, we suspect, to forestall entry into the 2020 race of a local elected Democrat who might win the seat). That plan fizzled when his pick, Lynda Bennett, lost the June runoff primary to Cawthorn, then 24, a former Meadows intern.
Davis, 59, is a retired Air Force colonel, recently returned to his native North Carolina after decades of public service. His bio says he is a former Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay (who refused to accept evidence acquired through torture), Director of the Air Force Judiciary, law professor at Howard University, judge, and national security expert with multiple TV appearances and 160.3k Twitter followers. While employed by the Congressional Research Service, Davis wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed critical of the Obama administration’s Guantanamo Bay prosecutions. Davis was fired. The ACLU won his First Amendment lawsuit over the free speech rights of government employees. (We’ve met; I’ve donated.)
All this is would be a 2020 campaign footnote until yesterday’s poll numbers. The district was not considered competitive, even after courts insisted the district gerrymandered in 2011 be redrawn yet again (I lost count), this time to include all of bright-blue Asheville and purple-ish Buncombe County.
Davis has raised about $500k, not enough to get the DCCC to take him seriously. (Winning Democrats raised on average $5.5 million in 2018 to flip a House seat.) But with another blue tsunami rumored on the horizon, the DCCC seems intrigued enough about NC-11 to buy a poll.
Then there is the matter of Cawthorn, a hard right Trump-supporter with predictable catchphrases, and some unusual enthusiasms that caught Jezebel’s attention. A car accident at 18 left the home-schooled Cawthorn partially paralyzed and with a sizable insurance settlement. He portrays himself as a real estate investor but seems to have no income from it, or any income at all. Jezebel’s Esther Wang judges his resume padded:
Cawthorn paints himself as a promising young man with plans to become a Marine until the 2014 car accident that left him partially paralyzed. “He planned on serving his country in the Navy with a nomination to the U.S. Naval Academy,” one of his campaign ads states, until “tragedy struck.” Almost every single news article about Cawthorn mentions that he was nominated to the Naval Academy by his former boss Mark Meadows, now White House Chief of Staff; it’s easy to then assume that he was accepted by the Naval Academy. But it turns out, according to a 2017 deposition Cawthorn gave as part of his unsuccessful lawsuit seeking $30 million from the auto insurance company that had already paid him $3 million, he was actually rejected by the Naval Academy, and was informed of his rejection before his car accident.
Cawthorn’s biography also neglects to highlight his actual time in college, which seemingly consisted of one semester at Patrick Henry College in Virginia, a small conservative Christian university described as “God’s Harvard” that operates as a sort of feeder school for those who want to enter right-wing politics. According to that same 2017 deposition, Cawthorn said he attended Patrick Henry College starting in the fall of 2016 and studied political science, but dropped out. The reason he gave? “Heartbreak,” he told the attorney, saying that his first fiancée (he was engaged to another woman before Bayardelle) “ran off with my best friend.” But he also admitted his grades were terrible. “I would think probably my average grade in most classes was a D,” he recalled, pinning the cause partly on the injuries stemming from his accident.
The Spartan “Molon Labe” symbol on Cawthorn’s holster (top photo), his display of the Betsy Ross flag, the name of his real estate LLC (SPQR), and a post from Cawthorn’s Instagram account have raised eyebrows. Wang writes:
I reached out to Ben Lorber, an analyst who studies anti-Semitism and white nationalist movements at Political Research Associates, to ask him what he made of Cawthorn’s use of SPQR and his display of the Betsy Ross flag prominently in his home. Lorber noted that the Betsy Ross flag had been seen at the Unite the Right rally in 2017, and most recently at some pro-police rallies, though he said the usage of the flag by extremist groups “is not prominent.” More striking, he told me, was Cawthorn’s decision to use SPQR in the name of his business. As Lorber told me via email, the term SPQR has been “adapted as a symbol by many white nationalists, who falsely glorify the ancient Roman Empire, much as they view the present-day U.S., as a proud white civilization that collapsed due to multiculturalism and immigration of non-white foreigners,” and has been used “to assert a similarly specious equivalence between an idealized Greco-Roman past and contemporary Western civilization, which they view as under attack by sinister forces of progressivism.” Cawthorn, Lorber wrote, “should clarify to the public why he used the acronym for his company name, and whether he holds these disturbing views.”
All circumstantial, of course. But Cawthorn has been deleting the vacation photos and claiming he visited out of a love of history. Davis tweeted, “Hitler’s vacation retreat is not on my bucket list.” Nor mine. I haven’t been to Auschwitz, but have visited Dachau outside Munich. I’ve been to a lot of historical/cultural sites on this continent and in Europe. Others make the list of those I’d like to visit someday. Der Führer’s mountain retreat doesn’t even merit dishonorable mention. But that’s just me.
Davis’ positions won’t align perfectly with every progressive’s, but he is a principled, experienced public servant with a shot at taking this seat and solidifying the House caucus. Heath Shuler did it in 2006 with similar district lines, but Davis does not strike me as that kind of Democrat no matter the right-lean of the district. Pay attention to this one and send Moe a little love, how about it?
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