In Madison Cawthorn’s NC district, it’s not the scandals that matter to voters

About a year and a half ago, Madison Cawthorn signs were all over Marion, a community of about 7,700 in one of the easternmost parts of his district. The election results corroborate this: he won McDowell County by 67 percent in the 11th Congressional District runoff, and with nearly 72 percent in the 2020 general election.

But if you drive around Marion this week, the only signs you’ll see for Cawthorn are at the McDowell County Board of Elections.

It’s not that similar signs are missing entirely in Marion. Matthew Burril, a McDowell County native and one of the eight candidates taking on Cawthorn in the Republican primary, has signs all over. The candidates aren’t missing, either: Chuck Edwards, a state senator with support from U.S. Sen Thom Tillis, held an event at Bear Creek Marina Wednesday night.

Backdropped by Lake James and the Blue Ridge Mountains, Edwards told the small crowd he decided to run “when our congressman turned his back on us and moved” to run in the 13th Congressional District, only to return to NC-11 when the maps were drawn again.

It’s a sentiment other Republicans shared this week, including those who supported the freshman congressman beforehand. Cawthorn may have earned the ire of Democrats before he got elected two years ago, but at least some Republicans now seem tired of him, too.

David Patneaude is a real estate agent and one of McDowell County’s Republican kingmakers. In 2020, he put his weight behind Cawthorn, who he saw as charismatic, bright, and a good follow-up to former U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows. In this race, he’s supporting Edwards.

“Mark was so good,” Patneaude told me in his wood-paneled office on Main Street. “Out of all the counties, if you needed anything, his people were in touch with you. Mark was here when we wanted him here.”

Cawthorn, simply put, has not been. His website lists four offices in western North Carolina, but only two phone numbers. Only one of those connected to a real staffer, who picked up on the second call, and said the offices on the website are “satellite offices” and that all case workers were located in Hendersonville.

“I mean, I’ve not seen him since the election,” says Joe Hall, the owner of Bear Creek Marina. He doesn’t attribute Cawthorn’s failures to any one thing; instead, he says, it happened gradually. Harold Wilson, a Vietnam veteran at the Edwards event, said the congressman “didn’t stay in touch with the people who helped him.”

Republican opponent Michele Woodhouse, ideologically, is closer to Cawthorn than to Edwards. But she also does not buy Cawthorn’s belief that there’s a left-wing media conspiracy to dispel him from office. “The left wing media did not make Madison Cawthorn drive without a driver’s license,” she says. “No one made him be an irresponsible gun owner twice.”

The recent scandals about Cawthorn donning lingerie or having sexually suggestive contact with male staffers did not come up at Edwards’s campaign event, either. What did was his disregard for the laws that all people have to follow, regardless of party. Beyond that, it comes back to his desertion, both in Washington and in western NC. It was his attendance record in Congress, where he is one of the most frequently absent members. It’s the constituent services. It’s leaving the district to run somewhere almost entirely new, instead of being the strong Republican the voters in the district want.

Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, has also heard this from voters. He sees this race as likely heading to a runoff — just as it did when Cawthorn was selected, and as it did with Meadows before him.

“It’s the feeling of resentment for leaving, and it’s the fact that he left, and it was a very different race than the one he returned to,” Cooper says. “So now, if you are a America First voter, you’ve got choices.”

“There are several people that are running for Congress now that would be better Congressmen, and could serve the constituents better,” Patneaude says. “That’s what I’m looking at. I like the guy, personally. But I do think there’s something going on.”