'An embarrassment to our party': North Carolina Republicans blast Madison Cawthorn's 'antics'
According to a report from the conservative Washington Examiner, Republicans in North Carolina are growing increasingly exhausted with Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) and would like to see him replaced because he is hurting the reputation of the party in the state.
Cawthorn, during his freshman year in the House, has become strongly identified with the extremist wing in the House -- along with fellow Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) -- and, interviews with the Examiner, conservatives in his home state expressed their frustration with him.
According to David Drucker's report, "Rep. Madison Cawthorn is stumbling at home and abroad as his bid to play Republican kingmaker falls flat with voters and alienates colleagues."
As one senior North Carolina Republican put it, "His antics are wearing thin with his colleagues and with Republican voters, though he still has a limited but fiercely loyal following with some activists.”
The report goes on to note that, while Cawthorn is popular outside the state with followers of former president Donald Trump -- to whom he has tied his future -- his popularity hasn't proven to be transferable to other Republicans.
"But in the first test of Cawthorn’s coattails, in primaries in Texas’s 3rd and 8th congressional districts, he failed," the report states. "The candidate he backed in the 8th, Christian Collins, came up short, as did the contender he endorsed in the 3rd, Suzanne Harp — the mother of his congressional office chief of staff."
Echoing others comments, one GOP operative observed, "His act is wearing thin,” before adding, "North Carolina’s Republican Party has long had a split between [former Sen. Jesse] Helms conservatives and Piedmont moderates. But antipathy toward Cawthorn increasingly unites a lot of them.”
The Examiner's Drucker wrote, "But what appears to rankle so many North Carolina Republicans the most, what is causing 'his act to wear thin,' party operatives in the state say, are two problems in particular: Cawthorn’s initial move to switch districts, later reversed, and his attempt to decide the political fate of the rest of the state’s GOP delegation by fancying himself kingmaker in the 11 House seats drawn to elect Republicans in an earlier version of redistricting."
The report goes on to point out that Cawthorn's "public presumptuousness infuriated many North Carolina Republicans, including and especially the prominent and more veteran members of the state’s GOP delegation."
One North Carolina GOP campaign explained, "Cawthorn is not well regarded with Republicans statewide in North Carolina. Many of us think he is an embarrassment to our party and state.”
You can read more here.
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