'Complete and utter idiot': GOP strategist explains Madison Cawthorn's loss

Rep. Madison Cawthorn suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of North Carolina voters on Tuesday.

"In 2020, Madison Cawthorn became the youngest Republican elected to Congress in American history. In 2022, he became the youngest Republican to lose re-election to Congress in American history," Ben Collins wrote for New York magazine. "The 26-year-old Cawthorn lost after a series of self-imposed scandals, controversies, and gaffes. He was repeatedly pulled over speeding while driving without a license, twice took a firearm through airport security, faced allegations of sexual misconduct and insider trading, baselessly accused colleagues of participating in cocaine-fueled orgies, and then there was the weird video of him humping another man."

Earlier Tuesday, Cawthorn called state Sen. Chuck Edwards to concede.

"Republican discontent stretched beyond traditional figures such as Tillis. 'No one from the Freedom Caucus guys to people in MAGA world are happy with how he conducted himself,' says one ally of Donald Trump," Collins reported. "There is a sense that he had behaved even worse than controversial figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, for all inflammatory rhetoric, was not viewed as “super conceited and cocky.” Another plugged-in Republican strategist put it more bluntly: “The guy is just a total f*ckup and shows the limits of patience and tolerance that the MAGA movement has for complete and utter idiots. It’s breaking laws and recklessness in personal behavior.”

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Collins had the support of Donald Trump.

"Still, there was one shred of sympathy for Cawthorn as Tuesday night drew close," Collins reported. "After reading a long Politico profile of Cawthorn describing him as unraveling, one freshman Democrat told Intelligencer that they came away with a feeling of pity towards a colleague. 'I just felt more sympathy than anything else. This is a person who clearly has ambition whose pain and whose ability to create new life through that pain could be inspiring but instead has become self-destructive.'"

Read the full report here.