Madison Cawthorn, a 24-year-old Republican candidate in North Carolina, spoke with BuzzFeed News about age comparisons to AOC and his desire for Confederate statues to come down because “these people seceded from our country.”
Madison Cawthorn is a hardcore Republican. The 24-year-old opposes so-called sanctuary cities, universal healthcare, and abortion — and is a climate change skeptic. He’s a committed Christian who wants to cut government spending. He counts Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro as his conservative role models.
He is also very likely to be the first Gen Z member of Congress.
“I want to be a different kind of candidate. We want to set ourselves apart. We’ve been sending the exact same thing to Washington so many times,” Cawthorn told BuzzFeed News. “Congress is designed to be a cross-section of the American people and it’s definitely not.”
On Tuesday night, Cawthorn won the Republican primary in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, besting his 62-year-old opponent, Lynda Bennett, by winning two-thirds of the vote. She had been endorsed by President Donald Trump and Mark Meadows, the former representative of the district who is now serving as the White House chief of staff.
Given the traditionally conservative politics of the seat, which takes up most of Western North Carolina, Cawthorn is now the odds-on favorite to win in November, when he will face Democrat Moe Davis, a retired Air Force colonel and prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay.
If he is elected, Cawthorn will become the youngest member of Congress, taking office at just 25 — the minimum age set forth in the Constitution.
But just as polls show there are some generational divides among young and older conservatives, some of Cawthorn’s views splinter from the most vocal senior members of his party.
Unlike Trump, for example, he believes statues of Confederate generals should be taken down — albeit by government process, not by those protesting against racism, and not necessarily because they are memorials glorifying racism. “These people seceded from our country. They declared war on the United States. I don’t necessarily want to have hero worship for them,” he said. “I do believe statues romanticize history.”