Autumn color shows up on the Blue Ridge Mountains just in time for the election: Glynn Wilson

By Glynn Wilson –

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, fall is in the air and the people are starting to pay attention to politics with less than 30 days to go before the election November 3. And just as white supremacy has come to the fore in Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection, it is a rising factor here in a race for Congress that is a microcosm of Trump’s divided America.

Like states all over the country, urban areas in North Carolina like Asheville, Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham are dominated by Democrats, where Joe Biden is the hands down favorite for president. In the rural counties further out in the mountains, the people tend to be more conservative and staunchly Christian. So far at least, they are sticking with President Donald Trump in spite of his outlandish behavior in downplaying the coronavirus pandemic threat, his over-heated and rude performance in the first presidential debate, the ongoing failing businesses and tax evasion allegations and his efforts to disrupt the United States Post Office and trash voting by mail.

In the eleventh Congressional district here, a seat held by Republican Mark Meadows before he took on the nearly impossible job of acting as Trump’s chief of staff, there is a competitive race that has only barely scratched the surface of national media attention. Yet it could prove to be a bell weather contest in a key, swing battleground state that is considered a must win if Trump is to have any chance of reelection. It’s also considered critical to any blue wave swamping the nation for Democrats.

On the map, it’s shaped like an arrowhead, from conservative Marion on the east to Cherokee at the western tip, surrounded by Tennessee and Georgia, with the more progressive Black Mountain and Asheville in the middle.

A map of the 11th Congressional District in Western North Carolina

Former Vice President Joe Biden holds a statistically significant lead in the national polls for president, somewhere between 9 and 14 points, and leads in enough key battleground states to have a clear shot at winning the Electoral College.

In North Carolina, which Trump won in 2016, the polls show voters nearly evenly divided in a deadlocked race within the margin of error. If there is movement, it appears to be trending blue, but the final swing will depend on how voters are reacting to Trump in the final days of the campaign. Trump’s favorability rating is stuck in the low 40s, while Biden is up around 55 percent, a clear majority.

Trump first endorsed a women chosen as Meadows’ heir apparent in the race, Lynda Bennett, until a recording surfaced of her claiming to be a “never Trumper.” So in rolled 24-year-old Madison Cawthorn of Hendersonville in his wheel chair, who claims to be a real estate developer but made his money suing a friend who wrecked an SUV Cawthorn was riding in, leaving him crippled.

Yet his youthful smile and ability to smooze with the right-wing militias and white nationalists and Trump Republicans caught the attention of Trump, so he may just have a chance to hold a district that has been gerrymandered for Republicans for a long time.

Former Air Force Colonel and lawyer Morris “Moe” Davis of Asheville won the Democratic primary to take on Cawthorn, and he’s been unrelenting in his criticism of the president. Davis became known for resigning as a prosecutor at the notorious Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba during the Bush administration, over his objection to using evidence obtained from alleged terrorists who were exposed to harsh interrogation techniques, which some experts classify as torture.

Madison Cawthorn

Madison Cawthorn’s bi-racial girlfriend stands behind him at campaign for Congress event

Since winning the Republican primary a few months ago, local news outlets have turned up a few things in Cawthorn’s background to give people pause, unless they are on the side of the right-wing militia movement, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the KKK.

At first Cawthorn tried to claim to be a new kind of young Republican, but soon settled into typical Republican positions in the era of Trump. He’s against abortion, for guns, and doesn’t think much of immigrants. Like other Republicans, especially Trump.

On the day in August when Trump did his toe-touch down in Charlotte for the Republican National Convention for the state roll call vote, Trump quickly after flew to a private farm in Western North Carolina to meet Cawthorn. Apparently things went well. Cawthorn later showed up at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. to raise money from the conservative groups who seem to hang out there to dole out campaign cash to Trump-loving Republicans from all over the country, including Cawthorn and former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. Tuberville faces incumbent U.S. Senator Doug Jones, the rare Democrat from Alabama, in what is considered a critical race to decide which party will control the Senate.

Political signs in downtown Marion, North Carolina: Glynn Wilson

North Carolina’s Republican Senator Tom Tillis recently tested positive for the coronavirus, and as a member of the Judiciary Committee, may not be able to show up for a vote on a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the Supreme Court, placing that vote in doubt. Tillis has electoral challenges of his own, facing a popular Democrat in Cal Cunningham, a Lt. Col. in the Army Reserve and a former state senator. The polls are deadlocked with less than a month to go before the election.

In the Congressional race, Cawthorn is a home-schooled evangelical Christian, and says on social media he believes in “faith, family and freedom” and vows to oppose “leftist coastal elites like Nancy Pelosi and AOC,” short for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who has become a lightening rod for the radical right.

Cawthorn has been caught using and displaying symbols associated with right-wing extremists and white nationalists, including those participating in the “Unite the White” rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia that spread around the country.

In June, when Cawthorn first got caught for his right-wing racist associations, he deleted nine photos posted on his Instagram page showing him smiling and celebrating Hitler on a trip to the Nazi dictator’s holiday retreat at Eagle’s Nest. Cawthorn called Hitler “the Führer” in his posts, a term of reverence, and said the trip had been on his “bucket list.” This is NOT really a hot spot for tourism among liberals or mainstream voters.

Cawthorn oddly named his real-estate investment company, which has not really engaged in any significant real estate development projects, SPQR Holdings, LLC, the Latin initials for “the Senate and People of Rome.” This is widely recognized by domestic terrorism experts as associated with skinhead gangs in Italy and white nationalists in the United States. Banners with those initials were carried by white supremacists during the “Unite the White” demonstrations and were later singled out by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, according to independent reporting by the local AVL Watchdog select news website, an all volunteer news outlet run by some big name Pulitzer Prize winning journalists in Asheville. Its stories sometimes run on public radio news sites and local newspapers too, like the local National Public Radio (NPR) affiliated Blue Ridge Radio.

Vassar College Professor Curtis Dozier, who studies the modern appropriation of classical symbols such as SPQR, said in an interview with the station that some white nationalists use the symbol to denote “racial and cultural purity” and to glorify cultures of “military and violence.”

Cawthorn could not be reached for comment to respond to these allegations, but he has provided a written statement in the past claiming it was merely “a term for Rome” and denouncing efforts “by extremists on any side to hijack or rewrite history.” He also claimed that the Founding Fathers were influenced by Roman statesmen like the philosopher Cicero, who warned against authoritarian policies, which Cawthorn said today would describe “the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.”

“SPQR is a warning to my generation from the ages against tyranny and authoritarianism,” Cawthorn says.

Yet he supports Trump for reelection, the man many experts are now charging with bringing authoritarianism or even fascism to American shores for the first time — from inside the White House.

“A photo of Cawthorn in his wheelchair carrying a military-style rifle and wearing a bandolier holster with a pistol also has drawn the attention of his political critics,” according to the AVL Watchdog. “The holster, which rests on his chest, bears the outline of a Spartan soldier’s helmet. It’s a symbol popularized by a far-right gun-advocacy group called the Oath Keepers and often includes the motto Molon Labe, meaning ‘Come and take them from me’ in Greek.”

Cawthorn is also frequently interviewed at home against a wall displaying a version of the Betsy Ross flag with just 13 stars for the original 13 states, according to local reporting. It too has been adopted by some white supremacists to reference the nation at a time when African Americans were enslaved and counted in the newly adopted Constitution as three-fifths of a person.

“This use was little known outside extremist circles until 2019 when Nike was forced to scuttle the release of a new shoe featuring the 13-star design that had been scheduled for release on the Fourth of July,” according to the local NPR report. “Former NFL star Colin Kaepernick, a Nike brand ambassador who protested police misconduct against Blacks, warned the company that the symbol would offend Black consumers.”

In public comments Cawthorn has denied charges of racism. He told Blue Ridge Radio interviewer Vaillancourt that his fiance’ is “half African American” and their children will be bi-racial. He insisted his opposition stemmed from his determination that his children wouldn’t grow up with “an entitlement mindset.”

The “real racists,” he says, are white liberals who advocate for reparations and such programs as Affirmative Action, echoing the president of the United States.

“They want people to be able to get into college with lower grades and lower school scores simply because they are African American. That’s insane,” Cawthorn says. “That is saying, ‘Hey, you know what? Don’t work so hard because you’re African American, because you probably just can’t do it.’ Are you kidding me?”

And he has dismissed as “divisive” and “racist” the Asheville City Council’s recent decision to develop policies of reparations for African Americans.

“Six-hundred thousand Americans gave their lives to free slaves and you’re going to tell me that’s not enough?” he said in an interview with Blue Ridge Public Radio reporter Cory Vaillancourt, a reply that “overlooks both the century-long impact of Jim Crow laws and the fact that 260,000 of the soldiers who died in the Civil War were Confederates fighting to maintain slavery,” according to NPR.

Cawthorn has also taken up with Trump to show open disdain for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, as well as state and White House guidelines for combating the spread of Covid-19.

“Many of the campaign appearances featured on his social media pages depict Cawthorn and most of the other participants ignoring social distancing and face covering mandates,” the report says.

Western Carolina University Political Science professor Chris Cooper told interviewers that if Cawthorn were to receive national attention for his views, it might be a dilemma for him locally.

“If he runs a campaign that would get him that level of national attention,“ Cooper said, “I don’t think it would help him locally.”

Cawthorn has also been accused in the local media of sexual misconduct, charges he denies.

Women come forward to accuse Madison Cawthorn of aggressive sexual behavior

As for his opponent Moe Davis, a North Carolina native and former Air Force prosecutor, he has come under fire for his angry tweets against Trump and the Republicans, according to an AVLW report that also ran in the Asheville paper.

Former Air Force Col. Moe Davis at a campaign event

Davis has urged Democrats to stomp on the necks of certain Republicans, calling Donald Trump the “dumbest fucking president in history” and described Republican Senators currying favor with the president in vulgar, graphic terms.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s lips were so firmly pressed on the president’s rear, Davis tweeted in October 2019, “that there’s going to be an indelible hickey on Trump’s fat ass.”

“Like many Americans particularly over the past four years, I have become upset and enraged by the extremism of the Republican Party and the actions of the Trump administration that continue to incite violence and denigrate our soldiers as ‘losers,;” Davis said in a statement. “At times, I took my anger out on social media and said things using language that some might find offensive. I apologize if that is the case and offer a simple solution … don’t follow me on my personal Twitter account.”

To learn more about Davis, check out this piece in the New York Times from October, 2007.

NYT: War-Crimes Prosecutor Quits in Pentagon Clash

Conclusion

How the race turns out might well depend on last minute movement away from Trump, who has faced a trying month with his failing businesses and tax bills exposed, an overheated debate peformance where he talked over his opponent constantly, turning off older voters, according to recent polling. As of this deadline, it’s too early to know how the response to Trump’s behavior after testing positive for the coronavirus will impact voter turnout.

Some older Republicans at risk from COVID-19 may well decide Trump is too much of an ego maniac and doing such a poor job of running the country that it may not be worth the risk to go in person to the polls to vote for him. If they stay at home and don’t vote, and Democrats and independents turn out in elevated numbers for Biden, Moe Davis here and other Democrats around the country like Doug Jones in Alabama just might have a chance to ride those coattails into office on Nov. 3.

Political signs in Marion, North Carolina: Glynn Wilson