Politics

Democratic nominee is 'no pushover,' Cawthorn warns

Madison Cawthorn and Lynda Bennett, who are in a runoff for the Republican nomination for the 11th Congressional District election, made their pitches at the Henderson County Republican Party convention Saturday.

By Bill Moss, Published: March 16, 2020

To hear them tell it, Lynda Bennett and Madison Cawthorn are crucial warriors on the ramparts against socialism in America, trusted soldiers under President Trump in a last-gasp battle to preserve capitalism.

At Saturday’s Republican Party convention, Bennett touted herself as a gladiator in “a battle for the soul of our nation” while Cawthorn said his youth makes him the most effective voice to “articulate the time-tested truth of conservativism” against a credible Democratic nominee.
Although it still leans Republican, the redrawn 11th Congressional District will be a tougher GOP win than it has been over the past four elections, Cawthorn said.
“With Asheville being added back, we have 39,000 far-left liberals who are registered Democrats who will be voting against us come November,” he said. “Moe Davis is not going to be a pushover. He was a military prosecutor for Guantanamo Bay. I was able to watch some of the prosecution and the man is a bulldog. We have got to elect someone who is able to go into a debate with him and simplistically articulate the time-tested truth of conservative — that we are the party of freedom, that we are the party that wants to let you have control of your life, we want to deregulate almost every industry, we want your money in your pocket, and we want you go understand what your life means and where you’re going.”
Cawthorn, 24, says he can relate to the young people the Republican Party needs to attract as it ages and loses voters.
“We’re starting to lose our country because there’s a generational time bomb that’s about to go off in the Republican Party,” he said. “If we don’t start defusing it now and start reaching my generation now we will have dark days in our party.”
He vowed to start a “patriot revolution” against taxes and government power and for freedom. “If you take any three letters of the alphabet and you throw them together you’re going to get some government agency that’s been designed to tell you what to do,” he said.
He vowed to fight against abortion and for the Second Amendment, which he said was adopted to ensure freedom, not to protect bird hunting and target shooting.
“The Second Amendment was written so that if a tyrant ever rises up we will have the ability to save ourselves,” he said. “We also have got to elect a true conservative who is going to represent our mountain values. I grew up in these mountains, I was educated in these mountains and I came to know the Lord in these mountains, so I know the values of who we are.”

Cut taxes, build the wall

Bennett, a real estate agent and businesswoman from Maggie Valley, said the 2020 election represents “a battle for the soul of our nation and the battle is the Lord’s and he is the source of my strength.”
When she started a real estate business in 1986, the economy was doing poorly. Although Reagan had been president for six years by then, Bennett said “we had just come out of a Democratic administration.”
“Reagan also warned us that socialism is on the horizon,” she said. “We thought, That’s not going to happen here, right? Fast forward 30 years. We know that we have a presidential candidate that is not only a socialist but is a communist socialist. We have liberal policies that have been consistently moving our country to the left. … I’m looking forward to working with President Trump. We’re going to cut taxes. We’ve already cut taxes. We want to cut them some more for the middle class. We want to build the wall. And I think it’s important that we protect the Second Amendment. I conceal-carry every day and I think you should too.”
In the primary, Bennett’s opponents criticized her for declaring herself a “never Trumper” at a Haywood County Republican Party meeting in September 2016. On Saturday she pointedly declared her strong support for Trump.
“Going into this election, there should be no more whispering about President Trump,” she said. “When the opposition is so about socialism, we need to speak boldly and confidently about our president, what he has accomplished and what he’s going to do for us in the future.”