Trump pleads with voters to give Madison Cawthorn a ‘second chance’ ahead of competitive primary election

Madison Cawthorn still has Donald Trump’s backing in the primary for North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District but the former president seems to recognise that his acolyte is in danger of being undone by his own scandals.

In a statement released on Monday morning on his Truth Social platform, Mr Trump pleaded with voters to “give Madison a second chance” and took the rare step of acknowledging the congressman’s various scandals as holding water.

“Recently, he made some foolish mistakes, which I don’t believe he’ll make again,” said the former president.

The list of Mr Cawthorn’s “foolish mistakes”, as the former president put it, is long and growing. In recent weeks he has been charged with driving under the influence on a revoked license and cited for carrying a gun into airport security; the 26-year-old congressman’s troubles go far beyond that, however, as he faced a public rebuke from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy last month after Mr Cawthorn accused (without naming names) his colleagues of using cocaine and inviting him to an orgy.

The embattled Republican now faces the prospect of trying to win Tuesday’s primary election (and potentially a runoff election if no candidate breaks 30 per cent) without the support of a single other member of North Carolina’s congressional delegation and the open opposition from Thom Tillis, one of the state’s US senators and a top political adversary of the Trump-aligned Cawthorn.

His top challenger is Chuck Edwards, a member of the North Carolina state Senate, but the first-term congressman also faces national opposition in the form of a well-funded “Fire Madison” super PAC that has somehow obtained sexually explicit and sometimes invasive photos and videos of Mr Cawthorn in various embarassing situations and published them online in a slow leak campaign that has attracted headlines for weeks.

Rep Adam Kinzinger, a member of the 6 January committee and a political pariah among many in his own party, is also hosting a virtual watch party on Tuesday to celebrate Mr Cawthorn’s potential defeat to Mr Edwards or potentially another rival. If no candidate gets 30 per cent of the vote and the race moves to a runoff, the odds for Mr Cawthorn’s challenger will improve greatly as the opposition vote will likely consolidate behind them.

Polling of the race is sparse but a survey published by GOPAC, a Republican-aligned candidate training organisation, in late April found that Mr Cawthorn’s support was dropping quickly while Mr Edwards was seeing his support surge. In the poll, Mr Cawthorn had the support of 38 per cent of voters while Mr Edwards followed behind at 21 per cent.