1. For all of the scandals, the one that did Cawthorn in was leaving the district & coming back. When he left, Edwards, Burril, Woodhouse & O'Connell weren't in this race. If he didn't leave, it's unlikely they would have gotten in. And he likely would weathered the storm.
2. Rules matter: without a runoff, Cawthorn wouldn’t have been elected in in the first place. If the #ncga didn’t move the threshold down to 30% in 2017, we’d be in a runoff in 2022.
3. Representation matters. Edwards only won three counties in #nc11 last night: Transylvania, Henderson & Buncombe. Those are the three he represented in the NC Senate. That was clearly his strategy & it worked.
4. Cawthorn ran a national campaign for a district office. He didn’t do traditional ad buys on WLOS & other local outlets. He closed district offices during the campaign & he didn’t show up for debates in the last stretch. His messaging was about $, not votes.
5. Edwards was likely helped by high turnout & high Unaffiliated #s. Over 88K people voted in the Republican primary—that’s 97% of 2020 R turnout. Too early to know about election day, but in early voting, Una made up ~42% of the Rep electorate in NC 11. That’s a big number. /
6. (I know I said 5, but 🤷): Attacking sitting members of Cawthorn's own party was a bad idea & resulted in massive spending against him. This can be summarized by the 6th law of #ncpol: don't piss off Thom Tillis.
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