Background and career
David Madison Cawthorn (born August 1, 1995) is an American politician who served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina's 11th congressional district from 2021 to 2023. A member of the Republican Party, Cawthorn describes himself as a constitutional conservative. After working as a staffer for U.S. Representative Mark Meadows, Cawthorn was elected to succeed Meadows in 2020 and became the first member of Congress born in the 1990s. His tenure was marked by various controversies, including allegations of insider trading, improper payments, bringing a handgun to an airport, and appearing in a leaked nude video. Cawthorn lost renomination in the 2022 Republican primary to Chuck Edwards, who won the general election. In 2026, Cawthorn ran for the U.S. House in Florida's 19th congressional district, and finished fourth in the Republican primary.
Cawthorn was born in Asheville, North Carolina, to Priscilla and Roger Cawthorn. He was home-schooled in Hendersonville, North Carolina, through 12th grade, and played football with the Asheville Saints, a league that includes home-schooled high school students. As a teenager, he worked at a Chick-fil-A restaurant. In 2014, at age 18, Cawthorn was seriously injured while returning from a spring break trip to Florida. He was riding as a passenger in a BMW X3 SUV near Daytona Beach, Florida, when his friend Bradley Ledford fell asleep at the wheel. The vehicle crashed into a concrete barrier while Cawthorn's feet were on the dashboard. In a 2017 speech, Cawthorn said that Ledford left him "to die in a fiery tomb", which Ledford has disputed. Ledford said in a sworn deposition for insurance litigation that he pulled an unconscious Cawthorn from the wrecked vehicle immediately after getting out himself; in Cawthorn's deposition, he stated that he had "no memory from the accident". In the same 2017 speech, Cawthorn stated that he was "declared dead on the scene" of the accident, but the official accident report listed him as "incapacitated". The injuries from the accident left Cawthorn partially paralyzed, requiring the use of a wheelchair. He said he accrued $3 million in medical debt during his recovery; he received that amount as settlement from an insurance company, as well as other payments, and as of February 2021 was seeking $30 million more. Rep. Mark Meadows had nominated Cawthorn to the United States Naval Academy in December 2013, but his application was rejected. Although this happened before his injury, he claimed in advertisements for his 2020 congressional campaign that the accident "derailed" his plans to attend the academy. Cawthorn had acknowledged in 2017 under oath that he had been turned down before the accident. When asked in 2020 about the discrepancy, he said, "I never said I was appointed or accepted to the academy, I knew that I'd only been nominated at that point. I fully expected to be accepted and to be appointed, but at that point I hadn't received it." During the fall 2016 semester, Cawthorn attended Patrick Henry College, studying political science, but earned mostly D grades and dropped out. He said his grades were low primarily because his injuries had interfered with his ability to learn. Cawthorn said in a deposition, "You know, suffering from a brain injury after the accident definitely I think it slowed my brain down a little bit. Made me less intelligent. And the pain also made reading and studying very difficult." He also said he withdrew due to "heartbreak" after his fiancée broke up with him.
From January 2015 to August 2016, Cawthorn worked as a staff assistant in U.S. Representative Mark Meadows's district office. He told the Asheville Citizen-Times he worked there "full-time", but it was a part-time position. Cawthorn is the owner and CEO of SPQR Holdings, LLC, a real estate investment firm in Hendersonville. The firm was started in August 2019 and reported no income; Cawthorn is its sole employee. As of August 2020, the company had been involved in only one real estate transaction, purchasing a 6-acre (2.4 ha) property for $20,000, in a foreclosure auction.
In the March 2020 Republican primary for North Carolina's 11th congressional district, Cawthorn finished second behind Lynda Bennett, who had been endorsed both by President Donald Trump and Meadows, who had become White House Chief of Staff. But Bennett did not receive the required 30% of the vote to avoid a runoff and Cawthorn won the June runoff overwhelmingly. He was supported by many local leaders and endorsed by Mark Walker, the vice chairman of the House Republican Conference. His victory has been called an upset. Cawthorn benefited from false and misleading claims that Bennett was a "Never-Trumper". In a July 2020 event at the Texas border, Cawthorn declared, without providing evidence, that there was "a large group of cartels, kidnapping our American children and then taking them to sell them on a slave market, a sex slave market". During the 2020 general campaign, his Democratic opponent drew attention to a 2017 Cawthorn Instagram post with a picture of his visit to Adolf Hitler's vacation residence Eagle's Nest, which he said had been on his "bucket list for a while", generating allegations of far-right sympathies. He had referred to Hitler as "the Führer", which had been Hitler's official title, and called Hitler "a supreme evil". In response, Cawthorn called the allegations that he was a white supremacist ridiculous, saying that he "completely and wholeheartedly denounce[s] any kind of white nationalism, any kind of Nazism". The Anti-Defamation League's analyst Mark Pitcavage said he did not see much merit in the accusations against Cawthorn. Some Jewish residents of his congressional district expressed concern about the incident, including Esther Manheimer, mayor of Asheville, the district's largest city. Cawthorn deleted the Instagram post on August 10. Cawthorn spoke on the third day of the 2020 Republican National Convention. During his election bid, Cawthorn's campaign created a website to criticize journalist Tom Fiedler, who had produced investigative pieces on Cawthorn and had written favorably about his opponent. The website accused Fiedler of leaving academia "to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office." The sentence on the website was later modified to claim Fiedler is "an unapologetic defender of left-wing identity politics". Cawthorn released a statement saying he had intended "to condemn" such political opinion as being "dangerous and divisive" and said that he "condemned racism and identity politics throughout [his] campaign." Ben Mathis-Lilley, writing for Slate, said that Cawthorn's apology was "not an apology for attacking the journalist in question, Tom Fiedler, as a traitor to his race." In the November general election, Cawthorn defeated Democratic nominee Moe Davis. He took office on January 3, 2021. Upon hearing he had won, he tweeted, "cry more, lib". Cawthorn was the youngest Republican to serve in the 117th Congress, and, at 25, was one of the youngest members ever elected to the House of Representatives. He is also the first member of Congress born in the 1990s.
In November 2021, Cawthorn announced that instead of running for re-election in North Carolina's 11th district he would instead run in the new 13th congressional district, which includes Cleveland County and other counties west of Charlotte. Most of Cawthorn's former territory, including his home in Hendersonville, had become the 14th district, but members of Congress are not required to live in the district they represent but merely in the same state. He wrote on Twitter that he was running in the 13th district because otherwise "another establishment, go-along-to-get-along Republican would prevail there." Describing some of Cawthorn's political missteps and disputes in his home district, the Asheville Citizen-Times wrote: "The emerging opposition to Cawthorn in his current district appears to provide a political rationale for skipping into the new 13th Congressional District." Cawthorn later filed to run again in the 11th district, after new maps were approved in February. On May 17, 2022, Cawthorn was defeated by Republican primary challenger Chuck Edwards, a state senator and fellow Henderson County resident, by a margin of 33.4–31.9%. Cawthorn conceded the race later that day. Edwards had been supported by Senator Thom Tillis and most of the North Carolina General Assembly. Railing against "the cowardly and weak members of our own party", Cawthorn wrote: "It's time for the rise of the new right, it's time for Dark MAGA to truly take command." "Dark MAGA" references a fringe movement advocating a vengeful return of Trumpism.
In January 2022, a group of North Carolina voters formally challenged Cawthorn's qualifications to run again, "citing his participation in a rally last January in Washington that questioned the presidential election outcome and preceded the Capitol riot." The challenge is based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who has "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the U.S. government from holding public office. Under North Carolina law, the burden is on Cawthorn to show through a preponderance of the evidence that he is not an insurrectionist. The challenge was on hold while redistricting litigation continued. Cawthorn filed suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina to dismiss the challenge before the state elections board could hear it. The North Carolina Attorney General's office, citing a 1919 application of the amendment to a congressman who had violated the Espionage Act, argued that the 14th Amendment could apply to Cawthorn "if a state board determines he aided or encouraged the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol." In March 2022, Chief Judge Richard Myers of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina ruled in Cawthorn's favor based on the Amnesty Act that gave amnesty to ex-Confederates following the American Civil War. However, on May 24, 2022, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the federal district court ruling and instead ruled that the Amnesty Act applied only to people who committed "constitutionally wrongful acts" before 1872. The appeals court did not determine whether Cawthorn is eligible for office; it only determined that the Amnesty Act does not shield him from disqualification.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
