Why does it feel like the vast majority of 20 year olds running for office are Republicans? This 'Americans for Prosperity' kid and the 24 year old real-estate CEO in NC-11 feel like outliers amongst their generation
I sense a lot of it is wealth-related
Madison Cawthorn (NC-11) received a multimillion dollar settlement stemming from the car accident that confined him to a wheelchair. No idea about the Kansas City guy but according to one of his campaign finance reports, he loaned his campaign $10,000, which is typically not something a 26 year old schoolteacher is in a position to do unless they have money from somewhere else.
I actually read about Cawthorn today, throughout the rest of this he'll be referred to as "wheelie" and it seems to me that he actually didn't get any money from the insurance settlement. Basically, as I understand it. He was going back home from spring break with a friend, friend falls asleep at the wheel and crashes into a concrete divider, Wheelie is partially paralyzed, after all the medical stuff he has around $3 million in medical debt I guess he didn't have insurance or something, Friends insurance company offers Wheelie $3 million to cover the expenses, Wheelie sues and demands $30 million, Judge rules in favor of Insurance company. Later on, he worked for Mark Meadows district office, went to college for a semester and then dropped out, his business "SPQR holdings" has one employee which is himself, I'd like to note it's pretty interesting that his business SPQR is the same as the acronym for the Roman Senate.
Final note, his website is atrocious, his issue profiles are all 1-2 sentences, I've seen school board candidates with better websites.
He's been an unreliable narrator in all of this.
When you're in an accident that's someone else's fault, the way it works is you get whatever surgery/medical treatments you need and your health insurance pays for it, but they then file a subrogation lien with the liable party's insurance company. (Or, if you don't have insurance, then the doctors/hospitals will file those liens with them because that is how they'll get paid.) So when you get a settlement/judgment, the money to pay for that gets taken out of your settlement.
My understanding of what happened with Madison Cawthorn is that his friend was driving a car owned by his dad's company, which had a $3M liability policy. The liability insurer offered to pay him the maximum $3M payout allowed by the policy. After some ambiguous back-and-forth between the Cawthorns and the insurer, they hired an attorney who rejected the offer and filed a lawsuit against them and some other parties they claimed were liable.
A couple of years go by and Cawthorn finally accepts the policy limits from those insurance companies. $3M and whatever other policies were involved. Then he turns around and enters into a separate settlement with his friend and his friend's father and his father's company for $30M. They obviously did not have $30M to give him so that opened the door for his friend to file a bad faith lawsuit against the insurance company (for not protecting him from liability over and above the policy limits), and the settlement agreement involved assigning that right to sue to Cawthorn so that he could theoretically just get the $30M from the insurance company himself (since, again, the friend didn't have $30M to give him in the first place).
This led to a federal lawsuit because the insurance company was not a party to that $30M settlement and the court affirmed existing case law that Cawthorn did not have a right to sue them in that manner.
tl;dr A Republican, despite the GOP being all about opposing "frivolous lawsuits", filed a frivolous lawsuit and lost.
If you look at his financial disclosure, it's clear that he's living off of (1) dividends and capital gains from stocks he bought with his settlement money; (2) a small disability pension that he mentioned in one of his depositions.
