Hudson and McDowell’s Defeats Expose the Cost of Defending Trump
Political Opinion: By Colton Overcash
Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot Tuesday, but two North Carolina congressmen paid the political price for his decisions.
Richard Hudson, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, lost to Democrat Richard Ojeda by 6,015 votes. In the neighboring 6th District, Republican Addison McDowell fell to Democrat Cyril Jefferson by 6,264. Both represented districts with strong Republican histories, and Hudson had won reelection by more than 18 percentage points just two years earlier.
I served in Trump’s first administration, and I refuse to pretend these defeats were simply the product of poor turnout or unsuccessful campaigning. Hudson and McDowell faced the unenviable task of defending a president whose promises had collided with the financial realities of everyday Americans. Trump made the decisions, and Republican candidates were left to answer for them.
The damage becomes clear in the county-level returns.
In Rowan County, north of Charlotte, McDowell defeated Jefferson by 9,403 votes. Four years earlier, former congressman Dan Bishop carried the same county by 19,538. Although Rowan belonged to a different congressional district in 2022, its Republican margin had fallen by more than half between midterm elections.
Davidson and Davie counties also delivered Republican victories, but their diminished margins were insufficient to overcome Jefferson’s strength in portions of Guilford, Cabarrus and Forsyth. McDowell’s comfortable 2024 victory offers little basis for comparison because no Democrat challenged him that year.
Hudson suffered an equally dramatic reversal. Alamance County flipped to Ojeda, while once-commanding Republican margins in Randolph and Moore dwindled. The counties that helped deliver his landslide victory just two years earlier could no longer produce the votes needed to keep his seat in Republican hands.
The November 1 early-voting report showed early and mail-in participation in Rowan running nearly 20 percent above the comparable point in 2022. Both congressmen carried the Election Day vote, but the Democratic leads accumulated beforehand proved too large to overcome.
Republicans can spend months dissecting precinct maps, campaign spending and turnout operations. But none of that changes the central problem: Trump gave voters plenty of reasons to take their frustrations out on his party.
In 2024, I joined millions of Americans in sending Trump back to the White House, expecting him to bring down prices, keep the country out of foreign wars, and put our interests first. Instead, he launched an unpopular war against Iran, offered one shifting justification after another, and imposed tariffs that drove up costs for American businesses and consumers.
As a result, gas prices soared as grocery bills squeezed families already struggling to make ends meet. For Americans who voted to escape the economic malaise of the Biden years, the promised Golden Age never materialized. What Americans got instead was another bill to pay, courtesy of the very president who promised to make their lives more affordable.
Rather than acknowledge their frustration, Trump offered a startling assessment during a September rally in Gastonia, North Carolina, describing higher gasoline prices resulting from the Iran war as a “very inexpensive price to pay.”
It was an astonishing display of indifference from a president who had campaigned on making life affordable again. Americans were being asked to absorb the financial consequences of a war they never voted for, while Trump dismissed those costs as a bargain.
By October, the warning signs were impossible to ignore. An AP-NORC survey found that 65 percent of Americans blamed Trump’s policies for higher prices, while 69 percent believed the Iran war was not worth fighting. Even among Republicans, 52 percent said his handling of the cost of living had been worse than expected.
The president was losing the argument on the very issue that helped return him to power, and Democrats wasted little time making affordability the centerpiece of their campaigns. Jefferson emphasized housing and health care, while Ojeda focused on working families, veterans’ benefits and Social Security. An Associated Press review of campaign advertising found Democrats repeatedly tying Trump’s tariffs and Iran war to rising household costs.
Their message was simple, consistent and grounded in what voters were experiencing. Republicans were left trying to defend the indefensible.
And where was the Republican leadership while all this was unfolding?
Congressional Republicans had ample opportunity to demand answers about the Iran war, challenge its mounting costs and insist on economic policies that actually delivered the relief voters were promised. Instead, too many chose to protect Trump’s ego rather than confront his failures.
They treated disagreement as betrayal, rewarded unquestioning loyalty and allowed the president’s personal priorities to take precedence over the concerns of the people they were elected to represent.
Passing off that kind of submission as party unity isn’t leadership; it’s political cowardice.
Hudson’s defeat carries particular significance because of his position as NRCC chairman. He spent this election cycle helping Republicans defend their majority, raise money and win competitive races across the country. Yet even his experience and considerable political resources could not shield his own district from the consequences of Trump’s decisions.
Trump was elected to serve the American people, not the other way around. Yet too many Republicans have spent the past two years treating his judgment as beyond question, even as voters grew increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of the country.
Hudson and McDowell did not start the Iran war, impose Trump’s tariffs or make the promises that went unfulfilled. But they paid the price at the ballot box. If Republican leaders want someone to hold accountable for these defeats, they need to stop looking at the candidates who lost and start looking at the president whose decisions put them in that position.
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Colton Overcash is the founder of Vertex Strategies, a Charlotte-based government relations and strategic advisory firm with a presence in Washington, DC. He previously held two presidential appointments at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration. He’s also a former staffer for U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis
