Jasmine Beach-Ferrara appealed for new followers on Wednesday after announcing her candidacy in the 11th district of North Carolina. At the time she had about 4,500 followers. By Thursday morning, 24 hours later, that had grown to more than 102,000.
“I am Democrat Jasmine Beach-Ferrara. I am running against Madison Cawthorn. I have 4.5K followers. My opponent has 256K,” Beach-Ferrara wrote. “Can you please retweet this and ask everyone you know to follow this account to build our platform?”
Later on Wednesday, Beach-Ferrara posted a follow-up tweet thanking her new followers.
“Thank you! Today I launched my campaign to remove Madison Cawthorn from Congress and we have already added 44K new followers and are just 221 low-dollar donors away from hitting our first major milestone,” she wrote.
Her following continued to grow throughout the day and on Thursday morning. The Democrat also announced her campaign had raised $100,000 in a single day.
“Going up against Madison Cawthorn won’t be easy, but wow. We just raised $100,000 online in less than 24 hours thanks to you!” she tweeted on Wednesday.
Beach-Ferrara describes herself as “a gay woman, Christian minister, mom of 3” and her initial campaign video has been watched more than 550,000 times on Twitter.
“I’m ready to prove the skeptics wrong again,” she tweeted on Wednesday.
“Some people will say, a gay woman who’s a Christian minister just can’t get elected in the South. Not to mention she’s a Democrat,” Beach-Ferrara said in the campaign video.
“But I say, an insurrectionist, who flirts with Nazis and fires up a violent crowd to attack our democracy, well, he shouldn’t get re-elected anywhere,” she said.
Cawthorn was elected to represent North Carolina’s 11th district last November. He is the first member of Congress to have been born in the 1990s and has won widespread attention as a future conservative star. Along with several other GOP freshman representatives, Cawthorn called on President Joe Biden to work across the partisan divide in January.
The North Carolina congressman has been a strong supporter of former President Donald Trump, who called him “a terrific young man” and predicted that he would “be one of the greats.”
However, several women have accused Cawthorn of sexual harassment and misconduct during his time at Patrick Henry College in Virginia. He has denied the claims.
“These questions were repeatedly asked and answered during the course of the campaign,” Cawthorn’s communications director Micah Brock told Fox News in a statement.
“The voters of western North Carolina responded to these allegations by giving Madison Cawthorn a 12-point victory over his opponent,” Brock said.
Questions have also been raised about Cawthorn’s account of his life. Details have been disputed, including by a friend who was involved in the 2014 car crash that left the congressman paralyzed.
Cawthorn has previously claimed that Brad Ledford, a childhood friend who was driving the car, left him inside the vehicle after the crash. Ledford says he pulled the future congressman from the car.
