A 24-year-old motivational speaker has defeated the Republican candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in a GOP runoff for Meadows’ old congressional seat, according to unofficial results.

Madison Cawthorn defeated Lynda Bennett in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District in far-western North Carolina. He won 65.8% of the vote in the race with Bennett at 34.2% with all precincts reporting. Cawthorn won more than 30,000 votes with Bennett receiving fewer than 16,000.

Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian-minded maverick who often clashes with GOP leaders, was renominated for a sixth House term. Trump savaged Massie in March as a “disaster for America” who should be ejected from the party after he forced lawmakers to return to Washington during a pandemic to vote on a huge economic relief package.

Cawthorn, who uses a wheelchair following an accident, will meet the constitutionally mandated minimum age of 25 when the next Congress convenes. Cawthorn has said he’s a Trump supporter, and Massie is strongly conservative. Still, their victories were an embarrassment to a president whose own reelection campaign has teetered recently.

As states ease voting by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic, a deluge of mail-in ballots and glacially slow counting procedures made delays inevitable. That torturous wait seemed a preview of November, when more states will embrace mail-in voting and officials warn that uncertainty over who is the next president could linger for days.

Kentucky usually has 2% of its returns come from mail ballots. This year officials expect that figure to exceed 50%, and over 400,000 mail ballots were returned by Sunday.

New York officials expect the vast majority of votes to be mail ballots this year, compared to their typical 5% share. Counties have until eight days after Election Day to count and release the results of mail ballots, with 1.7 million requested by voters.

In the day’s marquee contests, two African American candidates with campaigns energized by nationwide protests for racial justice were challenging white Democratic establishment favorites for the party’s nominations.

First-term state legislator Charles Booker was hoping a late surge would carry him past former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath for the Democratic Senate nomination from Kentucky. And in New York, political newcomer Jamaal Bowman was seeking to derail House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel’s bid for a 17th term.

(AP / YWN World Headquarters – NYC)