Mark Robinson has hijacked his own campaign in North Carolina
“This is Martin Luther King on steroids,” Donald Trump told a crowd in North Carolina three days before Super Tuesday. Mark Robinson, the lieutenant-governor and Republican candidate for governor whom Mr Trump was endorsing, might not like that, he went on to say. Mr Robinson, who is black, had called King an “ersatz pastor” and the civil-rights movement the “Communist Rise Movement”. On September 19th CNN unearthed comments that make it even clearer that Mr Robinson—now the party’s nominee, with less than 40 days to the election—is no justice-loving preacher. Writing on Nude Africa, a porn site, he called himself a “black NAZI”, noted he wasn’t in the Ku Klux Klan because “they don’t let blacks join” and said that if they brought back slavery, which he wished they would, he would “certainly buy a few”.
More screenshots from the forum, where over a decade ago Mr Robinson signed up with his full name, show the candidate describing sex with his wife’s sister and his appetite for “tranny on girl porn”. In a video posted to X Mr Robinson denied the words were his and called the report a “high-tech lynching”. This week his top campaign staff resigned and the Republican Governors Association said it would not buy him any more ads.
At a diner tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mr Robinson rallied supporters on September 23rd with the fury of a coach whose team is down in the fourth quarter. “They might be hitting us pretty good right now but guess what, we’re not going anywhere,” he bellowed. Sitting in one of the booths, Rivera Douthit, a friend who lost in the primary to replace him as lieutenant-governor, says southern women who love Jesus will forgive him if the allegations are true. His campaign is blaming the media for diverting attention from policy. “If the folks who support the Second Amendment abuse the Second Amendment like these folks abuse the First Amendment, there wouldn’t be one of us left,” the candidate said, to “Amens”.
When Mr Robinson got the nomination, seasoned Republican operatives warned he was far too extreme to win the state. Though he has a working-class story to tell on the trail—he grew up the ninth of ten children in a desperately poor and violent home and only finished college while in office in 2022—his views that abortion should be illegal at “zero” weeks, that women ought to control their genitals better, that gay people are “maggots” and that “some folks need killing”, referring to his political enemies, have not gone over well. Josh Stein, his moderate Democratic opponent, has been up by five to 15 points in the polls all summer.
The eye-popping crudeness of the new comments in effect ends Mr Robinson’s chance of winning. The question is how much damage the fallout will do to other Republicans in the swing state.
They have two big concerns. The first is the presidential race. By entering the contest in July, Kamala Harris put the state that Mr Trump won by 1.4 points in 2020 back in play. According to The Economist’s forecast model, North Carolina is as competitive for Democrats as Georgia, a state with the same number of electoral-college votes (16) that went for Joe Biden. Mr Trump’s endorsement of Mr Robinson now looks a liability. The Harris campaign plans to tie the two men to each other as much as possible in the hope that the scandal will cause right-leaning independents to sit out the election. Because Mr Trump needs North Carolina to win, he will have to campaign there. But until he disavows Mr Robinson publicly, his messages on Democrats and the economy may fall flat, says Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. At a rally in Wilmington two days after the news broke, Mr Trump avoided the matter.
Congress is the Republicans’ second problem. North Carolina is among a handful of states that will determine control of the House of Representatives this year because it is home to one of the country’s tightest races. For the Democrats, Don Davis is fighting to keep his seat in the state’s first district after Republicans redrew the maps to their advantage. At the end of June Laurie Buckhout, Mr Davis’s opponent, had outspent him four to one. But having proudly campaigned with Mr Robinson, she may be in trouble with the 40% of district residents who are black. Just before the CNN report surfaced, Ms Buckhout deleted a photo of the two of them from X.
For months Republican strategists have hoped that voters will apply the same logic to Mr Robinson as many do to Mr Trump: despite not liking him, they vote for him because they like his policies. That looks like wishful thinking. The last stretch of the election in North Carolina will now be a test of whether the party’s brand can be tainted by one man. Jonathan Felts, a consultant for Mr Robinson, reckons Republicans will prevail if they keep talking about petrol prices and fentanyl. Personal attacks, he says, won’t go far if the candidates are good. Across the state, members of his party are praying that he is right. ■
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