Republicans in North Carolina have given up hope of winning the gubernatorial race or of polishing their candidate’s tarnished image. But the scandal surrounding Mark Robinson is only intensifying the presidential candidates’ battle for the Southern swing state, where Donald Trump will campaign on Saturday.
And Robinson’s drama certainly doesn’t help.
While top GOP officials in the state condemned Robinson’s old posts on an online porn forum — essentially saying that bribing the governorship is a lost cause — Trump and his team have so far remained silent on the subject, as the former president attempts to quietly distance himself from a candidate he has previously praised and championed on stages.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’ campaign team promptly released an ad Friday linking Trump to the controversial gubernatorial candidate. The vice president’s team is expected to spread the message in the coming weeks.
With North Carolina a crucial state for Trump to win — and polls showing he and Harris are now effectively tied there — the two campaigns see any momentum as a gift, no matter how marginal the impact.
“Anything that affects a few thousand votes can be a huge deal. You’re talking to someone who lost by 10,000 votes out of 4.6 million votes,” said former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, who narrowly lost his re-election bid in 2016 when Trump won the state.
But as McCrory noted, North Carolina is a state where voters don’t mind ticket splitting, which is what happened when Democrats won the governorship in the last two presidential elections, despite Trump winning there. Trump and his team are counting on them to do so again, as he finds himself in a neck-and-neck race with Harris in the state where he won his narrowest margin of victory in 2020: 1.5 points.
Before Robinson’s latest scandal, Trump had embraced him as a new populist star in conservative politics, calling him a “friend,” “one of the most popular politicians in the United States of America” and “better than Martin Luther King.” The lieutenant governor was given a speaking slot at the Republican convention in Milwaukee and spoke at Trump’s Aug. 14 rally in Asheville and again at a rally in March, when he won the former president’s endorsement in the GOP primaries. Trump has not retracted the endorsement.
“This is partly a problem of his own making. Trump didn’t have to support it,” said Doug Heye, a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee who is from the state. “He chose to do it.”
“If this is the reason he loses,” Heye continued, “it’s like Kramer is wearing the pants he’s trying to get back.”
While Republican officials in the state privately acknowledge that there is no real fight left to be waged on Robinson’s behalf, many continue to insist that Trump can still win the state and that the latest scandal will have more impact on legislative and other lower-tier elections than on voters’ presidential elections.
“Reverse coattails are a fiction created by Clinton and Biden operatives who want to blame someone other than themselves for losing North Carolina in ’16 and ’20,” said Jonathan Felts, a Republican consultant in the state, who said Trump “is still in a strong position to win there” and that his economic message resonates with a broad range of people, including rural voters. “Harris is afraid of rural North Carolina because she doesn’t have good answers to inflation, gas prices and the disaster that is the southern border on her watch. And that’s why Trump is winning again.”
Robinson won’t appear with Trump on Saturday when he holds a rally in Wilmington. But if Democrats have their way, he’ll still be on everyone’s minds. On Thursday, Harris’ campaign released a new ad linking Trump to Robinson, focusing not on his latest scandal but on Robinson’s comments on abortion — including a video in which he says women get abortions “because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirts down.” The ad also included clips of Trump praising Robinson.
The Harris campaign believes Robinson’s anti-abortion message is more damaging to him than aspects of his other recent scandals, which have been widely covered by local and national media. According to a person with knowledge of the strategy, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter, the Harris campaign may not seek additional coverage from paid media outlets for Robinson’s comments on online porn sites.
The Trump and Robinson campaigns declined to comment.
Long before CNN’s Thursday report, Robinson had been the subject of a number of unflattering stories about his comments about women, LGBTQ+ people, Jews, Muslims and others, and had been pushed by top GOP officials in the Republican primary over other, more traditional Republicans without as much personal baggage.
But Robinson was already wildly popular with the GOP electorate, having become a star on the right after a 2018 video went viral of him talking about gun rights at a Greensboro City Council meeting. Efforts to thwart him in the primary fell flat. While Republican leaders in the state said they were unaware of the full extent of Robinson’s vulnerabilities, including his extensive online posts, they were well aware that damaging information about him could emerge, according to multiple people close to Republican politics there.
“Everybody who wanted to know, knew,” McCrory said of the fact that compromising information about Robinson was publicly available. “It was a ticking time bomb and the fuse had been burning for a long time.”
As more information about Robinson emerged in recent days, national Republicans became obsessed with the details and increasingly concerned about the implications for the presidential race.
“The only people who vote for Mark Robinson are the Republicans-or-these people,” said Oscar Brock, the RNC national committeeman from Tennessee. “He’s going to be defeated. He’s not going to bring any additional voters to the ballot.
“Given the growing enthusiasm for Harris and the tempered enthusiasm among Republicans for Mark Robinson, this could have an effect.”
