North Carolina Republicans are throwing a wild card into the state’s gubernatorial race, nominating a bomb-throwing, unapologetic social conservative who is running behind President Trump in the swing state that’s leaned Republican in recent years, Mark Robinson.
In North Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial primary last night, Mr. Robinson, the state’s first Black lieutenant governor, received 65 percent support, cruising to the nomination over the second-place candidate, businessman Dale Folwell, who received 19 percent.
Mr. Robinson, whose detractors are as passionate as his supporters, is trailing other Republicans in the state and, according to recent polling, his Democratic opponent as well.
A Meredith Poll released in February found that if given the choice between Mr. Robinson and Attorney General Josh Stein, who will be the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, 39 percent of North Carolinians prefer Mr. Stein and 34 percent prefer Mr. Robinson.
For comparison, 44 percent of North Carolina respondents preferred Mr. Trump, while only 39 percent preferred President Biden in the presidential polling.
“Although ticket-splitting — voting for a candidate of one party and another candidate of a different party — has declined significantly from a generation ago, North Carolina has a history of supporting Republican candidates for president and Democratic candidates for governor. The campaign is far from over,” pollster David McLennan said.
He added that “no one should be surprised if North Carolina continues this political tradition in 2024.”
Mr. Robinson’s lackluster numbers against Mr. Stein may be attributable to low support among Black, Latino, Asian, suburban, female, and unaffiliated North Carolinians.
Among Black North Carolinians, Mr. Robinson was polling at 3.1 percent support. Mr. Trump, for comparison, enjoyed 10.7 percent support among African Americans in a state where 22.2 percent of the population is Black, according to the Census. Black voters in the eastern part of the state carried President Obama to a narrow victory in 2008, though the state went Republican in the next three presidential elections.
Among Latino North Carolinians, who make up about 10.5 percent of the population, Mr. Robinson enjoyed 25 percent support, to Mr. Trump’s 31.3 percent support.
Among the key electoral demographic of unaffiliated voters, Mr. Robinson was polling at 21.7 percent, while Mr. Stein was polling at 38.6 percent. This stands in contrast to presidential support, where unaffiliated voters favored Mr. Trump 36.1 percent to Mr. Biden’s 34.9 percent.
Messrs. Robinson and Stein are a study in contrasts and mirror North Carolina’s dual identities as a corporate-minded magnet for northern transplants versus a deeply conservative, religious vestige of the Old South.
Mr. Robinson comes from a working-class background at Greensboro, where he worked in the state’s declining furniture industry, and he came to prominence due to fiery speeches on social issues that went viral on YouTube. Mr. Stein hails from ultra-liberal Chapel Hill and attended northeastern Ivy League schools before returning to North Carolina, where he has been in government for his entire career.
Working against Mr. Robinson is his penchant for making inflammatory statements on social issues, possibly most notably on his opinions of LGBTQ Americans.
Mr. Robinson has also called homosexual Americans equal to “what the cows leave behind,” calling homosexuality “filth” and saying that heterosexual couples are “superior.” He’s also likened LGTBQ Americans to “maggots” and “flies.”
One 2021 speech, delivered at a Black church at Raleigh, has gotten millions of views on YouTube. In it, Mr. Robinson taunted liberal reporters from WRAL — a local TV station — to take notes and then shouted out, “Ain’t but two genders.”
He continued: “You can go to the doctor and get cut up. You can go down to the dress shop and get made up. You can go down there and get drugged up but at the end of the day you were just a drugged-up dressed-up made-up cut-up man or woman. You ain’t changed what God put in you, that DNA. You can’t transcend God’s creation. I don’t care how hard you try. The transgender movement in this country … if there’s a movement in this country that is demonic and that is full of spirit of the Antichrist, it is the transgender movement. I’m not afraid to stand up and tell the truth about that issue. They dragging our kids down into the pit of hell. … Two plus two don’t equal transgender. That’s right. It equals four. We need to get back to teaching them how to read instead of teaching them how to go to hell.”
Mr. Robinson has also met popular backlash for his comments calling Muslim immigrants “invaders” who “seek to impose their will on their host by force through manipulating the law” and for his comments on Jewish people and the Holocaust.
“There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” Mr. Robinson said. “There is also a REASON those same liberals DO NOT FILL the airwaves with programs about the Communist and the 100+ million PEOPLE they murdered throughout the 20th century.”
The latter comment could be of particular interest in his campaign against Mr. Stein, an observant Jew. Mr. Trump has endorsed Mr. Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
With both a gubernatorial and a presidential competition on the ballot in November, North Carolina will almost certainly see high levels of spending from both parties and high turnout in the general election.
The associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, Miles Coleman, tells the Sun that he’s expecting the circumstances to result in high levels of split-ticket voting, saying, “North Carolina is no stranger to splitting its ticket for president and governor, which could bode well for Stein.”
On whether Mr. Robinson’s candidacy could have any effect on the presidential battleground, Mr. Coleman said, generally, “it’s the presidential race that sets the tone for everything else,” but he pointed to the 2022 election in Pennsylvania as an example of a lopsided Democratic victory in the gubernatorial race correlating with a better than expected performance for Democrats in the Senate race.
Mr. Coleman also pointed to Mr. Obama’s 2008 performance in Colorado as an example of where a particularly divisive down-ballot candidate may have affected the state’s presidential results on the margins.
“When Obama flipped Colorado from red to blue in 2008, the county that he improved the most in, compared to Kerry, was Weld” County, Mr. Coleman says. “In that district, Democrats ousted Representative Marilyn Musgrave, an anti-gay/abortion culture warrior. It’s possible Musgrave was just that bad that she hurt McCain.”
