Weeks before the CNN investigation aired, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign to be the next governor of North Carolina appears to be collapsing before our eyes. Last week’s bombshell report from CNN that Robinson had made a series of cringe-inducing comments on a pornography website in the years before he commenced his political career has sent Republican elected officials and candidates scrambling to scrub photographs and favorable mentions of Robinson from their campaign websites and social media accounts.
On Sunday, Robinson’s campaign – which was already trailing Attorney General Josh Stein in the polls before the story broke – announced a mass exodus of staff. By Sunday night, WUNC Radio reported that Robinson was down to having just “three people working on his campaign — two campaign spokesmen and a bodyguard.” On Monday, the Republican Governors Association cut off its financial spigot.
Had last week’s story broken earlier, it’s possible to imagine that GOP leaders would have put on a full-court press in an effort to force Robinson to abandon the race in favor of a substitute nominee. As a relative newcomer to politics, Robinson has few, if any, deep connections or personal ties to state Republican leaders of the kind that might generate feelings of personal loyalty.
But the story blew up just hours before the withdrawal deadline – the day on which the state’s already once-delayed absentee ballots were to be mailed out – and so at this point, Republicans appear to be stuck.
While Robinson has vehemently denied the story, most GOP leaders who’ve found themselves obliged to answer questions about it have settled on a shrugging-their-shoulders approach best exemplified by vice presidential nominee JD Vance during a weekend television interview. “I don’t not believe him, I don’t believe him,” said Vance. “I just think that you have to let these things sometimes play out in the court of public opinion.”
State law says that Robinson can still withdraw, and that the GOP state executive committee could nominate someone else to claim the votes he receives, but Robinson’s name will remain on the ballot – hardly a viable strategy.
And, as a practical matter, Robinson has little incentive to choose such a path. Whether he withdraws now or loses on November 5, the Lt. Governor will soon find himself back in a position in which he’s spent a good deal of his adult life — searching for employment. Why not hang in there and hope for some kind of a miraculous turnaround? Leaving now seems unlikely to produce many lucrative lecture-circuit invitations.
Of course, the bigger and more important and interesting question about Robinson’s political self-immolation is what kind of fallout it will produce for other Republicans candidates who so enthusiastically embraced him.
On Saturday, at a Wilmington rally for former President Donald Trump, Congressman Dan Bishop – a conservative culture warrior running for attorney general who has long embraced Robinson and championed similar or identical positions – seemed to blame the “complicit media” for the mess, saying, “Perhaps they will stop one of us…but they will not stop all of us.”
Meanwhile, Trump, who has repeatedly lavished praise on Robinson and likened him to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (ironically, a figure whom Robinson has long derided) seems to have opted for the “Mark who?” approach. He made no mention of Robinson during the rally – an event to which Robinson was not invited.
And Trump’s silence serves to highlight the potential outcome that has attracted an extra bright measure of the national spotlight in recent days – namely, that Robinson’s fall could help swing North Carolina’s presidential contest, and thereby the national election, to Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Harris-Walz campaign is doing its utmost to make that happen. The Democratic ticket has sought to link the two GOP standard bearers for weeks now, and within hours of the CNN report, it had billboards and an online ad up reminding voters of some of the praise Trump has showered on Robinson.
Whether this strategy will bear fruit is the proverbial $64,000 – or in this case, 16 electoral vote – question.
While it’s more typical that support for a presidential nominee helps those of the same party running for lower offices, the possibility that, in this instance, North Carolinians could see a negative “reverse coattails” scenario play out seems at least plausible.
As John L. Dorman noted in a column addressing the subject in Business Insider, Robinson actually outperformed Trump in 2020 – an election Trump won in North Carolina by only just over 1%.
And as Washinton Post senior political writer Aaron Blake observed, the Robinson connection could cost Trump with the still not insignificant group of non-MAGA Republicans – think Nikki Haley supporters. And if it does help to “tip the state and snatch its 16 electoral votes,” he wrote, “that would severely hamper Trump’s path to victory.”
Two things do seem certain at this point: 1) the presidential race in North Carolina just got that much more hotly contested, and 2) former Fox Sports commentator Jason Whitlock’s prediction that Robinson could be elected president in 2028 has turned out to be a trifle off-base.