Amber Sniff, a Democrat in Durham, N.C., finds the prospect of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson winning the governor’s race so alarming that she teared up talking about it one recent morning.
“He honestly scares me,” Ms. Sniff said recently, adding: “He’s not what I want for me and my children.”
But for Jimmy Connor, a Republican who lives across the state in tiny Clyde, Mr. Robinson represents a Christian-centered way forward and a chance for Republicans to wrest control of an office that they have held only three times in the last century.
“He refers to the Bible, and it makes a difference in the South,” Mr. Connor said, his voice breaking. “My grandkids’ lives are at stake, and the future of this country.”
The sense that North Carolina is at a particularly consequential crossroads looms over the contest, by far the most expensive and closely watched governor’s race in the nation this year, with two candidates whose styles and politics could not be more different. Mr. Robinson, an evangelical firebrand who has faced criticism for his extensive record of incendiary remarks, is facing Josh Stein, the Democratic state attorney general, who has cast himself as a subdued moderate in the style of Gov. Roy Cooper.
The race was considered neck and neck through much of the summer; North Carolina has a staunchly conservative legislature, a history of close elections and an outgoing Democratic governor who has played a moderating role for most of the last decade. But the dynamic has been shifting amid several recent developments, the biggest being Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket.
At the same time, Mr. Stein has ramped up advertising, with a focus on Mr. Robinson’s strident anti-abortion stance. In late August, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report noted that Mr. Stein had outspent Mr. Robinson on television ads by about $11 million.
A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in mid-August showed Mr. Stein with 48 percent of the vote and Mr. Robinson with 38 percent; the poll also found abortion to be the second most important issue to participants, after the economy. Several other recent polls have shown Mr. Stein leading Mr. Robinson by between 4 and 14 percentage points.
But Mr. Robinson’s campaign aides say that polling often underestimates support for Republican candidates, especially in North Carolina, which is known for extremely tight races up and down the ballot.
In interviews with dozens of North Carolinians across the political spectrum, some Republicans said they were eager to have an anti-abortion champion in the executive mansion who would govern through a Christian lens. Several Democrats said they feared North Carolina would follow the rightward trajectory of Florida, a bygone battleground state, or perhaps even be viewed as red as Alabama. And several independent voters said that they still did not know much about either candidate.
Democrats are trying to hold onto an office that they have won consistently — if often narrowly — for decades, their best foil against a Republican-controlled legislature that has been fortified through gerrymandering.
Mr. Stein’s campaign is hoping to benefit from the momentum that has swirled around the Democratic Party since President Biden withdrew from the race last month and endorsed Ms. Harris. But a Democrat has not won North Carolina in a presidential race since 2008, and Mr. Robinson is hoping to ride the coattails of former President Donald J. Trump, who won the state by 1.3 percentage points in 2020.
At the moment, Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump are essentially tied in the state. And while Mr. Stein may seem to have the wind at his back for now, “it’s roughly a 50-50 state, and it’s tough for anyone to get a big victory,” said Christopher A. Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University.
Some voters said they viewed Mr. Stein as a safe successor to Roy Cooper, a relatively popular moderate who is term-limited, and who endorsed Mr. Stein last year.
But most of the attention in the race has gone to Mr. Robinson, whose MAGA-aligned views and bellicose style mirror those of Mr. Trump, who has endorsed him.
Raised in Greensboro, with an alcoholic father who abused his mother, he later struggled financially, failing to file five years of federal income taxes and filing for bankruptcy three times. But Mr. Robinson, 56, has proudly used his story to connect with voters.
In 2018, he was working in furniture manufacturing when he spoke out against gun control at a City Council meeting in Greensboro. A year later, after a video of the speech went viral and he was invited to speak at a National Rifle Association convention, he entered the race for lieutenant governor.
“He’s a regular person, he came from nothing, and he built himself up,” said Lorrie Hancock, 63, a cosmetologist in Whitsett, who said she worked on tobacco farms as a girl. She said she had donated $50 to the Robinson campaign because Mr. Robinson’s upbringing reflects her own.
Mr. Stein, 57, who would become the state’s first Jewish governor if elected, was raised in the politically liberal college town of Chapel Hill, graduated from Dartmouth and Harvard, and served seven years as a state senator.
Some political strategists have questioned how much Mr. Stein’s elite credentials could hurt him in the race, saying they could turn off the rural voters who helped elect Mr. Cooper and former Gov. Jim Hunt, both of whom came from rural areas.
But as Mr. Stein has crisscrossed the state, telling voters about the opioid crisis settlements that he won as attorney general and his office’s work in clearing a rape kit backlog, he has often returned to a central theme: that Mr. Robinson is too divisive for an electorate that has historically preferred tame center-left governors.
As evidence, Mr. Stein points to Mr. Robinson’s past comments. Some of his Facebook posts and speeches have been widely criticized as conspiratorial, racist, antisemitic, transphobic and hateful. Mr. Robinson said in one post that he was “skeptical” of everything he heard on television about 9/11. He has quoted Hitler on Facebook, called Michelle Obama a man and said that Kwanzaa, an African American and Pan-African holiday that celebrates history and community, “is Hanukkah on food stamps.”
Mr. Robinson, who is Black, also once said that Black History Month was for “a people who have achieved so little.”
“Extreme, radical, negative — those are the words I would apply to him,” said James Chambers, 64, a Stein supporter in Wilmington, N.C. He added that, as a Black man, he was particularly “disgusted” by how Mr. Robinson uses disparaging language about Black people.
Mr. Robinson has insisted that he has never been racist or antisemitic. In his 2022 book, “We Are the Majority!,” he defended his social media page as a “scrolling marquee of bold, unapologetic political commentary.”
In recent months, Mr. Robinson has focused his speeches on the economy and crime.
Paul Shumaker, a veteran Republican strategist in Raleigh who has expressed concerns about Mr. Robinson’s electability, said that compared with Mr. Stein, he “has an advantage on personality, but unfortunately also has a disadvantage on all the things he’s posted on social media.”
Conrad Pogorzelski III, Mr. Robinson’s top strategist, said that the campaign would seek to portray Mr. Stein as a far-left liberal who is weak on crime.
Mr. Stein has focused heavily on abortion rights; the state legislature passed a law last year banning the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. One of his television ads shows Mr. Robinson saying in a Facebook video in 2019: “An abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It’s about killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”
Several voters across the state, including some conservatives and independents, said in interviews that they found the clip unsettling.
Cathy Bowen, a Trump supporter in Wilmington, said that she is generally anti-abortion but believes that “under certain circumstances, I don’t think I have the right to choose for someone else.” She said that because of that ad, she will probably vote for Mr. Stein, who supports a framework for abortion based on Roe v. Wade.
“You don’t just tell someone to keep your skirt down,” she said.
Last month, Mr. Robinson sought to moderate his opposition to abortion by releasing an ad in which he expressed support for the current state law. The ad also acknowledged that his wife, Yolanda Hill Robinson, had an abortion in 1989 — a decision that he said “was like this solid pain between us that we never spoke of.”
Mr. Robinson’s campaign had previously said that he wanted to further restrict abortion access in the state, with a six-week ban. On Saturday, NBC News reported that a Democratic group had published an audio clip in which Mr. Robinson is heard telling a woman at a campaign event on Sept. 3 that he would want to get abortion restrictions “down to zero” weeks.
Mike Lonergan, a spokesman for Mr. Robinson’s campaign, said in a statement on Saturday that the legislature had “already spoken on the issue,” and that Mr. Robinson would support women by “bolstering adoption, as well as foster and child care.”
Mr. Stein said on X that Mr. Robinson “keeps trying to convince voters that he isn’t as extreme as he seems — but as soon as he thinks the mics are off,” he reiterates his support for a total abortion ban.
Colby Maltry, a Republican in Buncombe County, in the western part of the state, said that he appreciated what he saw as Mr. Robinson’s fearless candor, pointing to the “keep your skirt down” comment as an example.
“He doesn’t care what people think about what he says,” said Mr. Maltry, 26, who owns a roofing company. “He is who he is. He’s genuine, real.”
Unaffiliated voters make up roughly a third of the electorate in North Carolina, and many are only now beginning to mull which candidate to support. Among them is Jackie Baker, who was walking around downtown Asheville on a recent afternoon.
Mr. Robinson had just spoken at a Trump rally there, and a number of red-hatted Republicans strolled by, many of whom were happy to denounce Mr. Stein as an extreme liberal. Nearby were Democratic protesters with signs declaring Mr. Robinson a clown.
Ms. Baker, who voted for Mr. Cooper and President Biden in 2020, curiously watched it all.
What did she think of Mr. Robinson? “He’s got a lot of energy. Makes me want to listen.”
And Stein? “I’m still learning about him.”
How about the race in general?
“I want to know: What can you do for the people? What direction are we going?”
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