A scandal engulfing Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, the Republican nominee for governor, has Democrats feeling even more optimistic about Vice President Kamala Harris’s chances of winning a pivotal swing state.
Minutes after CNN published a report on Thursday saying that Mr. Robinson called himself a “black NAZI!,” discussed his pornography habits and praised slavery in an adult online forum, the Harris campaign and its allies amped up their efforts to link him to former President Donald J. Trump.
“Best friends,” the Harris campaign wrote on X above a video of Mr. Trump and Mr. Robinson repeatedly praising each other. Her team circulated another video that showed Mr. Trump calling Mr. Robinson “better than Martin Luther King.” The effort continued into Friday, when the Democratic National Committee unveiled billboards in the Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh areas showing the two men smiling together.
Soon after, the Harris campaign released a television advertisement in North Carolina that juxtaposed footage of Mr. Trump paying tribute to Mr. Robinson alongside video of the lieutenant governor condemning women who have had abortions for not being “responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”
“Donald Trump and Mark Robinson: They’re both wrong for North Carolina,” the ad’s narrator says.
The strategy is clear: The Democrats want Mr. Trump to own all of Mr. Robinson’s baggage, hoping it will turn out their base while convincing independent voters and moderate Republicans to repudiate both men and cast their ballots for Ms. Harris instead.
“They’re one and the same,” Zack Hawkins, a Democratic state representative in North Carolina, said of Mr. Trump and Mr. Robinson. “We need to be shouting it from the rooftops. There’s nobody in the state of North Carolina, I guarantee, that has a cellphone and didn’t get this story.”
Mr. Robinson has denied CNN’s report and vowed to stay in the race.
The tactic of linking Mr. Robinson to Mr. Trump could prove particularly effective with female voters. CNN reported that Mr. Robinson had boasted in online messages about spying on naked women in public gym showers when he was a teenager. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll showed a significant gender gap between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump nationwide, with Ms. Harris leading by double digits with women and Mr. Trump holding almost as large an advantage with men.
But the Harris campaign may face a challenge in peeling voters in the state away from Mr. Trump even if they abandon Mr. Robinson. North Carolinians have a habit of splitting their tickets between political parties. In 2016 and 2020, they elected Roy Cooper, a Democrat, as governor after opting for Mr. Trump in the presidential contests.
And although Democrats have tried to link Mr. Robinson’s calls for strict abortion bans and other far-right positions to Mr. Trump, that effort does not appear to have succeeded. While Mr. Robinson trails the Democratic candidate, Attorney General Josh Stein, by more than 10 percentage points in some polls, the race between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump is essentially tied in North Carolina.
“I think privately, a lot of Republicans know that they’re not going to vote for Mark Robinson,” Mr. Hawkins said. “And so they just need to take it to the next step and not vote for Donald Trump, either.”
It would be difficult for Mr. Trump to reclaim the White House without winning North Carolina. In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the state to Mr. Trump by 1.3 percentage points, his narrowest defeat of the election. Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have invested tens of millions of dollars in television and radio advertising there, although Ms. Harris has reserved more airtime and opened more campaign offices in the state. Democrats also point to the state’s high number of Black voters and the population growth in its more moderate suburbs as advantages.
Barack Obama in 2008 was the last Democrat to carry the state in a presidential election.
In a statement, Mike Lonergan, a spokesman for Mr. Robinson, said that polls had underestimated Republican support and that the campaign would press ahead.
“As we continue to ramp up our efforts on the ground and on the airwaves, Mark Robinson remains in a strong position to win in November,” he said.
The Harris campaign has not had to look far for evidence of ties between Mr. Trump and Mr. Robinson. The former president supported Mr. Robinson early in North Carolina’s Republican primary, helping him pull ahead of other candidates. Mr. Trump also hosted a fund-raiser for him at his home in Palm Beach, Fla. And he has frequently praised him as a political “star’ and a man of high character, even referring to him as “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
“Donald Trump has a Mark Robinson problem,” said Ammar Moussa, the rapid-response director for the Harris campaign.
Even some Republicans seemed to agree. On Thursday, Scott Lassiter, a Republican candidate for State Senate in a moderate district, called on Mr. Robinson to leave the race “for the good of the state and our party.”
In an interview, Mr. Lassiter said he believed that Democratic attacks on Mr. Robinson could hurt Republicans up and down the ticket, including Mr. Trump.
“I don’t think there’s any way around saying that this is bad — very, very bad — for those candidates,” said Mr. Lassiter, who supported Mr. Robinson’s opponent in the Republican primary.
And Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, also a Republican, indicated that he thought the governor’s race was over, writing on X: “It was a tough day, but we must stay focused on the races we can win. We have to make sure President Trump wins NC.”
“If Harris takes NC, she takes the White House,” he added.
Republicans in North Carolina had feared for months that a day like Thursday was coming. Mr. Robinson has a long history of making inflammatory comments, including quoting a statement attributed to Adolf Hitler. CNN reported that he said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, despite his having made bigoted remarks against gay and transgender people.
Democrats running for office across the nation tried to jump in on the action. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who are running for re-election, sent joint fund-raising pitches with Mr. Stein after the CNN story.
Denying the allegations, Mr. Robinson said in a social media video, “The things you will see in that story, those are not the words of Mark Robinson.”
On Saturday, Mr. Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in Wilmington, N.C. But it was not clear if Mr. Robinson would attend. As he has in the past when his allies get into trouble, Mr. Trump and his campaign seem likely to distance themselves from Mr. Robinson and to largely ignore the controversy, though people close to him thought he might address it in passing, either on his Truth Social site or at his event in the state. Mr. Trump is not, however, expected to exert pressure on Mr. Robinson to exit the race.
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, issued a statement on Thursday that did not talk about Mr. Robinson directly.
Instead, she said that Mr. Trump would win the White House and called North Carolina a “vital part of that plan.”
Even if Mr. Robinson were to drop out, he could not be replaced on the ballot at this point. The deadline for him to suspend his campaign was midnight Thursday, and state law would require the North Carolina Republican Party to select a candidate to replace him. It would also require the State Board of Elections to decide whether to reprint ballots after already doing so in response to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s successful push to remove his name from the state ballot.
For all the news coverage that Mr. Robinson’s comments have generated, some Democrats warned that they could not rely simply on attacking him to win.
Cynthia Wallace, executive director of the New Rural Project, which conducts voter outreach to people of color in rural North Carolina, said Democrats needed to focus on kitchen-table issues to increase turnout among those voters, who could play a decisive role in a tight race.
“They really are talking about getting better-paying jobs, having the minimum wage increase so that they don’t have to work multiple jobs and still can’t afford housing,” Ms. Wallace said. “Public education for their kids. Being able to pay the bills each week.”
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