Candidates strive to be bold contrasts to their opponents. By that measure, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson has been running a spectacularly successful campaign for governor of North Carolina, and the past several days were absolutely phenomenal.
While his rival, Josh Stein, the state’s Democratic attorney general, was staying true to his low-key, lawyerly approach, Robinson, the Republican nominee, was angrily denying a report by CNN that between 2008 and 2012, he frequented a pornographic website where he called himself a “black NAZI,” praised slavery and boasted of various sexual proclivities and quirks.
After the lurid news broke Thursday, Stein’s aides refrained from gloating, releasing a platitudinous statement that he is “focused on winning” and intent on “a safer, stronger North Carolina for everyone.” That ceded the spotlight to Robinson, who was plenty busy. First he beat back rumors that Donald Trump’s allies — terrified that Robinson could cost Trump victory in a crucial swing state — were pressuring him to drop out of the contest. Then, on Sunday, he acknowledged the departure of at least four key campaign officials, who resigned amid the tumult. In short order, Colin Campbell of WUNC reported that the exodus went well beyond that and Robinson was down to “just three people working on his campaign.”
Robinson has blamed his latest travails on nefarious liberals and the evil news media, his pique reflecting his predicament: At this point, he’s probably doomed. Trump certainly seems to think so. Although he gushed early this year that Robinson was “better than Martin Luther King,” he didn’t so much as utter Robinson’s name on Saturday at a rally in Wilmington, N.C., where Robinson was conspicuously absent.
But while the campaign for North Carolina governor inhabits its own special category of bizarre, it also belongs fully and fascinatingly to this moment in time. It’s even, to some degree, the presidential contest in miniature, with each side driven as much by fear and loathing of the other as by any particular love for its candidate.
That dynamic was distilled in an uncharacteristically raw remark that Stein made to me about Robinson at the end of an hourlong lunch in Raleigh recently, before the latest revelations about Robinson.
“I cannot have that man be my governor,” Stein said.
I understand the feeling. I’m a North Carolina voter and I share it.
I don’t think Robinson will be our governor. That’s not just because of the past four days. I also believe, despite signs to the contrary, that there’s a version of MAGA extremism too cartoonish, too buffoonish and too plain ugly to pass muster in a patch of purple like ours, which has put more Democrats than Republicans in the governor’s mansion over the past few decades. Surely, we’ll choose Stein’s technocratic competence over Robinson’s madness and melodrama, and the divergent professionalism and discipline of these candidates’ campaigns will count for something.
And if elections in today’s broken America are simply won by the candidate who’s more difficult to caricature and demonize, well, Stein’s in clover, and he’s poised to prove that conventional beats unconventional when the latter comes in the furious, flamboyant form of Robinson. The lieutenant governor belongs to “the most radical slate of Republican nominees for statewide office in North Carolina history,” as Stein observed to me and two other journalists at a campaign event last month about an hour east of Raleigh.
“These are not normal people,” he said.
Then again, these are not normal times. I can’t breathe entirely easy. There’s deep red in North Carolina’s purple, as the Republican supermajority in our state legislature and Trump’s victories here in 2016 and 2020 make clear. If Trump wins North Carolina again, it’s not impossible that he and his many fervent supporters pull Robinson into the winner’s circle as well. And Stein is no political dynamo.
Stein, 58, hasn’t received nearly as much attention nationally as Robinson has, but then Robinson, 56, is low-hanging fruit loops. Before he ran for lieutenant governor in 2020, elevated to sudden MAGA prominence by a viral pro-gun speech at a meeting of the Greensboro, N.C., City Council, he spent no small amount of time posting venomous missives and messianic videos on Facebook, rants that accused Jews of financially exploiting Blacks, Michelle Obama of being a man and women who have abortions of “killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” He struggled to find sturdy professional footing, working in furniture factories, filing for bankruptcy three times and neglecting his federal income taxes for years on end.
Some of those details and the full array of his bigoted remarks — misogynistic, Islamophobic, homophobic, you name it — didn’t come to light before that 2020 election. But even after many of them did, Republican voters in North Carolina went ahead this March and nominated Robinson to be their candidate for governor. For the state’s top education post, they chose Michele Morrow, who had urged Donald Trump to use the military to remain in power and has either called for or suggested the executions of President Biden, former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci, among others. By that yardstick, Representative Dan Bishop, the Republican nominee to succeed Stein as attorney general, is practically a Bolshevik. He merely promoted the lie that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, and he once compared gay-rights advocates to the Taliban.
Is it any wonder Democrats are anxious, no matter Robinson’s miserable lot right now? They rightly feel that how those far-right Republicans fare — a few of them may prevail, or at least come close — could send a message to everyone outside North Carolina, the country’s ninth most populous state, about how welcoming (or not) we are, and could affect our economic competitiveness.
“It would be devastating for Mark Robinson to be elected governor of North Carolina,” said the man currently in the job, Roy Cooper, a popular Democrat who is finishing his second term and is prevented from running for a third. Like Stein, Cooper is famously mild-mannered — but not on the subject of Stein’s opponent.
“Mark Robinson not only would take us backward, but to a place we’ve never been,” Cooper told me several weeks ago, referring to Robinson’s florid bigotry. “He has no business being anywhere near a governor’s office.”
Robinson would be the state’s first Black governor. He emphasizes not his race but his class — he grew up poor, spent part of his childhood in foster care and dropped out of college after one semester — and he hardly walks in lock step with racial justice advocates: He has harshly criticized the “so-called civil rights movement” as part of a broader pattern of “communists and socialists slowly pulling the rug out from underneath capitalism and free choice and the free market,” as he said in a 2018 podcast.
Stein would be the state’s first Jewish governor, and while he, too, doesn’t showcase the potential milestone of his election, even playing it down, he answered quickly and definitively when I asked him what he made of many progressives’ condemnation of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, also Jewish, for supporting Israel with words little different from those spoken by Democratic politicians who aren’t Jewish and who drew less flack. “I was very distressed,” Stein said. “I felt like he was treated very unfairly because of his religion.”
Might Stein’s Jewish identity — and his carefully articulated, measured solidarity with Israel — actually be working in his favor? Chris Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University, thinks so, explaining that it distinguishes Stein from many figures on the left who rail against Israel. Professor Cooper (no relation to Roy) said that as a result, it moderates Stein’s image, possibly attracting swing voters offended by the antisemitic tirades and minimizations of the Holocaust in Robinson’s past. Professor Cooper recalled recently driving past “a Trump flag and an Israeli flag in the same yard.” There resides a potential ticket splitter: Republican for president, Democrat for governor.
But what intrigues Professor Cooper most about the governor’s race is that “you could not create two more different candidates” to square off against each other. “This is the starkest contrast imaginable, and it’s all taking place in a state on the razor’s edge between red and blue,” he said. What’s more, each candidate contradicts his party’s paradigm for victory in statewide races. Robinson represented a risk even before he devolved into a disaster.
“Republicans have won with don’t-rock-the-boat candidates,” said Mac McCorkle, a veteran Democratic strategist who teaches with me at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He noted that before Robinson, Republican nominees for governor — and, to some extent, for the U.S. Senate — were often relatively button-down, managerial types with demeanors that reassured the business community and didn’t spook unaffiliated voters, who constitute a third of the North Carolina electorate. (The rest is almost evenly divided between registered Republicans and registered Democrats.)
But Robinson is all anti-establishment provocation or pugnacity. He exalts firearms as necessary insurance against an overzealous government. He shares crude social-media posts, like one suggesting that the attack on Paul Pelosi by a man who broke into his and Nancy’s San Francisco home was really a sexual tryst gone wrong. He taunts transgender people, denies climate change and sermonizes censoriously from the pulpits of conservative Christian churches — all at a thunderous volume. That’s not just rocking the boat. That’s capsizing it, crashing it into a reef and then cackling as the wreckage sinks into the murk.
Robinson stands out just as vividly for his inexperience. Lieutenant governor is a largely ceremonial post — Governor Cooper told me that he infrequently crosses paths with Robinson — and as a recent article in The Atlantic by David A. Graham revealed, Robinson has been derelict even in that undemanding duty.
Stein isn’t as pronounced a deviation from the Democratic script, but he’s unlike Governor Cooper, whose folksy air and rural background have made it difficult for Republicans to label him a conventional liberal. McCorkle said that the governor epitomizes a “country to city, small town to university” type and arc that have worked well for North Carolina Democrats. Stein, in contrast, grew up and went to high school in Chapel Hill, a cosmopolitan college town often derided by Republicans as some godless Marxist commune. Then he attended Dartmouth for college and Harvard for law school. He gives off a faintly preppy glimmer and lacks Roy Cooper’s overt warmth. As Professor Cooper put it, “He’s just not the kind of guy who makes you want to fly a flag outside your house.”
Stein told me that from an early age, he felt a strong pull toward public service, an interest in line with his upbringing. His father, a prominent civil rights lawyer, presided over the state’s first integrated law firm, whose offices were once firebombed in protest of its fight for racial justice. His mother did research and policy work related to maternal and child health. His older brother is a policy adviser for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and his older sister is a retired social worker who counseled death-row prisoners. Stein said that when he first took his wife-to-be, Anna, on a vacation with his parents and siblings, she marveled, “Oh, my God, you all talk about politics and policy more than any people I’ve ever met.”
I asked him how he and Anna, also a lawyer, began dating, and his answer was like some comedy sketch spoofing his staid image. “We actually met in the state crime lab,” he said, flashing back to 1993, when they were interns in the North Carolina Department of Justice. Days later, he said, she showed up at his office door and invited him to watch a bit of a murder trial with her. It’s not exactly “Sleepless in Seattle.”
“We will often kid each other,” Stein said. “She’ll be like, ‘Why aren’t you a chef?’ And I’m like, ‘Why aren’t you an artist?’ Because we’re both lawyers and we’re both very rational.”
For several years in his early 30s, Stein worked for John Edwards, the former Democratic senator from North Carolina, helping to manage Edwards’s campaign for the Senate in 1998 and then serving as a deputy chief of staff in Edwards’s office on Capitol Hill. But he and Anna weren’t fond of Washington, D.C., he said, so they hurried back to North Carolina, where he took a job in the state’s consumer protection division, followed by eight years in the State Senate, until his election to the first of his two terms as attorney general in 2016.
He has performed impressively in that role, often prioritizing issues — the opioid scourge, vaping, the state’s backlog of untested rape kits — that transcend partisan divisions. His admirers cite his intensity. “You can’t underestimate how powerful his resolve is,” said Robert Crabill, a friend of Stein’s since their days together at Chapel Hill High. State Representative Robert Reives, the House Democratic minority leader, told me: “His work ethic is unreal.”
He has raised much greater sums of money and released more and better television ads than Robinson has, beginning with an early June blitz of commercials that hammered Robinson for his past condemnations of abortion, which Robinson said he wanted to outlaw in all cases with no exceptions. Only recently has Robinson revised his position to one of support for the state’s current law, which forbids the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy.
One of Stein’s ads spotlighted Robinson’s “keep your skirt down” repugnance, and within a month of its frequent airing, Stein began pulling away from Robinson in polls that had previously shown them neck-and-neck. Strategists in both parties say that it could prove to be one of the rare political ads that irrevocably alter the trajectory of a contest. If so, it will also validate Democrats’ beliefs that the repeal of Roe v. Wade has turned abortion rights into one of their most potent weapons.
But Stein remains vulnerable. Paul Shumaker, a veteran Republican strategist in North Carolina, told me that as recently as late August, most North Carolina voters didn’t have any strong impression of Stein, who has spent as much energy sounding the alarm about Robinson as singing his own praises. In his campaign announcement video early last year, he talked about his father’s bravery and legacy and about Robinson’s hatefulness before saying much about himself.
Some of the voters at that campaign event of his east of Raleigh didn’t have much to say about him, either. I asked a half-dozen of them why they were there; I heard more about the villainy of Robinson than about the virtues of Stein, with whom they didn’t seem to be deeply familiar, despite his many years in office.
Recent surveys from before the “black NAZI” bombshell showed him ahead of Robinson by — according to RealClearPolling — an average of more than nine percentage points. But Jonathan Felts, a Republican consultant advising the Robinson campaign, noted that polling in statewide races in North Carolina often overestimates Democratic candidates’ strength. Four years ago, polls put Roy Cooper 11 points ahead of his Republican opponent, but he won by only 4.5 points.
Felts acknowledged the potential damage of the past several days. “I think it fair to characterize the allegations made by CNN as not helpful,” he told me in a text message on Friday, when he also denied any panic in the Trumpiverse: “Trump’s campaign is run by smart people who know ‘reverse coattails’ is a fiction.” In that message and in a previous telephone conversation, he insisted that Stein was the candidate out of sync with most North Carolinians, who, he said, are “tired of the political class” and of politicians who give off “the vibe that their biggest decision every day is what shade they want their khaki pants to be.” He told me that the Robinson operation is on its way to shrinking the advertising disparity between the two campaigns and will take advantage of many voters’ fuzzy sense of Stein to define him “as the left-wing radical he is.”
That’ll be some sorcery. Stein doesn’t emit the faintest whiff of radicalism. His style on the stump is steady, reasonable, crisp. When I asked him what his greatest ambition and priority as governor would be, he said it was to improve public education, chiefly by raising teacher pay and expanding access to community college. That’s hugely important — and not remotely revolutionary.
As his wounded opponent thrashes in the foreground, Stein has perfected the art of receding just enough into the background. And while he may not inspire me or others to march to the barricades, he also doesn’t have us bolting our doors. Robinson does. Trump, too. May those two and the Republican Party be schooled soon on the risk and folly of that, so that North Carolina — and America — can pivot to something better.
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