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It’s a four-alarm fire at GOP headquarters in North Carolina, but nobody’s bringing any water.
With the election a little more than a month out, Republicans in the Tar Heel state are facing an unimaginable crisis: a nominee for the highest elected office on the ballot this year (with the exception of the presidential ticket) who is, to put it mildly, a disaster. Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, is undergoing a full-scale campaign collapse triggered by a CNN investigation into his past.
The details of the investigation were made public last Thursday: Robinson, an anti-transgender, anti-gay conservative culture warrior was linked through an email address and screenname to posts on a porn site called “Nude Africa” in which he allegedly described shocking and graphic sexual acts while referring to himself as a “Black Nazi”.
Robinson denied making the comments in a video message. Meanwhile, conservative operatives working in the state say the allegations were floating around as rumors for weeks if not months before being made public — with receipts.
Over the weekend, Robinson’s campaign imploded. A statement from the Robinson campaign on Sunday confirmed the resignation of virtually all senior staff, while a report from WUNC subsequently revealed that just three paid staffers remained on the Robinson campaign as of that evening. The state’s sitting lieutenant governor, endorsed for office by Donald Trump and the state’s Republican Party, was heading into this week without a campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, or virtually anyone else beyond a spokesman.
Things got even weirder Sunday evening as serial fraudster Jack Burkman tweeted that he was taking over Robinson’s campaign. Reporters quickly demanded proof, wary of Burkman’s history of spreading lies, and were quickly rewarded: Robinson himself tweeted that the hire was just a rumor, while Burkman responded to The Bulwark’s Sam Stein with a quote from a made-up person.
If Robinson was hoping for some backup, it’s not coming. Trump was in the state on Saturday for a rally in Wilmington. Robinson wasn’t there; wasn’t even mentioned. On Monday, things got worse: the Republican Governors’ Association (RGA), responsible for funding GOP gubernatorial candidates around the country, indicated it was holding off on future ad buys.
All of this is to say: North Carolina’s importance may have just shot up to the top of the rankings. It’s a state Trump won over Joe Biden by less than two percentage points in 2020, and where he is leading Harris by a similar margin according to polling of 2024. And it may be fertile ground for Democrats to renew those “weird” attacks aimed at Trump and his running mate JD Vance — surely there are some independents at least open to considering that message, given the past week’s news.
Josh Stein, Robinson’s opponent, is eating it up. The NC attorney general was on CNN’s State of the Union this weekend mocking his opponent’s denial, and is set to coast in to the governor’s mansion after November if polling is any indication. The question for him going forward: Will that path to Election Day include further appearances alongside Kamala Harris, his party’s new standard-bearer? Stein’s embrace of Harris could boost her in the state, and he has already made one appearance at a rally with the vice president earlier this month. A more public partnership with the Harris campaign — a la Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania — could be the strategic move here.
Some of that will be for Stein to decide. It will also be a question for Harris, who needs to choose whether she’ll devote time into the state as a winnable prospect going forward, or whether she’ll focus instead solely on the states she and Biden won in 2020: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia. She certainly has the money to open up a new front against the Trump campaign in the Carolinas; a Friday announcement from the Trump campaign revealed it had raised just a fraction of Harris’s total in August.
