The NPR Politics Podcast - Will Mark Robinson's Racism & Porn Scandal Hurt Trump In NC?

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson described himself, according to CNN reporting, as a "Black Nazi" and expressed support for slavery in posts on a porn forum. Robinson, who denies the allegations, has lost almost all of his campaign staff. Donald Trump hasn't revoked his endorsement even as other key groups withdraw funding and support. Will the scandal hurt turnout in that state, key to the presidential race?This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, political correspondent Susan Davis, and WUNC bureau chief Colin Campbell.The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Franz, Eleanor, and Zach in Broadhead, Wisconsin, headed to the bus stop. This podcast was recorded at 1.04 p.m. on September 24th, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Enjoy the show. I'm done. See you. I give him credit for having time to do that, getting his kids to school, because I feel like that is like a mad dash. How many takes do you think that took, though? I feel like that was like three or four takes.

Getting the kids to school half hour is the most hectic half hour of So Many Parents Day. I'm not there yet, but soon. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And Colin Campbell, the Capitol Bureau Chief at North Carolina member station WUNC, is also here with us. Hey, Colin. Hey, Miles and Susan.

Great to be here. Yeah, great to have you. So today on the show, we are talking about a political controversy unfolding in North Carolina's governor's race and what that might mean for the presidential battleground. Colin, Mark Robinson, who is the Republican lieutenant governor of the state, now running for governor, he has kind of built his political brand on saying controversial and offensive things. He has denied the Holocaust in the past, for instance. But a few days ago, CNN reported that this goes way further in posts that have been uncovered that he had made in an online porn forum.

And I just want to have you kind of quickly describe what he is being alleged as saying with the understanding that this is a family-friendly program. So can you just describe? Good luck, Colin. Yeah, good luck, Colin. Yeah, I say there's a lot of these posts from this website that we will not discuss here. But the big highlights, the ones that people are really talking about is his claim that slavery should be reinstated, that he would like to personally own some slaves. And he also posted that on the website that he had secretly observed women in a public shower locker room as a teenager earlier in his life. He also called himself a black Nazi. That's sort of been the big headline out of the CNN story. So there's a lot of things in these

posts. And as you mentioned, they're perhaps more extreme but at least similar in genre to some of the things that he's said more publicly and on his personal Facebook page in the past, in speeches on the campaign trail, things about denying the Holocaust, his comment about abortion, that women should keep their skirts down, that women are being called to be led by men. There's just this whole litany of things that he's said that I think has made people a little bit less surprised at what CNN is reporting was said on this website, even though those comments are several notches above anything he's said in a public forum. Of course, he denies that he made these posts. Other Republicans are now calling on him to prove that he was not the person behind these posts. And so far, we haven't seen any additional information come out of his campaign on that front. A lot of this is not shocking because Mark Robinson has a very long record of saying provocative things, as Colin just noted. But timing matters in politics and ballots are already starting to be mailed out in North Carolina. And all of this sort of drip, drip, drip happening now presents the reality that he's more of a political liability. It's also true that Mark Robinson has been trailing in the polls against the Democratic opponent Josh Stein in this race, makes it a bit easier for a party to

seek distance from a candidate that was likely on a trajectory to lose this race to begin with. But you have seen some responses from not from Donald Trump, who continues to endorse Mark Robinson, but people like Tom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, saying, look, he's got to speak to this or sue CNN or do something to prove that these allegations are false. And you have the Republican Governors Association essentially saying they're pulling back from this race and they won't be spending another dime in it. So it is creating not just a problem for Mark Robinson, but it is reviving this question of, like, hey, do Republicans have a broader problem in the state of North Carolina?

I keep thinking, right, that, like, the bar for scandal lately has been pretty high. Like it takes a lot to make a statewide scandal go national. And this seems to have done it. He is, as you mentioned, Colin, still denying the allegations. But there have been some developments within his campaign around this, right? Yeah. So on Sunday, we learned initially they announced that several of his campaign staffers had quit, including his campaign manager, his top advisor, people who'd been with him since his first run for lieutenant governor all the way back in 2020 were stepping down. They didn't give reasons for why they were leaving, but we can assume that they're related to this.

And then I learned in talking to some folks associated with the campaign that he's down to actually three staffers as of this week, two communications folks and his bodyguard to run a gubernatorial campaign that was expected to be millions of dollars in campaign spending. He was still out on the campaign trail earlier this week where he threatened to sue CNN, sounded very defiant in his campaign stops in some small towns in the North Carolina mountains on Monday. But it would be a challenge, I think, for him to rebuild his campaign at this stage of the game with just three people to go on. And a lot of the sort of campaign operative

types in politics are pretty busy this time of year. They're not necessarily looking for another job until November. Can you lay out a little bit more of the campaign on the other side? I imagine that Democrats are seizing on all of this, but tell us a little bit more about the Democratic candidate, Josh Stein, who's running for governor. So Josh Stein has been running for governor essentially on a very anti-Robinson platform. Part of the reason Robinson has been trailing in the polls up to this point is that Robinson has all these remarks that he's made on video and Stein's advertising campaign, which is backed by millions of dollars, including the Democratic Governors Association, has basically just been sort of a super cut of all of Robinson's greatest hits. You don't even hear that much about Josh Stein himself on this.

That's sort of been the campaign message and has really allowed him to create a pretty wide lead in the polls at this point. Now you see other Democrats running in this state trying to tie their opponents to Mark Robinson, putting out photos of him with various Republican candidates. You've even seen the Harris campaign within, I think, a day of this CNN story running, launching TV ads in North Carolina trying to tie Trump to Robinson, putting out this montage of the two of them in pictures and videos and rallies together with best friends and the line that Trump had about Mark Robinson being Martin Luther King on steroids. So we're going to hear a lot of this sort of trying to tie in and see if Democrats can manage to drag their various Republican opponents from Trump all the way down to state senator down with Robinson as he presumably continues to slide in the polls. Most of the polling we've seen so far was conducted before the CNN story.

So we haven't seen what kind of hit his campaign takes from the media firestorm that has occurred over the last five or so days. Yeah, the comment about Martin Luther King on steroids also takes a different light, considering a number of the posts that Robinson is alleged to have made were about disparaging Martin Luther King Jr. in a number of different ways. Sue, can you tell us a little bit about how Trump and Vance are responding or not responding to this story? Well, Donald Trump was in North Carolina over the weekend. Mark Robinson was initially expected to appear at that event because he's appeared with Donald Trump a lot in this campaign. There's obviously very close. Donald Trump has endorsed him, but he did not appear at that rally in North Carolina. Donald Trump did not mention him at the rally over the weekend. But look, Trump doesn't disavow people, right? He doesn't, if anything, what we've seen from the past is Trump, he'll often play the like, I don't even know him card after something happens. But he doesn't have a long track record of disavowing candidates. And I don't think it's surprising there. I think J.D. Vance has spoken to it a

little bit, essentially saying something to the fact of like, he has to explain himself to the voters of North Carolina. Never back down, never apologize is sort of the Donald Trump way. But look, part of why this is interesting is like North Carolina is polling within a statistical tie between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, although Donald Trump has had and I think still has a slight edge in those polls. But if somehow this becomes a state in the close that Democrats can put in play and win, it sort of changes all these calculations about the path to 270 and the electoral college, because North Carolina, with 16 electoral votes, is a pretty rich vote state. And we are seeing now there hasn't been a lot to shake up the state math of this race.

I think this is sort of the, maybe this is the October surprise that suddenly North Carolina is becoming the center of the political universe. If you were going to kind of write a political manual on how to put a state in play, potentially have a statewide candidate embrace Nazism online would be one of the things that potentially could work. Let's talk more about the politics and how this plays into the presidential map right after a break. And we're back. So Sue obviously, for listeners who are in a state that is not North Carolina, everyone is kind of thinking, how is this scandal going to impact the presidential race? You know, the presidential race is a much more high profile race than the governor's race. Is this really going to play a role in deciding whether Trump or Harris wins this election? You know, it's a good question. And like, stop me if you've heard this before, but almost nothing that Trump says or does affects the base. And I don't think that Mark Robinson's character flaws, to put it politely, are ultimately going to hurt Donald Trump among Republican voters in North

Carolina. But remember a couple of things here. Yes, Donald Trump won North Carolina in 2016 and 2020. But by really narrow margins. It was less than 2 percent in 2020. So this isn't like a comfortably red state. And what you're really looking for here is, one, is enthusiasm. Are Republicans just so disgusted by the absolute gutter ball politics of this that they don't want to vote? And independents and swing voters. I mean, this is just seems the most obvious thing to say. This is not the kind of stuff that's going to appeal to someone beyond the most hardcore conservative base voter. And even then, I think it's a little bit of an insult

to a conservative base voter to suggest that they would even align themselves with some of Mark Robinson's more offensive and racist remarks. So, you know, when you're talking about a race that could be decided by half a percentage point to three points, yeah, this kind of stuff does matter. As we see fewer and fewer split ticket voters, how a voter feels about one party can carry its way all the way up and down a ballot. But I do feel like it's worth noting North Carolina is one of those states, right, that has a history of some ticket splitting. And Colin can get into this a little bit. But Colin, I'm also hoping you can kind of lay out a little bit broader the demographics of North Carolina. I know that over the last few years, there's been huge population growth in some of the major cities in North Carolina,

which is why Democrats are kind of eyeing it as a potential target. But can you kind of give us a broader view of the electorate and how it's changed in the last few years? Yeah. So North Carolina, part of the reason I think it wasn't thought to be super in play a few months ago was that we haven't gone blue in a presidential race since 2008 when Barack Obama won. But at the same time, we do have ticket splitting that occurs. Even as Trump was carrying the state, the current Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, easily won his last election or so. So there's a lot of that where people really do tend to split their tickets between a national race,

a U.S. Senate race, and some of these down-ballot state-level contests. But in general, there's been this sense among Democrats that North Carolina is going to increasingly become in play for them because of a lot of this in-migration. You see a lot of wealthier, college-educated younger folks moving to urban areas like Raleigh and Charlotte and Greensboro. Some of the suburbs, as a result, are turning bluer. But at the same time, some of that change has been tempered by some of the in-migration to more rural counties, coastal mountain counties that have become destinations for retirees. So you've seen growth in those areas as well. And those areas have tended to become redder, sort of balancing out this effect of

bluer city and suburban areas in this state. So that's sort of one of the underlying dynamics for what makes North Carolina in play versus where Republicans may have thought they might have been safe in the state in the past. So I'm wondering if you can take a broader view at this kind of Robinson drama. It feels like I am having a little bit of deja vu because I think I hosted a politics podcast a year or two ago where we were talking about candidates in 2022 and candidate quality. I covered a number of secretary of state candidates in 2022 who were on podcasts saying crazy stuff. Is this happening more and more, do you feel like, specifically down-ballot Republicans, or am I kind of imagining that? I think it's happening likely more and more because I think in Donald Trump's Republican Party, more and more what would have been considered maybe fringe or extreme candidates

are being welcomed in by the party and endorsed by the party infrastructure in a way that wasn't really happening before Donald Trump. Mark Robinson is not an outlier. There's certainly been some other terrible candidates in the course of politics. But in thinking about this election, I do think it's important to remember that a lot of Republicans have won in races where they sort of run as very Trumpy Republicans. But very Trumpy Republicans have a very mixed to negative electoral history in the swing states we're talking about. Just look at the most recent 2022 midterms. You had Herschel Walker, who was a very controversial Senate candidate, lose that race that helped tip the balance of the Senate. You also had Trump-endorsed governors lose in the blue wall in Pennsylvania, in Michigan and Wisconsin, because when they sort of run as

Trump Republicans in not hardcore Trump places, there hasn't been a strong track record of winning. And I think that that is when you look at a state like North Carolina, which has sort of an upwardly mobile, more educated, growing population. Democrats have at least had one victory in North Carolina in 2008. But sometimes you have to think, is it a changing state or is it more like Texas, where Democrats are like, this is the year, right? This is the year we're going to flip North Carolina. And North Carolina keeps sort of eluding them. And obviously, it kind of feels like the unspoken thing here, right, is that there was a change at the top of the presidential ticket that also played into whether North Carolina would be

more in play, right? Oh, absolutely. Because a big question in North Carolina and what helped contribute to Barack Obama's victory in 2008 was very high turnout among young voters that inhabit a lot of the university towns and sort of younger job market there. And Joe Biden was not inspiring those voters to show up and turn out. Kamala Harris has sort of changed the calculation when it comes to Democratic enthusiasm, which I do think adds to that sort of hopeful nature that Democrats have here, in large part because of Republicans collapsing at the top of the ticket, near the top of the ticket on the other side. Trump had a pretty sizable lead in polls up until Biden dropped out. And now every poll I've seen since has put Harris and Trump in a pretty dead heat in the state. Well, Colin, getting back to the Robinson campaign, what is the future of his candidacy here? I mean, I don't know what the rules exactly are in North Carolina. I know some people have been calling for him to potentially drop out. Is there any precedent for that? Would

that even be possible at this late juncture? What is the future of this campaign here? Yeah, you know, the timing of the CNN story had a lot of people speculating that maybe Republicans were behind this particular bit of opposition research coming out because that was the date for candidates to withdraw, sort of the last chance to have a different candidate in this race if Robinson were to drop out. He's vowed to stay in through November. He'll have the struggle of being able to rebuild his campaign team. He'll have struggle with a lack of advertising support with the Republican Governors Association, no longer running ads on his behalf in this state. And we are awaiting, I think, US Senator Tom Tillis, who's the senior senator for the state, said today that he was sort of setting a Friday deadline for Robinson to prove that this wasn't him, or they're just going to sort of move on, rescind some endorsements. If he dropped out at this stage of the game, his name is still going to be on the ballot. So there's some question about whether Republicans could put forth a different nominee that votes for Robinson would count for that person. But in that scenario, that makes it really difficult to win if you're convincing people to check the box next to one person's name.

But really, they're going to be voting for somebody else. OK, well, let's leave it there for now. Colin Campbell of WUNC, I have a feeling this is not the last time we are going to be hearing from you in that very interesting state of North Carolina. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.