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For longtime Republican operative Doug Heye, the lesson of Mark Robinson’s lopsided defeat is simple.
“Don’t nominate insane people,” he told The Assembly in an email. “That’s it.”
At the outset, North Carolina’s governor’s race was supposed to be among the closest in the nation. With popular Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper term-limited, Republicans had an opportunity to claim the Executive Mansion for only the second time in 30 years.
They believed Cooper’s heir apparent, Attorney General Josh Stein, was vulnerable. And they hoped Republican enthusiasm for former President Donald Trump would carry the man Trump once called “better than Martin Luther King.”
Instead, Robinson, the state’s first Black lieutenant governor, suffered the state’s biggest landslide in a governor’s race since 1980, losing to Stein 55 percent to 40 percent. Fox News called the race at 7:36 p.m., just six minutes after polls closed on Tuesday.
“Certainly, the NCGOP is going to have egg on their face,” said Jonathan Bridges, a prominent Republican political consultant. “There are a lot of donors that are aggravated right now.”
A year ago, some Republican insiders warned that Robinson was fatally flawed. But they were ignored. Robinson had Trump’s endorsement and grassroots support. Most party leaders fell in line, and Robinson coasted through the primary.
A political disaster followed. Robinson ran 18 points behind former President Donald Trump, who won the state by 3.4 points.
Robinson’s campaign had been in free fall in September. Six men told The Assembly that Robinson used to frequent Greensboro porn shops. Then, CNN reported that Robinson called himself a “black NAZI,” said he liked transgender pornography and wanted to own slaves, and made other offensive statements on a porn site’s forum.
Robinson denied the allegations and sued CNN and one of The Assembly’s sources. But the damage was done—and irreparable. Robinson had fashioned himself a far-right Christian culture warrior, and the perceived hypocrisy proved too much to overcome. After the CNN revelations, most of his campaign staff quit and his fundraising flatlined.
But Robinson’s campaign was already on life support. By summer’s end, some polls showed Robinson trailing by double digits. He’d faced a barrage of negative press over comments many viewed as hateful, violent, antisemitic, and misogynistic, and his wife’s nonprofit had come under state scrutiny for financial irregularities. His hard-line positions on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights turned off swing voters, his fundraising badly lagged Stein’s, and he struggled to appeal to anyone outside of his ultraconservative base.
State Treasurer Dale Folwell, who lost to Robinson in this year’s Republican primary, says the NCGOP only has itself to blame for Tuesday’s defeat.
“Mark Robinson is the same person today as he was yesterday, as he’s going to be tomorrow,” Folwell said.
“That goes back to what Maya Angelou always told us,” he added. “When a person shows you who they are the first time, you should believe them, right? Mark Robinson’s history has told people who he has been the whole time, but the people who selected him to be the nominee didn’t want to know.”
‘A Good Head on His Shoulders’
Robinson burst onto the political scene in 2018 when he delivered a passionate gun rights speech to the Greensboro City Council. He had no government or public policy background, but as a powerful orator—and a Black conservative—he quickly became a political celebrity. A year later, he ran for lieutenant governor, battling a crowded primary field of nine Republicans, including the superintendent of public instruction, a state senator, and a former congresswoman.
In March 2020, he won the Republican primary with 32.5 percent of the vote—just enough to avoid a runoff against state Sen. Andy Wells. (In 2017, the General Assembly lowered the threshold for outright victory from 40 percent to 30 percent.) Robinson then defeated Democratic state Rep. Yvonne Holley in November by three percentage points.
“When he got the lieutenant governor nomination, it was like nobody saw him coming,” said Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. “And then, when he runs against Yvonne Holley, the Democrats are, like, dancing a jig, thinking, ‘Of course we’re going to beat this guy. He’s insane.’ And, of course, we know what happened.”
Several state media outlets reported on Robinson’s social media posts during the campaign. But those stories failed to break through the pandemic, racial justice protests, and high-profile races for president, governor, and U.S. Senate in North Carolina.
In office, Robinson continued to raise his profile, championing causes like public school “indoctrination” and denouncing LGBTQ+ people and social justice movements from conservative church pulpits. Critics—including some conservatives—complained that Robinson built his brand instead of doing his job. He regularly appeared on right-wing media, but routinely missed meetings and played little role in Republicans’ policy agenda.
Still, Robinson embodied the populist streak that had come to dominate Republican politics in the Trump era. Trump promised to endorse him in June 2023, and many conservatives rallied behind him.
“I like Mark Robinson,” Anthony Shook, a conservative but unaffiliated voter in Brunswick County, told The Assembly on Saturday. Shook said he was attracted to Robinson because of his religious faith, but also because “a lot of things he’s talking about, what he would like to accomplish in this state, I agree with.”
Wayne Smith, an 81-year-old Republican in Alamance County, said Tuesday that he voted for Robinson because “he’s telling the truth.” Smith especially liked Robinson’s opposition to abortion. “You need to keep your skirt down,” he told a female Assembly reporter.
The establishment came along for the ride. “I just think he’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Senate leader Phil Berger, the state’s most powerful Republican, said in October 2023 when he endorsed Robinson.
‘Clear and Complete Control’
Some Republican insiders tried to raise alarms.
Paul Shumaker, a longtime GOP consultant who has worked for Sen. Thom Tillis, released a memo in June 2023 arguing that Robinson faced a steep path to the Executive Mansion. Robinson was only down three points at the time. But his support plummeted when unaffiliated voters learned that he wanted to eliminate science and history courses in elementary schools and that he’d failed to pay his property taxes.
Democrats had a lot more material to choose from. The Stein campaign honed in on Robinson’s unequivocal opposition to abortion rights—even though Robinson admitted paying for his now-wife’s abortion in the late 1980s. One particularly effective ad showed Robinson saying that “women are not supposed to be leading the charge” and abortion is “about killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”
Others painted Robinson as a dangerous extremist unsuited to positions of responsibility. In one, Robinson boasted that he owned AR-15s “in case the government gets too big for its britches.” Another highlighted problems at a daycare center Robinson and his wife once owned. (The Robinson campaign sent Stein a cease-and-desist letter, saying the ad included “misleading statements.”)
Meanwhile, Robinson’s incendiary comments dominated state and national headlines about the race. Stories about Robinson’s multiple bankruptcies and an N.C. Department of Health and Human Services probe of his wife’s nonprofit frustrated Robinson’s attempts to moderate his image.
Even before CNN’s story on Robinson’s alleged posts on the website Nude Africa, the hits took a toll. In March, a WRAL poll had Stein up just two points. By early September, that margin had grown to 14.
Many of Robinson’s vulnerabilities were known before he ran for governor, at least among insiders. But once Trump endorsed Robinson, the primary was “over,” said Michael Bitzer, a professor of political science at Catawba College. “You cannot go against Trump’s endorsement,” he said. “Republican base voters have clear and complete control over nominations. And for the most part, two-thirds of that primary base electorate are Trump Republicans.”
Robinson won 65 percent of the primary vote. He defeated Folwell, the state treasurer and an old-school conservative out of step with the MAGA movement, and Bill Graham, a wealthy attorney who had attacked Robinson’s past antisemitic statements. Former U.S. Rep. Mark Walker, a former Robinson ally, flirted with a gubernatorial bid before running for Congress, then taking a job with the Trump campaign.
Shumaker, who worked as a consultant on Graham’s campaign, says the Republican Governors Association worried about Robinson’s viability. “They told us that they were going to have a third-party effort [to back Graham], and they pulled a plug on at the very last minute,” Shumaker said. The RGA has denied that it considered intervening.
“He was an unelectable general election candidate,” Shumaker said. “Quite frankly, he [would have] lost the Republican primary if all Republican primary voters were informed.”
But doing that required a lot of money. “There’s a business side to American politics,” Shumaker said. “To change that brand on Mark Robinson in a Republican primary, you’re talking a $20-[million to] $25-million Republican primary. Never had happened before.”
With the party’s establishment behind Robinson, it didn’t happen this time, either.
“The GOP will tell you they don’t endorse in primaries,” said Bridges, the consultant who worked for Walker. “But Robinson was practically the nominee very early on. The party didn’t want anyone else to come through.”
Folwell says NCGOP leaders should resign over the Robinson debacle. He believes they ignored Robinson’s liabilities. “The fact is, they didn’t want to know,” he said.
But it’s not clear they could have stopped Robinson if they wanted. “What Trump says goes,” Bitzer said.
‘The Beast Ate Them’
Just before Trump spoke at the North Carolina Republican Party’s convention last year, party activists formally censured Tillis over his participation in bipartisan efforts to reform immigration and codify same-sex marriage rights. In 2021, the party’s executive committee also censured former U.S. Sen. Richard Burr for voting to convict Trump following his impeachment over the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“It is truly a sad day for North Carolina Republicans,” Burr said in response. “My party’s leadership has chosen loyalty to one man over the core principles of the Republican Party and the founders of our great nation.”
Earlier this year, Trump promoted the head of the NCGOP, Michael Whatley, to chairman of the Republican National Committee. Whatley’s replacement in North Carolina, Jason Simmons, worked on Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
“The MAGA wing of the Republican Party has taken over the party, and the insiders have really lost control of their party,” said Blair Reeves, who runs the Democratic-aligned group Carolina Forward. “And you see this not just in North Carolina, you see this all over the country.”
But it wasn’t exactly a hostile takeover. More like an acquiescence. For years, state Republicans tried to harness the grassroots’ grievances. Walker, in fact, was responsible for pushing Robinson’s 2018 gun rights speech to a national audience.
In time, the Venn diagram of the NCGOP and Trump’s movement became a near-perfect circle. Traditional conservatives, such as Tillis and Burr, were shunned for not demonstrating sufficient fealty to Trump. Legislative leaders like Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore, who was elected to Congress on Tuesday, embraced him. To do otherwise would have been political suicide.
“Let’s remember the establishment Republican Party fed the beast before the beast ate them,” Cooper said. “The establishment elite, I mean, they have lost. They’ve given up their party.”
Bridges said legislative leaders thought they could control Robinson if he became governor. After all, he had little experience and no political capital.
But at the same time, Robinson’s defeat is hardly devastating. Republicans still have large majorities in the General Assembly, and in recent years, they’ve stripped the governor of appointment and other powers, making one of the country’s weakest chief executives even weaker.
In a way, Stein’s victory might suit legislative Republicans’ interests. He’ll be a foil and someone to blame if things go wrong. If Robinson had won, they’d have to answer for whatever he said or did.
“The goal was, we need supermajorities,” Bridges said. “We don’t need a governor. The thought process was, if Robinson wins, that’s fine. If he doesn’t, that’s fine too.”
Robinson wasn’t the only far-right candidate Republicans backed this year.
Michele Morrow—who had her own problematic social media history and little relevant experience—became the Republican nominee for superintendent of public instruction, defeating incumbent Catherine Truitt, a former adviser to the last Republican governor, Pat McCrory. Republicans also picked U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, an election denier who sponsored the anti-LGBTQ+ “bathroom bill” in 2016, to be their candidate for attorney general.
Morrow and Bishop narrowly lost, but both ran well ahead of Robinson. Cooper says Robinson’s scandals might have deflected scrutiny from his allies this year, in the same way the turmoil of 2020 helped him become lieutenant governor.
“There’s no oxygen left in the room after the presidential election and what was happening in the gubernatorial race,” he said. “People want to leave space in their heads for football, and they want to leave a space in their heads for family and for everything else in the world. There’s only so much space they have for politics, and it’s just gobbled up at the top.”
Bitzer says that as poorly as Robinson fared, the NCGOP is likely to continue nominating candidates in his vein.
“I don’t see how this party doesn’t continue its populist Trump strain, because it is well embedded,” he said. “I mean, if you lose, the response is going to be, ‘Well, the election was rigged,’ and that’ll be the cognitive dissonance that will rationalize, ‘Well, we’ll get them next time because they cheated.’ It’s not because you put forward a candidate as flawed as Robinson is.”
Shumaker pointed out that by 2026, a large plurality of North Carolina voters won’t belong to either party. And if Republicans keep nominating candidates like Robinson, they’ll pay for it with the voters they need.
“The party that’s best positioned to build that coalition with unaffiliated voters is going to be the party that’s going to be successful long term in North Carolina,” he said. “That was my argument against Mark Robinson. His issue set, his background, is not the image that we’re going to have to have to build that coalition with unaffiliateds here.”
‘No Place to Go’
Robinson was a dead politician walking the second the CNN story dropped on Sept. 19.
He soldiered on for the election’s final six weeks, touting his role in Hurricane Helene relief, crashing a forum at the historically Black North Carolina A&T University, and begging Republicans to unite even if they didn’t like him.
But he couldn’t change the narrative. Robinson had little money and just the skeleton of a campaign team after most of his staff quit. Several Republican governors pulled their support, and Trump stopped inviting him to rallies. (In October, Trump said he was “unfamiliar” with the governor’s race.)
Despite his landslide loss, many observers don’t expect Robinson to go away. He’ll soon be out of job, and he doesn’t have a career to fall back on.
“Mark Robinson has no place to go,” Shumaker said. “He has nothing to go back to. He has to stay in politics. And he has to try to remain some type of viability, because he has no other income line in life other than politics.”
Asked Tuesday about what he plans to do if he loses, Robinson told reporters outside a polling location in rural Durham County on Tuesday, “We haven’t even thought about that yet. I mean, we have thought about it. But, you know, we have to have family discussions about that, my wife and I, about what we want to do.”
Shumaker expects Robinson to run for office again, perhaps challenging Tillis in the 2026 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. If it happens, that contest will be an interesting test of the party’s primary voters. The winner might face former Gov. Cooper, one of the state’s most popular politicians.
The establishment and party financiers likely won’t bet on Robinson again. But Tillis has run afoul of the MAGA base that comprises about two-thirds of primary voters.
And Robinson’s supporters don’t seem eager to see him exit stage right.
“I don’t think any of that stuff matters,” Robert Lawrence, 44, of Person County, told The Assembly about the controversies that dogged Robinson’s campaign. “That was so many years ago. It’s just the media trying to distract from the issues.”
During his concession speech on Tuesday night, Robinson suggested he would be back.
“It’s about the people who believe in you,” he said. “It’s about the state that you love—the state that I fully intend to continue to serve for the next two months.
“Who knows? Maybe in the future once again somewhere in office,” he continued, prompting a few shouts and claps in the room. “Who knows? I don’t know.”
Additional reporting by Joe Killian, Chase Pellegrini de Paur, Anne Blythe, and Johanna F. Still.
Jeffrey Billman reports on politics and the law for The Assembly. Email him at jeffrey@theassemblync.com.