Some North Carolina Republicans have all but counted their party out of the governor’s race in the crucial battleground state this year.
The polls keep looking worse for Republican candidate Mark Robinson, who’s been marked with scandal after scandal (the most recent being a salacious report about his frequent visits to an adult film store, which he denies). All told, several veteran party operatives think the feat of saving his campaign seems more futile by the day. And Democrats, who predicted it all, are rubbing it in.
“For Robinson to win, he will need to be on offense for a consistent period or for Trump to considerably overperform his 2016 margin,” Republican strategist Doug Heye, who has long warned that Robinson would be toxic in a general election, told NOTUS. “Not impossible, but neither of those seem likely.”
The likelihood of either scenario only decreases as time runs out in the election.
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With two months remaining, Vice President Kamala Harris has largely closed the gap Joe Biden faced against Donald Trump in North Carolina before exiting the presidential race. In the governor’s race, it is Robinson’s controversies that have colored the election thus far, repeatedly drawing a national audience to North Carolina. There’s a video and audio of him supporting a no-exceptions total abortion ban, despite his public stances supporting the state’s current restrictions after 12-week. He also suggested to a church congregation in 2022 that Christians should be “led by men” rather than women. Robinson has spent much of the past month walking back potentially damaging information about himself while lagging by double digits in the polls.
Meanwhile, his opponent, Attorney General Josh Stein, has leaned into his party’s early investment. Democrats have spent $46.4 million on ads for the governor’s race in the general election so far, more than twice as much as Republicans, who spent $20.4 million, according to AdImpact. Currently, Democrats have put down $16.2 million in ad reservations from now through Election Day, while Republicans lag with only $1 million in reserved advertising. (An even larger gap exists in the presidential race, with Democrats reserving $30.5 million in ads to Republicans’ $1.1 million.)
This gulf is particularly frustrating to the North Carolina Republicans who never supported Robinson — even very early on in the primary.
Former state prosecutor Bill Graham, who ran against Robinson in the 2024 primary, told NOTUS he agreed with Democrats “that Robinson was their best chance to win,” and he was ignored.
“I said this would happen over and over again, and so I don’t know why it’s a surprise to people,” Graham said. “He can’t moderate his positions now because, at this point, the average voter has a decidedly set opinion about him. And the hits keep coming.”
Several Republicans questioned whether there was ever a strategy for Robinson’s campaign to prepare itself for the attacks everyone in the state knew were coming for the Republican candidate.
Paul Shumaker, a veteran Republican strategist who supported Graham’s campaign, pointed out an ad Stein released in August highlighting his work to clear North Carolina’s rape kit backlog. It followed a June ad, paid for by Republicans, that claimed that “on Stein’s watch, rapes in North Carolina are up 53%” and he released violent criminals from prison early.
“Stein’s campaign is out there being proactive and addressing their vulnerabilities and laying a foundation to inoculate themselves in case that turned out to be bad for them,” Shumaker said. “So where was the Mark Robinson campaign strategy to inoculate itself from his past?”
“As far as for swing voters, there was little to no definition for Mark Robinson coming out of the primary, and the Josh Stein campaign has done a very effective job of defining him to that universal swing voter first,” he added.
Robinson’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
His campaign did, however, make a significant shift last month on Robinson’s stance on abortion. After previously expressing support for a total ban and then later a six-week ban, Robinson released an ad stating that he stood by North Carolina’s current law, which bans abortion after 12 weeks and provides exceptions for the life of the mother, incest and rape.
Nonetheless, even Robinson has acknowledged the race slipping further out of reach due to Democrats’ advantage, predicting two weeks ago that “if nothing changes on the fundraising front, not only do we risk losing this race, but the White House too.”
Democrats say Robinson is scrambling at this point.
“That’s just him trying to tie himself closer to Trump so that when you support Trump, you support him,” North Carolina Senate Democratic Leader Dan Blue told NOTUS. “That’s a ploy that you use to get yourself close to a candidate that you think is more popular than you.”
Democratic strategists predict Robinson will have trouble “cutting through the noise” as he continues to face attacks while asking for the GOP’s help in his campaign, echoing Shumaker’s acknowledgment that Democrats lead the messaging war.
“There was a big opportunity to define him early without potentially damaging him becoming the general election candidate,” Philip Shulman, spokesperson for the liberal PAC American Bridge, said. “He’s going to have to spend the next two months pushing back against what he has said in the past instead of talking about his own message.”
Former Republican North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr, who broke away from the party following the events of Jan. 6, told NOTUS that it’s Trump’s desire for a candidate who is a loyalist to him that often leads to someone unqualified to run a winning campaign.
“On the statewide ballot, Robinson just exemplifies extremism,” Orr said. “He plays right into the Democratic theme that Republicans are a bunch of extremists, especially when you add Trump at the top and Dan Bishop for attorney general.”
“It ain’t over till it’s over,” Orr said of the election, “but it’s hard to see how there could be a big shift in voter attitudes.”
Not all Republicans in the state are counting Robinson out. At least one GOP county chair in the state told NOTUS that they believed Stein’s ability to capture two-term Gov. Roy Cooper’s winning coalition of Democratic, independent and Republican voters was overestimated.
“Stein is like Cooper on steroids, and I don’t know how many fans he has,” Polk County GOP Chair Robin Wierzbicki said. “Cooper made a lot of people feel safe during COVID, and that got him a lot of votes, even with Trump winning here. But that’s not going to be an issue this time, and it will be very different.”
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Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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