How Democrats tied Mark Robinson to NC GOP candidates — and why it didn’t trip up Trump
North Carolina Democrats' strategy going into the 2024 election was to use the "extreme" words of their opponents against them.
In May, the first ad of the gubernatorial race showed Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a Republican, looking into the camera and saying, "abortion in this country is not about protecting the life of mothers. It's about killing a child because you weren't responsible enough to keep your skirt down."
It then adds audio of Robinson saying, "It's not your body anymore."
"That was not just about abortion," said Morgan Jackson, a top Democratic campaign consultant in North Carolina. "That's about disrespecting and being demeaning to women. This is the guy ... who says, 'women can't lead' and 'some people need killing' — all those crazy things."
It was effective.
As results flooded in Tuesday evening, it became clear that former President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate hoping to take back the White House, was the strong favorite to win North Carolina.
But Democrats defeated Republicans in some of the top Council of State races, like Robinson's, where candidates were among Trump's fiercest supporters.
So what happened?
Split ticket voting
Democrats and Republicans had very mixed reactions on Tuesday's outcomes.
"We are thrilled for President Trump's success and third victory in North Carolina, which is the largest of his three previous victories," said Jason Simmons, chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party. "And then, obviously we're disappointed in some of the results that we saw from great candidates."
But Simmons revels in knowing that Republicans took control of the White House, the Senate, potentially the House, both chambers in the state legislature and additional seats on the state's top courts.
And Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, celebrated the successes his party saw on the ballot.
Trump pulled ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in North Carolina by more than 3 points, earning the state's 16 electoral votes. But Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat running to replace Cooper, surpassed Robinson in the race for the governor's mansion by nearly 15 points.
Republicans maintained their seats as commissioners of agriculture, insurance and labor, and state treasurer, and they picked up the state auditor's office. But Democrats kept their control over the offices of attorney general and secretary of state and added those of superintendent of public instruction and lieutenant governor.
"The presidential results weren't what we wanted but in several critical state races we beat back extremism and elected strong leaders who will move North Carolina forward," Cooper said in a written statement to McClatchy. "Josh Stein, Rachel Hunt, Jeff Jackson, Mo Green and Elaine Marshall will lead our state with a positive vision for years to come. And breaking the Republican supermajority in the state House will help prevent bad legislation and leverage good bills that improve the lives of North Carolinians."
Fourteen counties in North Carolina split their ballots between the Republican candidate for president and the Democratic candidate for governor, including Alamance, Anson, Brunswick, Cabarrus, Franklin, Granville, Henderson, Jackson, Lee, Lenoir, Martin, Nash, Scotland and Transylvania.
Many of those are rural counties where it feels unheard-of for voters not to support the Republican nominee.
But it was clear as far back as June that Democrats' ads were resonating with voters.
At the 301 Endless Yard Sale that brings vendors to a miles-long stretch of Eastern North Carolina along U.S. 301, McClatchy spoke with Kathy Levinger , a Republican from Selma, and a staunch Trump supporter who was disturbed by Robinson's comments.
"He needs to change his wording about the skirt, because we women, we can't help but wear skirts and it takes two to conceive," Levinger said while shopping at the sale. "The male is just as guilty as the female. It's just a matter of being responsible and doing the responsible thing."
It also didn't help that Robinson and his wife had an abortion themselves .
Jason Husser, director of the Elon University Poll, said he could trace Robinson's original poor performance in polls back to this: "I think abortion was a big part of it," Husser said. "And seeming like a hypocrite as well."
Blaming Robinson
Including governor, Republicans lost five Council of State races to Democrats, splitting the council evenly between the parties.
And Husser places the blame on Robinson.
"To me the biggest explanation of why Trump did better than many other Republicans in North Carolina are likely to be down-ballot coattails from Mark Robinson," Husser said. "The candidates that Democrats were most able to connect with Robinson seems to be the ones that did the worst."
Robinson enjoyed a meteoric rise in politics . He quickly went from factory worker in Greensboro who went viral in 2018 for chiding the city council for canceling a gun show following a school shooting to becoming the lieutenant governor of the state in 2021.
And Trump embraced Robinson wholeheartedly giving him a national platform, providing him a prime speaking slot at this year's Republican National Convention and labeling him "Martin Luther King on steroids."
And while Robinson has always been known for controversial statements he's made against groups of people including women, the LGBTQ+ community, Black people, Jews and Muslims, he maintained a loyal following.
But Trump immediately distanced himself from Robinson in September after CNN published a piece about racist and raunchy statements Robinson allegedly made on a porn forum called Nude Africa. Robinson denies the posts came from him.
Husser said the report isn't what caused Robinson to lose, but it didn't help.
"We were finding here at Elon, as well as just me looking at aggregates of polls, that it probably lost him about 5 points," Husser said. "And given the margins, he still would have probably lost by 5 to 10 points."
Last-minute spending
Republicans said Robinson's scandal allowed Democrats to turn their focus away from Stein's race and spend down-ballot.
In a news conference Wednesday afternoon, both Senate leader Phil Berger, a Republican from Eden, and the state's likely next House speaker, Destin Hall, a Republican from Lenoir, addressed why some of the party's candidates faltered.
"I think money, and they had a successful campaign of trying to tie candidates to the news about Mark Robinson," Berger said.
Hall, chairman of the House Rules Committee, said Democrats spent more than $4 million on House campaigns in the final weeks of the election.
Jordan Shaw, a top Republican political consultant, said it was all predictable and he was one of the people sounding alarm bells to the party that it would happen.
"It was predictable for those of us who saw it coming a long time ago, that it should have been a rout for Republicans up and down the ballot but instead, Stein was able to flush millions of dollars into the LG's race, the AG's race, in key legislative races," Shaw said. "And because of that, Republicans paid an incredibly high price for the Robinson debacle."
Ads tied candidates to Robinson
Husser said the airwaves were flooded with ads targeting the relationship of Robinson and candidates like Hal Weatherman, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, and U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, the Republican candidate for attorney general.
"In fact, that became sort of like the dominant ad that was out there, connecting these Council of State races," Husser said.
Jackson said it was one of the smartest plays Democrats made this cycle.
"We ran ads showing Dan Bishop saying, 'I'm for Mark Robinson, I want to be his sidekick,'" Jackson said.
U.S. Rep. Jeff Jackson defeated Bishop by nearly 3 points.
State Sen. Rachel Hunt, a Democrat and the daughter of former Gov. Jim Hunt, won the lieutenant governor vote against Weatherman by nearly 2 points.
Extreme candidates?
Morgan Jackson added that it also helped Democrats that Republicans "put forth the largest number of the most extreme slate in North Carolina history." And he said his slate was more appealing "in shared values of North Carolina voters than the Republican alternatives."
He also says he's never seen a statewide candidate have higher unfavorable ratings than Mark Robinson
Jackson adds that it was often said among Democrats that "Robinson did all the work" for them this election cycle by what he was willing to say on camera. "They just put the ads together."
And that was a strategy they used across the board in campaigns for races like the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and superintendent of public instruction.
"It was a slate that was compromised of election deniers, abortion banners and social media conspiracy theorists, and at the end of the day, we were able to take those actions and rhetorics and words that were being used by those candidates and disqualify them," Jackson said. "And that's how we won in a night that was really dark across the country."
He adds, when they weren't using Republicans' words against them, they were airing positive ads about a better future under Democratic candidates.
He said their blueprint for winning should be studied in other states.
But Simmons wasn't letting Democrats completely have that win.
"Democrats were able to direct significant funds to attack Republican candidates, and statewide judicial races," Simmons added. "Still, all they were able to net were just two of those contests — which speaks to the strength of President Trump and our ground game operation this election."
Husser said the impact Robinson's scandal had on races like auditor or treasurer were minimal because people just don't think about them as much and don't have as much information about them.
And Michele Morrow, the Republican running for superintendent of public instruction, had her own difficulties separate from Robinson, Husser said.
"She was going to have trouble regardless because of running for superintendent of public education, when you're not really a big fan of public education and participated in Jan. 6, and the other sort of extreme comments she's made over time."
The Trump factor
But that leaves a large question about Trump.
Trump has made extreme statements, too, some of them similar to the rhetoric of Robinson.
First, Jackson points out that there's no real point in second-guessing about North Carolina's role in Trump winning.
"It was a national Trump wave," Jackson said. "When you win all seven battlegrounds, it just is what it is, there's not a 'what went wrong here' in the presidential race, it's the same damn thing that went wrong in every state across the country that we lost."
But, Jackson said, the difference between Trump and candidates who emulate him is that Trump's brand "is bigger than life."
"Voters know exactly who Donald Trump was and ultimately voted him back in office," Jackson said. "A lot of these candidates were created from the MAGA movement that Trump started and they were made in his image and built in his image, but the difference is they weren't celebrities. They weren't billionaires. They didn't have 90% name ID brand with voters."
Jackson said Democrats seized on the fact that voters didn't know who many of the down-ballot candidates were.
"What we worked very hard to do was to get on TV first," Jackson said, "and in mailboxes and in digital first and set the stage, and we told the story of who these candidates were before they could tell it themselves, and so we put an imprint on them and were able to do that before they were able to introduce themselves to a broader audience, and so what voters knew about them were negative, and that's different than Trump."
