Even before North Carolina’s Republicans have chosen their 2024 gubernatorial nominee in next week’s March 5 primary, some Democrats are already kicking into general-election mode.
North Carolina Democratic donor Todd Stiefel unveiled this week a new website and advertising campaign aimed at satirizing the GOP’s gubernatorial front-runner, lieutenant governor Mark Robinson — “Mark Rottenson” — in this cycle’s open race for retiring Democratic governor Roy Cooper’s seat.
Stiefel plans to pour $1 million from his own pockets into the “Mark Rottenson” effort, which he said will target the lieutenant governor and a number of other candidates through November via his super PAC, Americans for Prosparody — a parody of the Koch brothers–backed group, Americans for Prosperity.
The North Carolina news site WRAL first reported on the effort on Thursday.
The “Meet Mark” tab of the parody website features doctored photos of “Rottenson” wearing a boater hat and large mustache with his mouth open staring into space, along with a store tab that links to parody items including a T-shirt that reads “Kwanzaa is Hanukkah on food stamps” and “Mark’s magical mirror for black people to see who is to blame for their problems” — references to memes and statements in the lieutenant governor’s old Facebook posts.
If Robinson wins the GOP gubernatorial nomination on Tuesday against businessman Bill Graham and state treasurer Dale Folwell, he is expected to face Democratic attorney general Josh Stein in November. That general-election race is already shaping up to be one of the most competitive and expensive gubernatorial races of the cycle.
In an interview with National Review on Thursday, Stiefel said the purpose of his anti-Robinson campaign is to “educate” voters about the GOP gubernatorial front-runner’s history of “sexist, homophobic, and religiously bigoted” remarks — which include calling Parkland school-shooting victims “media prosti-tots” and dismissing Marvel’s Black Panther as a film created by an “agnostic Jew” to “pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets.”
“We’re using a completely made-up silly name to make sure people don’t get confused,” Stiefel said of the “Mark Rottenson” for “Governot” effort.
The site also includes artificial intelligence-generated sound bites of the character reading excerpts from a parody memoir, including an “excerpt” in which an AI-generated “Rottenson” — whose voice sounds awfully similar to Robinson’s — says his wrestling name would be “the big banana.”
Stiefel insists that none of the altered pictures or AI-generated sound bites are meant to be racist tropes. “If there’s anything racist on our website, it’s the line that ‘black people achieve little,’ and ‘Kwanzaa is Hanukkah on food stamps,’ and ‘the NAACP are commies.’ And yeah, that stuff’s horribly racist, but we didn’t say that,” Stiefel said. “Those are quotes and paraphrases directly from Mark Robinson himself.”
Robinson’s campaign dismissed the website as a “typical Democrat smear campaign” that misleads voters. “Steifel’s low-rent website is full of fake clips and outrageous lies,” said Robinson spokesman Michael Longergan. “North Carolina voters will see right through it.”
Stiefel has donated thousands of dollars to Stein, Cooper, and President Joe Biden in recent years, public records show. (The Democratic donor made sure to point out in an interview that he has also given to two Republican candidates in the past: Utah senator Mitt Romney and former North Carolina state senate candidate Mario Lomuscio.)
The Stein campaign, for its part, disavowed the website in a statement to NR. “The Attorney General has worked tirelessly to protect consumers from AI scams, and any use of AI to mislead voters is unequivocally wrong and has no place in this campaign,” said Jeff Allen, the campaign manager for Josh Stein for North Carolina.
For roughly a year now, some North Carolina Republicans have quietly raised concerns that Robinson’s history of controversial comments and dicey campaign-finance history may hurt his chances with independent and suburban voters in November. One high-profile Republican who is publicly sounding the alarm on Robinson’s electability issues in November is North Carolina U.S. senator Thom Tillis, who endorsed businessman Bill Graham in the GOP gubernatorial primary back in December, as first reported by NR.
In a brief U.S. Capitol interview on Wednesday, Tillis again raised concerns to National Review about Robinson’s qualifications for the job, ability to win a general election against Stein, and potential drag on down-ballot Republican state legislative candidates this cycle.
“If you take a look at Robinson in the general, he’s gonna have his work cut out,” Tillis told NR. “Just objectively, there’s a lot of opposition research, there’s a lot of reasons why the Democrats would like to have him as the nominee.”
In a statement to NR, Robinson’s campaign brushed aside those electability concerns and pointed to head-to-head matchups suggesting the general election race is a dead heat between him and Stein.