On the menu today: Examining the likely consequences of the embarrassing scandals of Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, remembering that GOP primary voters’ habit of picking terrible candidates predates Donald Trump’s arrival in the world of politics, and contemplating three reactions to Nancy Pelosi’s recent insistence that “Joe Biden is the most consequential president of modern times.”
The GOP Stumbles in North Carolina
Thursday, in a gang tackle that the 1985 Chicago Bears would envy, CNN and Politico exposed two separate deeply embarrassing sexual scandals of Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina. CNN revealed comments made by Robinson on a pornographic website’s chat board that Caligula would probably find weird, and Politico found Robinson’s email registered on Ashley Madison, a website designed for married people seeking affairs.
“Let me reassure you the things that you will see in that story, those are not the words of Mark Robinson,” Robinson said in a short video released on Twitter. “You know my words, you know my character, and you know that I have been completely transparent in this race and before.” He dismissed the not-yet-released CNN story as “salacious tabloid trash.”
I haven’t heard a Republican speak about himself in the third person so emphatically since Bob Dole. We should note that CNN reported, “Robinson listed his full name on his profile for Nude Africa” — the pornographic forum in question — “as well as an email address he used on numerous websites across the internet for decades.” This was long before Robinson was a public figure, making it unlikely anyone was impersonating him.
As for the Ashley Madison allegation, an adviser to Robinson, granted anonymity to speak freely, “confirmed to Politico that the email address in question belongs to Robinson, but denied that Robinson had created an account on the affair-seeking site.”
Conservative radio talk-show host Erick Erickson said that a number of North Carolina Republicans had heard rumors, but not enough specifics, about skeletons in Robinson’s closet:
Last year, at the Gathering [a conservative event], I endorsed Mark Walker for governor of North Carolina. Several consultants told me there were lots of bad things that would come out about Robinson including “weird online sex stuff” or something like that.
I knew the rumors. I did not know the substance. It could have been idle gossip. But it appears now, before the primary, there was a real hint of something that Republicans knew. On top of that, it became clear Trump was going to endorse Robinson and the consultants in North Carolina did not think old “weird online sex stuff” would stop the Trump endorsement.
So they went into do no harm mode and kept their mouths shut.
Let’s begin with a point that will probably get lost in the hubbub of Robinson’s twin scandals. Yes, once again, Republican primary voters examined their options in a high-stakes competitive primary and rejected two “normie” options — the two-term state treasurer and a veteran trial lawyer — in favor of an egregiously flawed candidate with easily foreseeable problems in a general election. Donald Trump’s early endorsement — he weighed in in June 2023, even though the primary was in March 2024! — effectively sealed the deal for Robinson.
But this phenomenon long predates Trump and his MAGA movement. Even if Trump has accelerated this self-destructive Republican habit, like Billy Joel, he didn’t start the fire.
Before Trump there were Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada in 2010 and Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana in 2012. All winnable races against vulnerable Democrats, all fumbled away by a GOP nominee with glaring problems in communication and character who was unprepared for the kind of scrutiny that comes with running for a U.S. Senate seat.
Back in 2017, libertarian-minded GOP Kentucky representative Thomas Massie shared a depressing, and likely accurate, assessment about GOP primary voters’ preferences: “I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a b**** in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”
“The craziest SOB” may well be able to win a general election in a deep-red House district, or even win statewide in a sufficiently red state. But North Carolina is reddish-purple. Four of the last five governors have been Democrats. Kay Hagan and John Edwards have represented the state in the U.S. Senate in the not-so-distant past. Obama won the state in 2008. Trump won it by just three percentage points in 2016 and about one percentage point in 2020.
And this year, North Carolina is about as close as it can get. In both the RealClearPolitics average and the 538 average, Trump is ahead of Kamala Harris by one-tenth of one percentage point. Trump doesn’t have any room for error.
Will Robinson cost Trump North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes? And if Trump doesn’t win North Carolina, can he reach 270 electoral votes?
Politico reported, “An internal poll conducted for Trump’s campaign found Robinson running 14 percentage points behind [Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh] Stein, while Trump was leading Harris by 3 points in North Carolina, according to a person with knowledge of the poll. Public polling has also shown Robinson consistently behind Stein, in some cases by as much as 14 points.”
One report indicates the Trump campaign now doesn’t want Robinson anywhere near its events:
Also according to the anonymous source, earlier this week leaders in the Trump campaign privately told Robinson that he was not welcome at rallies for Trump or vice presidential candidate JD Vance. He was slated to speak at the Vance appearance on Wednesday, but his office announced that Robinson had tested positive for COVID.
Alas, the Harris campaign has no shortage of video of Trump singing Robinson’s praises. At a rally in March, Trump called Robinson, “Martin Luther King on steroids” and “Martin Luther King times two.”
We talk about “down-ballot effects,” but you rarely hear discussion about “up-ballot effects.” You rarely hear a voter saying, “My town councilman is a corrupt jerk, so I’m not going to vote for his party’s nominee for governor.”
Robinson is a gigantic problem for the Tarheel State GOP in this regard. Every news segment talking about his Nazi, slavery, and transsexual porn fetishes — a sequence of words I did not think I would ever write in this newsletter — is time that isn’t being spent talking about any other issue that would improve Republican odds in the state.
Every Republican in the state is now forced to weigh in; as our Audrey Fahlberg reports, the North Carolina state GOP is sticking by him:
“Mark Robinson has categorically denied the allegations made by CNN but that won’t stop the Left from trying to demonize him via personal attacks,” the state party’s statement reads. . . . “The Left needs this election to be a personality contest, not a policy contest because if voters are focused on policy, Republicans win on Election Day.”
But some North Carolina Republicans may not be all that eager to run to the ramparts to defend a guy who looked like a near-certain loser — on both RCP and 538 — even before all of yesterday’s bombshells.
One of the state’s two GOP senators, Ted Budd, said, “The comments reported in the article are disgusting. Mark Robinson says they are not from him. He needs to prove that to the voters.”
The state’s other GOP senator, Thom Tillis, didn’t quite come out and say Robinson’s toast and it’s time for the state party to cut its losses, but . . . well, read his statement for yourself:
It was a tough day, but we must stay focused on the races we can win. We have to make sure President Trump wins [North Carolina] and support the outstanding GOP candidates running for key [North Carolina General Assembly] and judicial races. If Harris takes [North Carolina], she takes the White House. We can’t let that happen.
I can hear frustrated Republicans asking, “Why don’t last-minute sex-scandal revelations ever hurt the Democrats?” They do! Tillis is probably a U.S. senator because of a late-breaking Democratic sex scandal:
By all accounts, Democrat Cal Cunningham was on his way to beating Republican Sen. Thom Tillis in 2020 and delivering that 51st Democratic seat. That was until his tryst with the wife of a wounded combat veteran went public, soiling his carefully crafted clean image and wrecking his campaign.
Election data now confirms the anecdotal evidence suggesting Cunningham’s affair was the decisive moment in the campaign: Over 157,000 more North Carolinians voted for a third-party candidate in the U.S. Senate race than in the races for president or governor. Tillis’ pollster and national data gurus, including 538’s Nate Silver, say the affair made the difference.
If Tillis hadn’t won that race — by less than 2 percent! — there wouldn’t have been a 50-50 Senate starting in January 2021. Without a 50-50 Senate, West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin and Arizona Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema would’ve had considerably less leverage. A significant portion of the Biden administration’s domestic agenda had to be retooled and trimmed to placate Manchin and Sinema.
In other words, Cunningham’s libido may well have altered the direction of national policy for the first two years of the Biden presidency.
Note that midnight was the deadline for Robinson to withdraw from the race. He refused to do so even though he’s effectively toast, and he may well bring down the odds of Trump winning the state as a result.
What will be the consequences of Mark Robinson’s actions?
ADDENDUM: As discussed on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch episode, at a recent event, Nancy Pelosi insisted, “Joe Biden is the most consequential president of modern times.”
I imagined the reactions to that statement in a particular home of the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C., a home in Chappaqua, N.Y., and down in Plains, Ga.