‘We are staying in this race’: behind the unraveling of Mark Robinson’s campaign in North Carolina

Mark Robinson, North Carolina's tub-thumping Republican candidate for governor, had been trying to extricate himself from problems caused by his own words long before CNN dumped a truckload of dirt on him Thursday afternoon.

Robinson has treated outrage over his ever-increasing litany of racist, sexist, homophobic and antisemitic offense as a badge of honor during the course of the campaign and his term as the state's lieutenant governor. But CNN's report tilled his pornographic internet history, unearthing comments that still managed the power to shock.

CNN's report connects Robinson's name, email address and biographical details to the "minisoldr" persona, where Robinson described himself as a "Black NAZI!", praised Hitler, described Martin Luther King Jr in racially offensive terms, expressed sexual interest in transgender pornography and described peeping on girls in a public shower when he was 14.

"Slavery is not bad," Robinson reportedly wrote. "Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it [slavery] back. I would certainly buy a few."

CNN refrained from exposing the entirety of its findings because some of it was too disturbing to address in public, the news organization said.

Shortly before the report came out, Robinson claimed he would remain in the race. If Robinson did not drop out before midnight, he couldn't drop out; the deadline in North Carolina would have passed.

Knowing how the left has sought the removal of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas for receiving questionable largesse from billionaires, it was characteristic of Robinson to liken his situation to Thomas's "hi-tech lynching" 33 years ago over allegations of sexual misconduct with Anita Hill. "We're not going to let them do that. We are staying in this race. We're in it to win it," Robinson said.

But the bombastic candidate had already been facing a crushing defeat after a mix of resurfaced remarks and poor polling led the national Republican party, and Donald Trump, to back off from their support.

Robinson's apparent interest in transgender pornography stands in sharp contrast to his public opposition for trans rights. Calls for his resignation began in 2021 after comments surfaced in which he described education that discussed trans issues as "child abuse", LGBTQ+ content as "filth" and suggested that trans people should be arrested for using the wrong bathroom.

Robinson's opponent, the North Carolina attorney general, Josh Stein, has needed to do little more than saturate the airwaves and social media with campaign ads drawing on Robinson's own rhetoric, while speaking in broad positive terms about the state and his platform and reaffirming his support for reproductive rights.

"As your next governor, I will veto any further restrictions on reproductive freedom," Stein said at a rally in Greensboro for Kamala Harris.

Abortion policy is at the center of Robinson's appeal to the right and perhaps at the center of the electoral disaster unfolding for Republicans in North Carolina as well. Robinson's pro-life politics have not just been strident but defiant and accusatory.

In one recently unearthed video from a church sermon in 2022, he attacks women's empowerment and birth control. "Why don't you use some of that building up of your mind and building up of empowerment to move down here, to this region down here," he said, waving his hand around his crotch. "Get this under control."

Notably, Robinson has admitted to paying for an abortion for his then girlfriend, now wife, in the 80s, something he said he regrets. It is the stridency of his anti-abortion rhetoric that has kept North Carolina's religious right in his corner.

Lorra Parker lives in McDowell county, where Republicans have a three-to-one advantage. She went to hear Robinson speak last week. Though she has a broad set of conservative political interests, abortion policy was critical to her identity as a voter, she said. Even as Trump appeared to vacillate on this issue in the debate, he doesn't need to be the perfect candidate, just the better candidate.

She applies the same logic to Robinson. Now, she's reserving judgment while the reporting sorts itself out, she said.

"Honestly, I'd need to hear it from a source other than CNN," she said. "I think if he's not guilty of this, then he should fight to prove that he's not guilty of this. He's got time to do that. But he's been lieutenant governor for four years and they just found this out now? That's a little suspicious to me."

Robinson's public appearances and social media posts are a treasure trove of opposition research for Democrats painting their opponents as extremists.

On defense from all angles, Robinson went to ground shortly after winning the Republican primary earlier this year, refusing interviews with all but the most stridently conservative publications and broadcasters and largely avoiding public appearances.

But a strategy of riding Trump's coattails and counting on the state's generally conservative lean had been collapsing as waves of negative press - about his campaign finances, the maladministration of his wife's government-funded non-profit, and always his incendiary rhetoric - flooded the field.

Robinson has not led in a poll since June; even before CNN's revelations, the withdrawal of Joe Biden from the race in July threatened to turn a close race into a rout. The latest poll from Emerson College shows him losing to Stein by eight points.

So, Robinson resurfaced a few weeks ago. He had made tentative steps in small venues far from the scrutiny of big-market news reporters to test messaging that retained as much heat as possible without burning people: cayenne rhetoric, not Carolina Reaper.

On 11 September, the day after the Harris-Trump debate, Robinson stepped into the back room of Countryside Barbecue in cherry red Marion, North Carolina, looking for friendly territory and as much of a rhetorical rebrand as he might muster under fire.

His stump speech touched on gas prices and teacher salaries and state taxes - policy issues instead of the culture war molotov cocktails about abortion and guns and gay people which launched his career and won him the nomination.

But time and again, his attention turned to how the press and his Democratic opponent, had been lighting him up.

"We've got a guy named Josh Stein who wants to talk about any and everything except the truth," Robinson said. "He's got something about me from Facebook eight or nine years ago, where he cut it off just to play about three seconds of it. He didn't play the whole thing, something about 'keep your skirt down.'"

Robinson was referring to the wall-to-wall ads playing across the state replaying a Facebook video from 2009 in which he says abortion "is about killing the child because you weren't responsible enough to keep your skirt down".

"He cut off the part where he said 'or keep your pants up'," Robinson said to the conservative crowd last week, for whom that was convincing. Then he suggested that ad and others were deceptive. He called his opponent a liar. He dared the press to report it. He also demanded a debate, which Stein has been refusing.

Shades of the Robinson bluster lay under the fresh paint of respectability.

He spent almost as much time haranguing the president and vice-president in the mountain towns of western North Carolina as he did his actual opponent.

"The same one that was right there riding shotgun with [Biden] while he was doing it was on TV last night talking about how she was going to fix it all," Robinson said of Harris. "She tore it up, but she can't fix it. What policy has she ever championed since she's been in any office that will fix the problems that we're facing right now?"

Robinson has been walking back his previous, strident calls for a total abortion ban in North Carolina. Earlier this year, he argued for a six-week "heartbeat" law limiting abortion. Earlier this week, he argued for the public to "move on" from the abortion issue.

In a room packed with church-going Republicans in Marion, he said: "Everybody may have a different opinion on that.

"My opinion is this: no matter where that law sits, as the governor of this state, I'm going to fight to save every single solitary life in the womb. It doesn't matter whether it's 12 weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, 20 weeks - we're going to fight for life in this state.

In a reference to Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, Ohio senator and author of Hillbilly Elegy, some of Robinson's road team wore shirts printed with the words "Felon / Hillbilly".

The shirts reflect the tone of Robinson's race. He has tied himself for good or ill to Trump's tenor and politics. But even Trump's team has had enough.

According to the conservative Carolina Journal, the Trump campaign has been pressuring Robinson to withdraw, out of fear that North Carolina's election-deciding swing voters will not just abandon the lieutenant governor but the entire Republican ballot.

Citing anonymous campaign sources, the Carolina Journal reported that the Stein campaign leaked the material to CNN, and that the Trump campaign told Robinson that he was no longer welcome at rallies for Trump or Vance. Trump has not mentioned Robinson in the last week. Vance held his first solo rally in North Carolina on Wednesday. Robinson did not appear. His office announced that Robinson had contracted Covid-19.

Trump campaign officials denied that they had been pressuring Robinson to quit the race in comments to NBC.

The Stein campaign released a terse statement shortly after the CNN piece aired.

"North Carolinians already know Mark Robinson is completely unfit to be Governor," the campaign said. "Josh remains focused on winning this campaign so that together we can build a safer, stronger North Carolina for everyone."

The Harris campaign, however, has gleefully circulated videos with Trump praising Robinson. Trump referred to Robinson as "Martin Luther King Jr on steroids."

Robinson, in comments under his "minisoldr" persona, said: "I'm not in the KKK. They don't let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!"