Opinion | The Governor’s Race You Cannot Ignore

Partisan hit jobs. Left-wing smears. That’s how Mark Robinson’s aides characterize any attention to his diatribes against Jewish people, gay people, women. They want voters in North Carolina, where he is the Republican nominee for governor, to see him as just another conservative whose straight talk and religiousness come under predictable fire from the ambassadors of wokeness. Nothing to see here, folks, nothing but the usual disdain for MAGA might.

That’s a lie as big as any in an epoch of epic fabulism. And Robinson’s fate will be an especially revealing referendum on just how much, in the America of 2024, tribalism trumps common sense and common decency and voters tune out the truth.

The governor’s race pits Robinson, who’d be North Carolina’s first Black governor, against Josh Stein, the Democrat, who’d be its first Jewish one. To go by polls, it’s a dead heat. But the Stein campaign has only just begun its advertising blitz and three weeks ago released a whopper of an ad that spotlights Robinson’s 2019 remark that abortion “is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”

Robinson’s rants — mocking Paul Pelosi after he was attacked, suggesting that Michelle Obama is a man — are that hateful. And they’re the very foundation of his improbable political career: He was elected lieutenant governor of North Carolina in 2020 almost solely on the basis of a single speech in opposition to sensible restrictions on firearms. His work history included nothing — zilch — that prepared him for political leadership. But he could shout. He could spew.

He has spewed less of late. Ambition can be a gag. But his extremism remains so close to the surface that Paul Shumaker, a Republican strategist in North Carolina, was recently quoted in New York magazine as predicting that “Donald Trump will unendorse Mark Robinson by the time we get to Labor Day.”

Robinson should, indeed, be poison in this purple state. He should be struggling, too, given Stein’s bona fides: eight years as the state’s attorney general, before which he served in the State Senate and was a top aide to John Edwards in the U.S. Senate. There’s not a whiff of extremism about him. But late last month, The Cook Political Report changed its assessment of the Stein-Robinson race from leans Democratic to tossup. In any other year, I’d be shocked. In this one? I’m just terrified.