Dem
49
GOP
51
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson's (R-NC) hopes of being promoted to governor, which weren't great even before he got outed on a porn site as a "Black Nazi" who approves of slavery and thinks Martin Luther King Jr. was a "coon," are getting fainter by the day. Yesterday was chock full of bad news for him.
To wit, much of his senior campaign staff resigned en masse yesterday morning. Then, the Republican Governors Association announced they would be making no further ad buys on his behalf, which is not the usual procedure in a purple state. Then, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) announced he was disembarking from the SS Nude Africa (in honor of Robinson's favorite XXX site), and would not be voting for the Lieutenant Governor. As they say, when you've lost Thom Tillis, you've lost America.
Robinson, for his part, is trying to fight back... sorta? He has loudly denied that the problematic porn postings (PPPs?) were his doing. A group of pro-Robinson tech experts offered to help him prove that the messages weren't his, and he declined. Hmmmmm, wonder why. He did threaten to sue CNN over the report that launched this latest round of controversy. Sounds like someone who's innocent, right?
There's little doubt that the gubernatorial race is over; the much more momentous question is whether Robinson will drag down the presidential ticket, and potentially cost Donald Trump the state's 16 EVs. If so, that would be dangerously close to unsurvivable for the former president, even if he took Pennsylvania. To put a finer point on it, if you take the Biden states, and give Trump Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and then give Kamala Harris North Carolina, then Harris wins the election with 278 EVs. So, it's no surprise that Trump is now pretending that he does not know Mark Robinson and never heard of Mark Robinson.
The Harris campaign's strategy, which they shared in detail with CNN, is to ignore the stuff about Nazis and MLK Jr. and slavery. Team Harris thinks Robinson is already toxic, and will remain so for the balance of the campaign, without any input from them. Their task will be to join Robinson and Trump as firmly at the hip as is possible. So, if you live in or near the Tar Heel State, get ready for a barrage of commercials featuring video of all the times Trump and Robinson appeared together, and all the times Trump has said complimentary things about Robinson. The Trump-Robinson connection will also be a major theme of Democratic campaign events in the state. We will be very interested to see what happens with polling in the state; at the moment, the FiveThirtyEight polling average of North Carolina has Trump up 0.5%. (Z)