Why Kamala Harris might get coattails from the N.C. governor’s race
As well as Vice President Kamala Harris performed in delivering her acceptance speech at the DNC convention last Thursday night (introduced by North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper), I could not help feeling it might be Harris who benefits in North Carolina from coattails provided by Democrats’ candidate for governor, Attorney General Josh Stein. Pundits touted the race to replace term-limited Cooper as the must-watch governor’s contest in the country.
Stein is as competent a public servant as his MAGA Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Mark “some folks need killing” Robinson, is a train wreck. Robinson’s own statements are sinking him fast in the polls. So much so that veteran Democratic operative Thomas Mills wonders when his own party will stop throwing good money after Robinson’s floundering candidacy.
A lobbyist told Mills last summer that Republicans were giddy at having Robinson, a Black man, atop their statewide ticket. He would draw off enough Black votes in this narrowly divided state to make their retaking of the governor’s mansion a cinch. The NC GOP seems to have put as much effort into vetting Robinson as Donald Trump put into vetting J.D. Vance.
Mills writes:
A year later, Republicans are now deciding when to pull the plug on Robinson’s sinking ship. A SurveyUSA/High Point University poll that came out late last week shows Stein leading by fourteen points, 48-34. Two other polls released within the past two weeks show Robinson down by ten. The Real Clear Politics average, which ignores one of the polls showing him down by ten, has Robinson trailing by 8.7%. This late in the campaign, those are deficits hard to overcome.
Republicans are in a bind. They know that supporting Robinson is almost certainly throwing good money after bad, but if Robinson loses by too large a margin, he could sink other GOP candidates below him on the ballot. If they keep spending valuable resources on him, they’re just trying to keep the race from becoming a blowout. They don’t have good options.
Robinson hates LBGTQ+ people. He claims Democrats are communists. He blames women for unwanted pregnancies and wants a total, no-exceptions ban on abortions. Robinson believes the Civil Rights movement was a mistake, climate change is a “junk science,” etc. It’s as if a sous chef performed a reduction on Donald Trump and the concentrated result is Trump à la Robinson.
But it’s not just what he’s said that’s sinking Robinson, because there’s more:
Robinson has spent most of August trying to tell us that he didn’t really mean all those things he’s been saying for all those years. In order for him to win, he will have to recover from the self-inflicted wounds. Even if he could reverse the damage from what he’s already said about himself, it’s really too little too late.
Stein and company have just begun to unload on him. They aren’t going to let voters forget what Robinson said about himself and they also have plenty more ammunition to take him out. They haven’t even gotten to the fiscal mismanagement and corruption stuff yet.
Democrats would be wise to start wrapping the rest of the Council of State and judicial candidates around Robinson. They chose him to be the GOP standard bearer and now they should be forced to defend him. He should be the centerpiece of the campaign moving forward and they should use him to damage the Republican brand. Not only can they turn off swing voters to the GOP, they can suppress the Republican base, keeping turnout below 2020 levels.
With Robinson sinking fast and the Survey USA poll showing Harris up by a point in North Carolina (other N.C. polls show Harris with a lead between 1 and 3 points), “tanking Robinson” could depress GOP turnout enough to improve Democrats’ chances of flipping the state for Harris. Polling itself theses days is tough enough. Modeling the interaction between the presidential race and the gubernatorial contest even trickier. The Black voters Republicans once thought might help Robinson now could help Harris more.
Meantime (to add to the post just below), the RNC and state GOP officials are suing the State Board of Elections for the second time in a week alleging (without evidence) that large numbers of non-citizens are registering and voting illegally. The suit filed Monday seeks to purge a quarter million registrants from voter rolls within 90 days of the fall election, an action the Board asserts is itself illegal.
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