Robinson v. Stein offers a stark contrast
Joe Biden’s sharpest barb at the White House Correspondents’ dinner was about him running against a six year old.
The Guardian this morning uses a few more words for characterizing the “former factory worker” who rose from obscurity to serve as North Carolina’s Republican lieutenant governor. Mark Robinson is his party’s candidate for governor this November. It might be news that Republicans selected a Black candidate to run against state Attorney General Josh Stein. But if Donald Trump is a six year-old, it’s less clear how one might describe Robinson:
Born into poverty and working in a furniture factory while attending college, Robinson quit his job and dropped out of school to begin speaking at conservative events. (Robinson, if he wins, would be the first North Carolina governor without a college degree elected since 1937.)
Robinson beat a host of competitors for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 2020, winning about a third of the primary vote. He faced the state representative Yvonne Holley, an African American Democrat from Raleigh. Holley’s campaign focused on North Carolina’s urban territory while largely ignoring rural areas of the state, while Robinson barnstormed through each of the state’s 100 counties. He won narrowly but outperformed Trump’s margin over Biden by about 100,000 votes.
That’s not headline news. Democrat Roy Cooper outperformed both Trump and Biden to win the governorship. That’s how state elections here roll. State voters have a moderate streak and a history of ticket-splitting when it comes to local vs. national races. Republicans find in Robinson a candidate “who could not be easily accused of bigotry.” On his face (literally), Robinson appeared to provide Republicans with some cover against such accusations, “until people began to pay attention to what he said,” the Guardian reports.
Such as?
Robinson has shared conspiracist comments about the moon landing and 9/11. He has attacked the idea of women in positions of leadership. His swipes at Black culture and public figures are talk-radio fodder, describing Barack Obama as a “worthless anti-American atheist” and suggesting Michelle Obama is a man.
“Half of black Democrats don’t realize they are slaves and don’t know who their masters are. The other half don’t care,” he wrote in one Facebook post. He described the movie Black Panther in another as the product of “an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist”, and wrote: “How can this trash, that was only created to pull the shekels out of your schvartze pockets, invoke any pride?”, using a derogatory Yiddish word to refer to Black people.
While the literati celebrating themselves last night in Washington, D.C. aimed (mostly) good-natured jokes at each other last night, Robinson isn’t joking.
The antisemitism of that comment is not singular. He has repeated common antisemitic tropes about Jewish banking, posted Hitler quotes on Facebook and suggested the Holocaust was a hoax. “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” wrote Robinson, with scare quotes around the figure.
Robinson’s Democratic opponent, Stein, could be the rapidly growing state’s first Jewish governor.
The two present a sharp contrast in policy, temperament and experience. After graduating from both Harvard Law and the Harvard Kennedy school of government, Stein managed John Edwards’ successful Senate campaign. Stein then served in the statehouse before winning the attorney general’s race in 2016, becoming the first Jewish person elected to statewide office in North Carolina.
Stein, 57, is running as a conventional center-left Democrat. At a stump speech in pastoral Scotland county near the South Carolina line, Stein focused on fighting the opioid-addiction epidemic, the state’s backlog of untested rape kits, clean drinking water and early childhood education. But he had some words about Robinson’s rhetoric.
“The voters of North Carolina have an unbelievably stark choice before them this November, between two competing visions,” Stein said in an interview. “Mine is forward and it’s inclusive. It’s about tapping the potential of every person so that they have a chance to succeed where we have a thriving economy, safe neighborhoods, strong schools.
What’s more, if the controversy over North Carolina’s infamous “bathroom bill” (HB 2) is any indicator, electing Robinson could be an economic hit for the Tar Heel State. The Associated Press estimated the law could cost the state “upward of $3.7 billion in sports/entertainment and business revenue over the next 12 years,” the Washington Post reported in 2017. Forbes in November 2016 estimated the state had “flushed away” perhaps “$630 million in lost business in the bill’s first eight months in effect. It helped cost Gov. Pat McCrory (R) reelection.
It’s not an economy voters might want to turn over to Robinson. The firmly anti-abortion Robinson’s finances have been in the headlines lately while Stein’s have not.
In one of Robinson’s three bankruptcy filings, reporters discovered that he had failed to file income taxes between 1998 and 2002. Questions have been raised about personal expenses charged to campaign funds from the 2020 race.
His wife shuttered a nutrition non-profit after a conservative blogger began to raise questions about the Robinson family’s financial dependence on government contracts. Reporters later learned that the North Carolina department of health and human services is investigating the firm for questionable accounting.
[…]
Robinson acknowledged in 2022 paying for an abortion for his wife 33 years earlier.
The question is whether Robinson’s full-throated anti-abortion stance hinders not just his own candidacy but that of Trump. Planned Parenthood plans to double its spending in North Carolina, to $10m, with an eye on defending the governorship and ending a veto-proof Republican legislative majority. Trump, meanwhile, has backed away from publicly endorsing the most extreme abortion bans.
No guarantees, but Trump and his 88 criminal charges and Robinson with his past statements and business history could bring out the moderate in North Carolina’s electorate this November.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.