In North Carolina, another fiery MAGA candidate struggles with swing voters

Both parties have seen North Carolina as competitive all year, top to bottom — with a brief exception this summer, when Joe Biden went into freefall.

Republicans point out that polling wildly underestimated them in 2020. So do Democrats, who are hoping to ward off complacency. It doesn’t matter that Stein outraised Robinson; it may not matter that the incumbent Republican superintendent of education lost her primary to a political neophyte who posted (again, on Facebook) about televising the execution of Barack Obama.

“I think it’s tighter than what a lot of the polls indicate,” said Stein, who leads Robinson in an average of recent polls by 9 points; he won both of his races for attorney general by less than half of one percentage point. “The race is going to be tight to the very end. It’s just how elections are in North Carolina. They are just not blowout elections, and that’s true at the gubernatorial level, it’s true at the presidential level.”

Still, Stein had a strategy for Robinson, and he’s executed it: Unleash ads about his years of right-wing statements, and never let up. A typical TV spot features women looking on with shock Robinson’s abortion comments play, along with a clip from a Washington Post story on his social media posts “making light of sexual assault and domestic violence.” Democratic ads have generally focused more on audio and video clips of Robinson, while negative news stories have highlighted the Facebook posts.

His opponent has tried to reframe his candidacy in response. Last month, Robinson responded with a surprising ad that described, for the first time, how he and his wife once made the “very difficult decision” to have an abortion — part of an effort to portray his current anti-abortion stance, which he said included “common-sense exceptions,” as less judgmental towards women. More recently, he’s taken a page from Trump and Vance, describing the Democratic attacks as desperate and irrelevant.

“They want to ask me questions about what I said on Facebook 10 years ago,” Robinson said in Mooresville, in a riff he’d use at every Thursday campaign stop.“Let me ask you a question. When this state was dead broke, couldn’t pay its bills, was that because of what somebody said on Facebook?”

At crowded campaign stops, Robinson never mentioned abortion at all. His fame preceded him; dozens of Republican attendees brought baseball caps for him to sign, some held up phones so he could record messages for their kids, and plenty said they’d been fans since “the NRA video.” A few wore shirts that read “We Are the Majority,” the title of Robinson’s memoir, published When he spoke, he warned that Stein could “repeat history” and ruin the economy that had grown since Republicans won the state Assembly in 2010, a majority they’ve locked in with favorable gerrymanders.

In a few ways, Robinson also moderated his rhetoric. He’d done so for weeks; Robinson’s speech at the RNC reintroduced him as a small businessman who’d struggled with inflation, not the pulpit-pounder in Democratic ads. At a stop at Newton’s B-52s American Bar and Grill, where photographs of veterans papered the walls, he promised to root DEI and CRT out of schools, but did not repeat a line about teachers as “wicked people” who could mislead children.

“Teachers did not create the situation that they’re working in,” he said, promising to improve test scores — with little detail, in a 10-minute speech. “They’re not paid well, they’re not respected, they’re not protected.”

Outside the bar, two dozen local Democrats had gathered to mock Robinson. Some of their signs referred to a brand-new story in The Assembly, which alleged that the candidate was a regular at porn shops (“Stick to What You Know: Porn and Pizza”), and some to the “skirt down” remark.

Their own campaigns promise competence and continuity; the economic good times that Robinson wants to continue have happened under Gov. Roy Cooper, a term-limited Democrat, and Stein’s predecessor as AG. Stein is promising to keep things largely as they are: Medicaid expansion intact, further abortion limits vetoed.

The two Democrats have markedly different skill sets, biographies, and drawls; Stein’s mellowness includes a G-rated alteration to one of Kamala Harris’s slogans, from “when we fight, we win” to “when we work, we win.” This is not a candidate who wants “fiery” to be attached to headlines about his speeches.

Anderson Clayton, the chair of the state Democratic Party, said that she knew voters who would stick with Trump despite concerns about his temperament, but were less worried about a Gov. Stein than a President Harris and more willing to break with the party as a result.

“Donald Trump has said crazy-ass shit, so why would you vote for him for president?” Clayton recalled asking one voter. “But he’s just gonna vote for Trump and skip the governor’s race. I think you’re gonna find a lot of Republican voters that do that in the state.”

Since Donald Trump came to dominate the GOP, candidates with the same say-anything profile have often struggled to recreate what works for him. One obvious reason: They haven’t been famous for decades, building fan bases who don’t see them first as political figures and give them leeway as a result. Another: They’re running in the world Trump built, where the conservative Supreme Court has made abortion a voting issue in every state.

That’s the underlying challenge for North Carolina Republicans, led by Robinson. After Republicans in Raleigh convinced a Democrat to switch parties, she gave them the votes to pass a 12-week abortion ban. Robinson has said that he favors a six-week ban, while Democrats warn that he’d sign a total ban, but even the six-week “heartbeat” limit has been criticized by Trump himself, multiple times.

Anecdotally, I’d heard of voters who were so put off by Robinson that they were reluctant to support the Republican ticket; that Robinson was dragging Trump down, too. If there’s truth to that, it’s largely because of the Dobbs decision. Robinson is a natural anti-politician, and has adopted the Trump line that record matters more than rhetoric; I heard him mention, to one voter, the bumper sticker joke that Trump offered “mean tweets and $2 gas.”

But he had no political profile before 2018, and voters only know him as a pro-life conservative who’d say outrageous things on Facebook. He may not hurt Trump in North Carolina, but like Vance, he’s revealed which part of Trump’s agenda and style can lose votes when they’re not connected to the host of “The Apprentice.”

“North Carolina is always a competitive state when voters put their jersey on,” said Matt Mercer, a spokesman for the NC GOP. “When Harris was installed, it accelerated that move sooner.”

Republicans have been in a similar position here before, and recently; Democrats have won and lost close statewide races after leading in the polls by portraying the GOP as the party of culture war. But the GOP didn’t abandon a traditional ground game in 2020, and it had a robust infrastructure everywhere, which has helped Robinson and other candidates who Democrats see as vulnerable and easily caricatured. “Republicans in our state understand what it takes to win statewide and we’re putting in the work to get out the vote and protect the ballot.”