Mark Robinson has been North Carolina’s lieutenant governor since 2021 and its Republican gubernatorial nominee. He said that he wants to serve on behalf of all North Carolinians, and has sketched out plans for the economy and education.
Over the course of a few years, Robinson has become a recognizable face of Trump’s MAGA movement, embracing the movement’s rhetoric, endorsing a full abortion ban, and defending the notion of “white pride.”
Several key staff members from Robinson’s campaign quit last month following a CNN report about posts on a porn website, and he’s trailing his Democratic rival, state Attorney General Josh Stein. Nonetheless, close to 40% of North Carolinians say that they would vote for the controversy-plagued candidate.
The September CNN investigation attributed to Robinson comments posted on an adult website’s message board more than a decade ago: “I’m a black NAZI!” “If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” “Get that fucking commie bastard [another reference to Martin Luther King, Jr.] off the National Mall!”
Robinson has denied that he made these remarks and has filed a lawsuit against CNN over the report, asserting that someone has “manufactured” what he has described as “salacious tabloid lies.” Additionally, a deeply conservative Black evangelical church in Raleigh continues to stand by him — its bishop has referred to the embattled lieutenant governor as “an upstanding man, a tremendous leader.”
But many Black residents are unconvinced.
“I’m appalled. The things he says are not only divisive but also hateful,” Becky Bell, a conflict consultant based in Wake Forest, told Capital B. “I’m absolutely floored. The rhetoric he has espoused doesn’t serve the communities he comes from. It’s mind-blowing.”
Robinson did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
A campaign sign for Republican North Carolina gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson rests on the grass in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene this month in Bat Cave, North Carolina.
Where did Robinson come from?
The MAGA movement embraced Robinson several years ago, with his political roots dating back to comments he made in 2018. During a Greensboro City Council meeting, he railed against the idea of scrapping a gun show after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people, including 14 students, dead.
“When are you all going to start standing up for the majority?” Robinson asked. “And here’s who the majority is: I’m the majority. I’m a law-abiding citizen who’s never shot anybody, never committed a serious crime, never committed a felony.”
He continued, “I’m going to come down here to this city council and raise hell, just like these loonies from the left do, until you listen to the majority of the people in this city.”
This speech went viral, seizing the attention of Republican leaders. Robinson quit his furniture factory job and leaned into public speaking. In 2018, he addressed the National Rifle Association’s annual convention, where Trump also made remarks.
Two years later, Robinson ran for lieutenant governor of North Carolina, winning the contest to become the first Black person to hold that office in the state’s history.
“Robinson was plucked from obscurity because his views were so MAGA-ish that the [Republican] primary crowds said, ‘This is the kind of guy we need in our politics,’” Theodore R. Johnson, a senior adviser at the public policy think tank New America and a scholar of Black political behavior, told Capital B. “And he took advantage of the opportunity.”
Black Republicans tend to fall into one of three categories, according to Johnson. There are those who are genuinely conservative, and the party aligns with their worldview; those who inherited the partisan label from their grandparents, who may have been Republicans in, say, the 1940s; and those who are opportunists who recognize that embracing a radical movement just might propel them into political office.
Robinson falls into this last category, Johnson said.
This approach might call to mind Herschel Walker. The former football star turned MAGA star made headlines in 2022, when he challenged U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia for his seat (and ultimately lost).
Buoyed by Trump’s support, Walker sailed through his party’s primary, delivering broadsides against transgender athletes and “wokeness.” Johnson told CNN in 2022 that he appeared interested not in serious ideas or governing but instead in getting ahead swiftly in a MAGA-dominated party.
An attempted reset
As scrutiny of his candidacy has intensified, Robinson has sought to soften the jagged edges of his firebrand image.
During a small business luncheon in Charlotte in September, he talked about his little-known platform with an unusual amount of detail. He zoomed in on the economy and education, telling the crowd via a 15-minute speech that “tackling those two issues would take North Carolina to places it has not gone before.”
Robinson promised to strengthen the economy by making housing more affordable, reducing crime, and updating infrastructure. To do this, he would modernize the departments and agencies that affect these areas, such as the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.
He also vowed to advance public education by raising teachers’ pay and removing “political or social agendas from the classrooms” so that educators can hammer home the fundamentals: reading, writing, and arithmetic.
“Don’t let them tell you I’m going to go into office and be some wild, crazy culture warrior,” Robinson said, also saying during the event that it’s time to “move on” from the abortion discussion.
Robinson has long been a proponent of school choice.
In 2021, at the height of the anti-critical race theory backlash, he launched a task force giving students and parents a tool to report any “indoctrination” occurring at public schools.
In a statement at the time, the Education Justice Alliance said that families would be better served if Robinson used his task force to “look at real instances of inequities in our public schools,” including the disproportionate number of suspensions, expulsions, and law enforcement referrals Black students face.
(South Carolina over the summer became the third state, after Arkansas and Florida, to drop the College Board’s AP African American Studies course. But so far, the class seems to be expanding to more schools in North Carolina.)
On abortion access, Robinson is Draconian in his views on the subject. Recent audio reveals that he’s advocated for an abortion ban at “zero weeks.”
“As someone who unfortunately lost a baby prior to having my son, I would hate to be criminalized for something that I wanted so badly, that I still grieve to this day,” Raleigh-based mental health counselor Alesia Gilmore said. “For him to degrade women as if we’re nothing more than objects that create babies is disgusting.”
Can he ride a Trump wave?
Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are polling neck and neck in North Carolina. (Not since 2008 has the Democratic nominee won the state, which has a recent history of ticket-splitting and creating a divided government.) But even with Trump’s endorsement, Robinson’s rhetoric seems to have cost him.
“Unfortunately for Robinson, he’s not untouchable,” Johnson said.
After CNN’s story broke, state Republicans and members of Robinson’s own team began to panic about what to do about their nominee. Nearly 40% of North Carolinians say they want Robinson to be their next governor.
“There’s definitely been some movement against Robinson from folks who initially backed him, but most still seem to be supporting him. And I don’t know if any ‘revelation’ about him will change that,” Bell said.
This story has been updated.