Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, campaigns at an ice cream shop, in Ellerbe, North Carolina, U.S., October 30.Jonathan Drake/Reuters
He luxuriates in bombast, unconcerned by the niceties once expected of public discourse. He is a political outsider whose past is pocked with sexual indiscretions, racially-charged comments and a brazen response to revelations of scandals.
But it does not look as if Mark Robinson, the former factory worker who would be Republican governor of North Carolina, has managed to spin that familiar combination of traits into the political fortunes reaped by Donald Trump, the architect of a new way of doing politics that has proven remarkably difficult to replicate.
Mr. Trump is within striking distance of a return to the White House.
Mr. Robinson, by contrast, was down by 15 percentage points in a recent poll. He has raised only 10 per cent of the funds brought in by his Democratic rival. Last week, a polling company sued Mr. Robinson’s campaign for US$114,000 in unpaid invoices.
Mr. Trump’s raucous occupancy of the American political firmament has inspired a raft of imitators. Few matched Mr. Robinson in his willingness, like Mr. Trump, to sanction violence and disregard norms of decorum and conduct.
But the apparent rejection of Mr. Robinson’s extremes suggests that voters have reached a limit in their willingness to accept the norm-shattering approach to politics that Mr. Trump has wrought. Indeed, nearly a decade after he confirmed his presidential ambitions, it’s not clear that Mr. Trump has discovered a profane new path to the White House so much as simply elevated his own inimitable personality.
Mr. Robinson was an unknown until he made an impassioned 2018 address to the Greensboro City Council, angrily denouncing the “loonies from the left” on gun policy. Video of his speech went viral, and he was soon tapped to run for office.
“He was made a politician by white Republicans in North Carolina,” said Mondale Robinson, a North Carolina mayor who is founder of the Black Male Voter Project, which works to increase voter participation.
“These people have no personalities. They are all emulating or trying to be Trump, seeing that they can say crazy things and get elected.”
In 2020, Mark Robinson won election to become North Carolina’s first Black lieutenant-governor. Voters showed they were prepared to accept the leadership of a man who declared that “some folks need killing” and said women who had abortions “weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”
Mr. Trump, too, thrilled to his North Carolina protege, calling Mr. Robinson “unbelievable” and “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Mr. Robinson was invited to speak on the first night of the Republican National Convention this summer, where he called Mr. Trump “the braveheart of our time.”
At the time, polls suggested nearly even odds that Mr. Robinson would become the first Black governor of North Carolina.
His standing – with voters and with Mr. Trump – tumbled only after an extensive September CNN report documenting comments made on a pornographic site’s messaging board by an account that appeared to be his, including that he supported slavery and considered himself “a black NAZI!”
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Robinson admitted no fault when accused of wrongdoing, saying he did not write those posts. He has filed suit against CNN.
Unlike Mr. Trump, though, he has suffered considerable consequences. Much of his campaign staff left him. Fundraising dollars slowed. Polls showed him falling far behind.
Mr. Robinson once seemed a prototype for politicians in the Trump era. “He said the right things at the right moment, and had a fiery personality on social media. The stars kind of aligned,” said Rob Schofield, a North Carolina political commentator who is editor of NC Newsline, a digital news outlet.
Now, Mr. Robinson is no longer welcome to share a stage with Mr. Trump. On Saturday, large cheering crowds greeted Mr. Trump in two North Carolina rallies. But the former president did not once mention Mr. Robinson, who spent his evening beside a dirt racetrack at HorsePower Park outside of Morganton, N.C. He was defiant in front of the roughly 60 people listening in the stands.
“Why in the hell would I let CNN drive me out of this race?” he asked.
Those still supporting Mr. Robinson say they place little stock in the revelations about him. “We just perceive it as being propaganda,” said Summer Black, who co-produces a YouTube channel on Christianity and politics with Brad Ward. Mr. Ward dismissed discussion of Mr. Robinson’s past behaviour as “a general plan of attack” against conservatives, Mr. Trump included.
Mr. Robinson’s plight, some say, simply reflects his poor suitability for the intense scrutiny of seeking high political office. “Mark Robinson was doomed for failure in this race,” said Douglas Heye, a North Carolina strategist who is a former communications director for the Republican National Committee.
Local Republicans were warned, he said, that “nominating Robinson would be a disaster.”
Other factors may also have played a role. North Carolina’s history of troubled racial relations remains so pertinent that Black residents in one town sued this year to remove a county courthouse bust of a Confederate soldier with the inscription: “In appreciation of our faithful slaves.” Mr. Robinson is Black, and “it’s hard to imagine that race isn’t at least a slight factor in his demise amongst some of the conservatives,” said Mr. Schofield.
But the likelihood that Mr. Robinson will lose also suggests that “Trump-style politics is ultimately limited to Trump himself,” said Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., who is a close observer of the state’s politics.
“Robinson and other Trump acolytes can’t replicate Trump’s ability to deflect and redirect.”
In part, it’s because Mr. Trump’s background makes him so unique. He entered politics with immense stores of wealth and celebrity. Celinda Lake, a pollster who works for the Democratic National Committee, recalled conducting focus groups in 2016 with voters who were not convinced that Mr. Trump himself put stock in the things he said, such as pledging to defund Planned Parenthood. His personality and droll delivery have, for many voters, leavened the more extreme aspects of his policies.
“People don’t believe that he believes half of this stuff,” she said. “But they believe Mark Robinson believes it.” For that reason, a future Republican party without Mr. Trump, she believes, is likely to prove an easier opponent for Democrats.
“There is a MAGA Republicanism that extends beyond Trump and it’s marked less by insulting style than extreme policies.”
Others, however, say that is precisely a reason to worry.
“What happen when the next Donald Trump is someone who is not weird?” said Mr. Robinson, the North Carolina mayor.
For political liberals, “I don’t think that’s optimistic. I think that’s a scary thing,” he said. A new generation of Republican leaders who embrace Mr. Trump’s populist policies “without the weirdness becomes a real threat.”