Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally at the Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 12.
Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
When CNN reported last week that Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican lieutenant governor, had once called himself a “black NAZI” on a porn site, the political world came to one quick consensus: He was totally cooked in his race for governor. (Most of his staff promptly quit.) What was less obvious was how the news would budge the deadlocked presidential race there. At Kamala Harris campaign headquarters in Delaware, and on the ground in Raleigh, Democratic operatives saw a clear opportunity to gain an edge in a state only one Democrat has won at the presidential level since Jimmy Carter. When Priorities USA, an influential Democratic super-PAC, finished running its latest private North Carolina forecast on Sunday, just days after the CNN report, it had Harris at 50.3 percent and Trump at 49.7.
No one in Wilmington or Washington, let alone Charlotte, expects Harris to open up much of a lead in a state that often looks more burgundy than purple, but Harris’s team began making aggressive moves to flood North Carolinians with reminders of Robinson’s extremism, and his latest scandal, within hours of the news — and to tie him to Donald Trump.
Along with Georgia, North Carolina represents the second-biggest electoral-vote haul of all the battlegrounds. Joe Biden, who’d lost it by just over a point in 2020, set out to win it when he launched his 2024 campaign. His troops invested in an ambitious field and advertising operation there, recognizing it as the most obvious opportunity to flip a state Trump won four years ago. As Biden struggled, though, North Carolina slipped further from his grasp than any other core battleground; by the time he dropped out this summer, Trump held a seven-point lead there in the FiveThirtyEight polling average.
It’s been a different story entirely since Harris took over the ticket. Since then, the same polling average has never shown a gap of more than one point between her and Trump. For over a year, the vice-president had been visiting the state regularly, occasionally at the invitation of Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat with whom she has been friends since they were both attorneys general. The national vibe shift in her favor was perhaps the most pronounced in North Carolina, where nearly 25,000 new volunteers have signed up since she became the nominee and voter registration has spiked, especially among women, and women of color in particular. (People who have spoken with Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign’s chair, say she appears especially eager to win the state back after losing it narrowly as Barack Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012. He’d won it in 2008, when she was his battleground-states director.)
While Harris’s political brain trust put North Carolina back on the front burner the week she took over for Biden, in their eyes Robinson’s implosion has only made the opportunity more ripe. It’s hardly one they can afford to pass up. The most important state this year is Pennsylvania, but her campaign does not believe it can count on winning it since it’s so close and both campaigns are pursuing it so aggressively. If she can’t win Pennsylvania, she’ll very likely need either Georgia or North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes to reach 270, and Georgia is looking like a tougher climb even though Biden won it in 2020. (A New York Times–Siena College poll this week had Trump up four in Georgia but just two in North Carolina.) Meanwhile, Trump’s path back to the presidency is exceedingly difficult without North Carolina.
The two candidates and their running mates visited the state eight times in the first three weeks of September alone. And though Democrats have more ad money booked in North Carolina than Republicans in the home stretch of the race, it’s the only battleground where the Trump campaign itself has outspent Harris’s since she got in the race, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
For months, the Harris team had been “expecting a close race, and trying to win a close race,” in the words of Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s director of battleground states, building a campaign to fight for marginal votes. Much of the campaign’s messaging already tied Robinson — who was infamous for being a Holocaust denier and arguing that abortion is “about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down” — to Trump.
“We knew this a year ago, we knew this a month ago: We recognize that Mark Robinson was the example of what Donald Trump’s politics have done to the Republican Party and to America,” Kanninen told me. Since last week’s revelations, less engaged voters have tuned in. “It doesn’t represent to me a shift in the imperatives or the strategy, but it does mean there is a hotter spotlight on that extremism,” he said.
The Harris campaign didn’t announce a new infusion of cash to North Carolina, but its immediate shift in attention and energy has been obvious to voters, activists, and operatives in the state. Pro-Harris forces wasted no time last week in trying to make sure hardcore Democrats, wavering independents, and conservatives associate Robinson with Trump and vice versa. The Democratic National Committee, for one, paid for billboards around the state showing the pair of Republicans together, highlighting Trump’s extensive praise for Robinson (whom he’s called “Martin Luther King on steroids”). Harris’s campaign, too, started circulating an ad explicitly tying the pair together, showing footage of them side by side. Yet the ad’s focus isn’t on Robinson’s newly revealed comments, rather on his harsh right-wing views on abortion. On the ground, the Harris operation immediately started planning press events aimed at getting more coverage of Robinson’s extreme views and, especially, his ties to Trump.
Since last week, Harris staffers have argued that Robinson’s continued outrages help their cause with both Black voters and moderate white ones in the suburbs. For months, the campaign had been working on its appeal to the latter group by focusing largely on abortion, and by specifically reaching out to the nearly one-quarter of voters in the GOP primary in March who chose Nikki Haley over Trump. This group has been bombarded with reminders of Trump’s and Robinson’s far-right views, but also those of congressman Dan Bishop, the former sponsor of the state’s infamous HB2 anti-trans “bathroom bill” who’s running for lieutenant governor, and Michele Morrow, the superintendent candidate who was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and called for Barack Obama’s execution. Now the Harris camp is turning up the volume on this messaging, previewing in a campaign memo that it would be specifically outlining how Trump and Robinson share a backing of abortion bans, their wish to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and their joint hope to gut the Department of Education.
As the campaign enters its final stretch, Wilmington is looking for even more ways to make sure its many staffers on the ground in North Carolina can disseminate the Robinson news — and reminders of his Trump association — to every last voter who may be undecided. “This is when people start paying attention, and all of a sudden there’s this conversation in real life, in stride, about the election. And that’s where the presence we’ve had on the ground matters,” Kanninen said.
Democrats’ imagined path to victory in North Carolina is straightforward but relies on maximum turnout from a few different groups and likely some Republican discouragement. Over the last decade, many liberal hopes for the state have rested on demographic change, especially on the influx of highly educated left-leaners moving in, particularly to big cities like Charlotte and Raleigh. Now Harris is hoping for higher margins of victory — and blockbuster voting rates — in those metropolitan areas. Yet she is also expected to rely largely on nearly two years of organizing work led by Anderson Clayton, the state party’s 26-year-old chair, who has been adamant about building and maintaining a presence in rural and traditionally deep-red parts of North Carolina, too. The idea is not to win there, but to cut into Trump’s margin of victory in places such as Statesville, the county seat of Iredell County, which Trump won by a two-to-one margin in 2020.
Still, most of their hope is pinned on gains in the fast-growing suburbs, where Democrats have been making particular inroads in recent years by focusing on the fall of Roe and MAGA extremism. The playbook worked to great effect in 2022, and even more in elections since then. Democratic operatives in the state point often to unexpected off-year party gains in local offices — like flipping the mayor’s office in Huntersville and a state house seat in Cabarrus County, both outside of Charlotte — as reason for optimism.
While many local Democrats insist they see no evidence of a serious Trump organizing plan, Harris has been running ads in Black-focused and Spanish-language media for months, and has established 26 field offices across the state. Among these are outposts in highly valuable suburbs like those in Cabarrus and Mecklenburg counties, and others in far more conservative areas like Gaston County, which Trump won by 28 points four years ago. (Catawba College professor Michael Bitzer told my colleague Benjamin Hart this week that the infrastructure is “the most ambitious ground-game operation I’ve seen since Obama’s ’08 campaign.”) And Harris’s operation is stacked with North Carolina experience: Kanninen, for one, helped run Hillary Clinton’s operation there in 2016, and has made sure this operation is more robustly organized across the state than Clinton’s had been. On the ground, Harris’s team is led largely by veterans of Cooper’s campaigns and governor’s office, including senior advisers Scott Falmlen and L.T. McCrimmon, and Dory MacMillan, the campaign’s state communications director.
Yet the irony is that Cooper’s repeated success in the state is one reason there’s no clear consensus about how much Robinson’s collapse will actually help Harris. The state’s voters have a decades-long history of electing Democratic governors along with Republican presidents — Cooper, who was elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2020 while the state twice went for Trump, is only the latest example.
Local operatives agree on how continued revelations about Robinson’s past could theoretically help Harris: by convincing some undecided suburbanites of GOP madness, but mostly by discouraging conservatives from voting at all. Yet many are skeptical that this would necessarily translate up the ballot, especially if it seems like Attorney General Josh Stein, Robinson’s opponent, will win easily and Robinson poses little threat. Plus, while many Democratic operatives close to Harris have firsthand experience in campaigns defeating Trump-inspired extremists, most are quick to acknowledge those candidates’ unpopularity seldom dents Trump’s own appeal to his voters. “In normal times, the Robinson thing would be a killer up and down the Republican ticket,” said Bruce Thompson, a prominent Democratic lawyer in Raleigh. But since the CNN report, “It’s hard to feel a tide shift, because it’s going to be decided on the margins. Trump supporters have proven it does not matter what he does, or who he’s associated with.” Still, Thompson said, there’s always a good chance that some groups of Republicans “get frustrated and don’t show up.”
Republicans have mostly scoffed at the idea that Robinson could bring Trump down. But the former president himself isn’t taking any chances.
Just two days after Robinson was revealed to have called himself a Nazi and advocated for reinstating slavery, Trump touched down in Wilmington. Robinson had been at Trump’s side in his appearances in the state for months, and spoke at Trump’s convention in Milwaukee. This time, though, Robinson wasn’t invited and Trump never mentioned his name.
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