The Problem Isn’t Mark Robinson. It’s GOP Voters.

Plus: Trump caves on a government shutdown in private conversation with Mike Johnson

Photo by Grant Baldwin/Getty Images

The latest bombshell about Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor, might not represent much of a departure from his past comments and history, which include Holocaust denial and making daily stops at a porn shop to avail himself of a private viewing booth. But the most recent reveal—that Robinson used a chat forum on a pornography website to brag about peeping on girls in locker rooms, regularly recount an ongoing affair with his wife’s sister, proclaim his love of transgender porn despite his opposition to trans rights, and claim to be a “black NAZI”—has pushed him across a clear line with his fellow Republicans.

To be clear, that crossed line hasn’t prompted a wholehearted GOP rejection of Robinson. It’s more that the story has given his colleagues political malaise. Many of them have become concerned that his toxicity might poison the electoral chances of the Good, Honest Conservatives in North Carolina.

Foremost among the candidates at risk of being weighed down by Robinson is Donald Trump, who also was involved in a porn scandal,¹ but who remains in the good graces of nearly every political-class Republican and a sizable-enough chunk of the electorate to give his re-election campaign roughly even odds of success.

Trump has remained in the lead in most credible North Carolina polling, but Kamala Harris is quite close. Democrats have been hammering the state with ads—spending large amounts of the money Harris’s campaign has raised since Joe Biden’s departure from the race. They view the state as a key pickup that could lock in an Electoral College victory. Harris’s campaign has also worked to raise awareness of Trump’s close ties to and fondness for Robinson, whom he referred to as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” whatever that means. In his most recent North Carolina rally in Wilmington on Saturday, Trump didn’t mention Robinson’s name.

In about six weeks, we’ll know whether the Robinson splashback has ended up sullying Trump’s electoral chances. But Robinson’s ability to get this far—he already holds the second-highest office in the state—might have some Republicans wondering what their real electoral malady is. Are they suffering primarily from a candidate quality problem or a base voter problem?

I posed this question to lawmakers: Should the GOP—at either federal or state levels—play a stronger role in primaries to prevent candidates like Christine O’Donnell Roy Moore Blake Masters Herschel Walker Dr. Oz Mark Robinson from being nominated? The GOP base clearly wants crazy, but I wanted to know if Republicans already on Capitol Hill feel they have to let the voters have crazy, and if they might even think a little craziness is healthy.

Robinson’s fellow North Carolina Republican, Sen. Thom Tillis, said that in his view, based on his past involvement in party efforts, “you’ve got to draw a fine line, and you don’t want to actually vote before the voters.” But he went a bit further in regards to Robinson’s scandal:

Now, having said that, I think you got to do the homework so you just minimize these kind of surprises. But these things happen. You’ve seen it happen in Democratic races. You’ve seen things happen in my prior race. The key is, how do you react afterwards? And what I’ve said clearly is one of two things: [The reporting is] either not true and there ought to be a big lawsuit, or it is true, and there ought to be a lot of explaining.

Tillis compared Robinson’s situation to something he experienced in a prior campaign. According to Tillis, an unspecified news outlet approached him about a story that would put his military service into question. “We made it very clear to them, they were about to get sued,” he said. “They didn’t have the data. They dropped it.”

“That’s the sort of stuff that we need to see out of the Robinson campaign,” Tillis added. “That ends it! At the end of the day, my reputation matters most of all. I’d have a team of lawyers going against CNN.”

Asked if he believed the reporting about Robinson, Tillis avoided giving a direct answer and instead again urged the lieutenant governor to take legal action.

It doesn’t matter to me what I think Robinson needs to do. If he has a factual basis for it, he should bring a lawsuit and make a lot of money against CNN, and if [the reporting] is true, then he needs to move on.

A senator with keen insight into how to keep cool and focused during an election when all the chips are on the table is Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.). As chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2014, Moran oversaw one of the best Republican results in years and helped the GOP take back the Senate majority after an eight-year drought.

Moran set up a full slate of competent, effective candidates in 2014, which marked a departure from the party’s approach to elections in 2012 and 2010. In those years, the GOP elevated the sorts of candidates the party base has come to love: carpetbaggers, TV personalities, perverts, and aspiring werewolves. Moran offered these thoughts on his 2014 success and why it might be harder to pull off in 2024:

I would say our effort when I chaired the NRSC, was to make sure that we attracted candidates and helped candidates succeed who could do more than just win a primary, but could also win a general election. I think that effort has been fully continued with Sen. Daines, but the voters decide who the candidates are, not the party. Okay? Incidentally, political parties are pretty darn weak. They don’t have much influence.

Asked if there’s a contrast between the way Democrats do business, Moran said dryly, “I don't know about their party, but people decide things in primaries that make the decision—who our candidates are.”

The party angle might help illuminate the response to this scandal, as well. The fact that so many Republicans are backing off Robinson this late in the campaign might be better understood not as a moral reaction to his alleged comments, but as a practical decision about resource allocation. Remember the Alabama special Senate election in 2017, during which Republican nominee Roy Moore was discovered to have an affinity for young girls, who learned to avoid him during his creepy prowls around local shopping malls? While people immediately recoiled en masse at Moore, a newly minted President Trump stood by his side, and the Republican National Committee suspended, then resumed financial support for his campaign. Encouraged by Trump, the party bosses determined that they needed the Senate seat Moore was trying to win, no matter what. He went on to lose to Democrat Doug Jones.² 

We’ve passed North Carolina’s deadline for parties to finalize their gubernatorial tickets, but Republicans can still afford to leave Robinson in the lurch because other races are so much more important to them. Still, he embodies a larger problem for them moving forward: The more frequently that candidates like him win primaries, the more often situations like this will cause headaches for party bosses around the country. Right now, they seem uninterested in trying to change the dynamic.

Know when to hold ’em

Donald Trump has publicly insisted that House Republicans should shut down the government unless the funding bill they pass includes a provision that prohibits undocumented immigrants from voting, purges voter rolls, and discourages voter registration efforts.

That provision is unnecessary, as the law already prohibits undocumented immigrants from voting. And when it became clear that the votes weren’t there in the House to package these two things together, Speaker Mike Johnson quickly moved on.

Now Notus is reporting that Johnson is privately telling Republicans that Trump has changed his tune and sees a shutdown as bad for the GOP. 

This is true, sources tell The Bulwark. Trump had been initially supportive of a shutdown for two major reasons, according to two people who spoke with him: He wanted to spark a discussion on alleged voting by illegal immigrants, and he believed that the Biden administration would pay the political price if a funding bill wasn’t passed.

“The president gets blamed for a shutdown,” Trump explained to one person who relayed his remarks on condition of anonymity. Trump was speaking from personal experience: He was tarred politically when the government shut down for 35 days in 2018 and 2019.

But Trump confidants pointed out that the former president was blamed for that shutdown at the time because he was the one who had called for it. Also, they noted to Trump, President Joe Biden is no longer his opponent, and Vice President Harris has been able to escape the gravitational pull of Biden’s bad poll numbers. They impressed on him the idea that Harris and Democrats would benefit from being able to label House Republicans as obstructionists.

“After the meeting with Speaker Johnson, everyone was on the same page,” a Trump adviser said of last Thursday’s gathering between the speaker and the former president.

Husker don’t

In case you missed it, I reported on Monday that Nebraska’s senior senator, Republican Deb Fischer, told me Republicans have given up on the effort to change the state’s Electoral College vote allocation system, which has each district awarding its own vote (Nebraska’s 2nd district famously votes Democratic in most elections) in addition to two votes awarded on the basis of statewide results. With the exception of Maine, all other states allocate Electoral College votes on a winner-takes-all basis.

Sen. Deb Fischer told The Bulwark and one other reporter that the votes were not there in the statehouse to make Nebraska a winner-take-all state this cycle. 

“It’s over,” said Fischer.

Trump and his team had been putting aggressive pressure on GOP lawmakers to make an eleventh-hour change to scrap the current system, which rewards Electoral College votes on the basis of both  the statewide performance of the candidates and their performance in individual districts. Had the push to change the rules succeeded, Kamala Harris would have lost the opportunity to win the occasionally blue-leaning Omaha district. Losing that district’s single vote  would in turn have meant that Harris would have likely needed to win an additional state on top of the so-called blue wall trio (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) in order to secure more than 269 Electoral College votes. With Omaha in play, those three would be enough on their own to get her to 270.

The mood elsewhere in the Capitol was glum. Nebraska’s other senator, freshman Republican Pete Ricketts, called the failed effort “disappointing.”

This afternoon, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen issued a statement putting a nail in the coffin, declaring that he would not call a special session of the state legislature to address the issue. As Fischer said, “It’s over.”

Republicans saw the Nebraska rules initiative as a key effort to tip the scale for Trump in the event of an extremely close race. In a campaign where hitting the threshold of 270 becomes a much more likely possibility for Harris if she’s able to secure that blue dot in Nebraska, every vote counts, and some count quite a lot.

1. Unlike Robinson’s porn scandal, Trump’s has implicated him in crimes, resulting in his conviction on 34 felonies. Just saying.

2. Despite pressure, the NRSC never resumed backing Moore, at the direction of former Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.). For his sins, right-wing media pilloried Gardner as an establishment RINO.