North Carolina is once again in the news for making a terrible political decision. On March 5, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson won the Republican primary to become the party’s next gubernatorial candidate. Robinson defeated Dale Folwell, a conservative but relatively inoffensive underdog who has been State Treasurer for seven years. In the days after Robinson’s victory, many of his extreme statements over the past decade have come to light.
Critics seized on his remarks about the Holocaust, his supposed hope to go back to a time when women could not vote, and his hateful comments towards LGBTQ people. The Human Rights Campaign characterized Robinson as “one of the most radical anti-LGTBQ+ MAGA politicians on the ballot this year, with a long record of demeaning LGTBQ+ people and spreading hateful, vile rhetoric without abandon.”
Do social issues sell?
Most observers are puzzled by Robinson’s candidacy in a purple state. Barack Obama won the state by ten thousand votes in 2008 and was a toss-up throughout the 1990s. The state has certainly trended conservative in recent years. It was the site of HB2 in 2016, the notorious bathroom bill that led to nationwide outrage and Pat McCrory’s gubernatorial loss that same year. Nevertheless, it was still surprising to see the state become the home of an election cycle’s most horrifying candidate, an honor usually reserved for Alabama or Missouri.
As documented in Rob Christensen’s excellent book, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics, most observers of North Carolina politics frame the state as torn between two political traditions. One is the tradition of liberals and liberal centrists. These leaders have made North Carolina into a home for social spending, liberal views on race, and a progressive attitude towards education and the rights of women. The state excelled in these categories throughout the 20th century. It was one of the first states to have a woman, Susie Sharp, serve on the State Supreme Court. Its liberal reputation on civil rights helped lead to the establishment of the Research Triangle Park. As Christensen wrote, “North Carolina has always had a strain of cornbread populism– an unwillingness to give Wall Street, the big banks, or the big insurance companies free rein.” This approach epitomized the career of several governors who had presidential ambitions, most notably Terry Sanford of the 1960s and Jim Hunt of the 1970s and 1990s.
The Other Traditions
A different tradition has existed at the same time, however. This tradition harkens back to North Carolina’s time as a backwater, one that refused to support schools or raise taxes to pay for much of anything before the 1850s. It helped ensconce decades of conservative governors and fueled the state’s white supremacist campaigns of the 1890s and 1900s. The more conservative tradition had its own leaders who seemed just as brash and outspoken as the liberals. It seemed as though there was a Jesse Helms for every Jim Hunt in North Carolina history.
Along with these two dominant traditions, North Carolina has been home to a third, one that revels in bucking all trends and ideas of decorum and good taste. This trend goes back to the colony’s earliest days, when it was an ungovernable stretch of land between the Albemarle Sound and the Virginia border. It fueled North Carolina’s initial rejection of the Constitution, as well as its decades of frontier independence before and after the Civil War.
The most famous example of this impulse was the political career of Robert Rice Reynolds, United States Senator from 1932 to 1945. Reynolds was a virulent nativist and budding fascist. While not an outright supporter of Hitler or Mussolini, he spoke favorably about fascists throughout the country and attacked the American war effort even after Pearl Harbor. Reynolds defeated former governor Cameron Morrison in a 1932 race built on a host of lies, including an insinuation that Morrison was both incredibly wealthy and a Russian communist. Reynolds would serve two terms before declining to run for re-election after American success in the Second World War discredited his virulent nativism before and early on in the war.
Mark Robinson is certainly a candidate in the Reynolds model. He is brash, unapologetic, and not particularly interested in solving the state’s most intractable problems. There is also a decent chance that he will win in November. The next Democratic candidate, Josh Stein, is mostly an unknown entity and does not have the star power of current governor Roy Cooper. Stein will have to craft a narrative of his own success while finding every opportunity to fight back against the self-destructive impulse in North Carolina politics. He will likely have his work cut out for him.