Before the campaign began, Mark Robinson’s consultants relished the attacks they planned to launch on their Democratic opponent Josh Stein. Jonathan Felts signaled that his team planned to pillory Stein as a moon-bat radical and the most liberal candidate in North Carolina history. It was going to be energizing and delightful. What Robinson supporters failed to consider was that their candidate’s pathologies made their attack-ad dreams futile from the beginning.
The Mark Robinson campaign planned to attack Josh Stein using many of the same tropes that Jesse Helms used against Congressman Nick Galifianakis in 1972. The bigoted WRAL commentator portrayed his opponent as an alien liberal with a suspicious ethnic background. Infamously, Helms’ team coined the slogan “Vote For Helms — He’s One of Us.” This ominous appeal was meant to signal that Helms hailed from the same safe, familiar Anglo-Saxon background as most white North Carolinians, whereas Galifianakis, the son of Greek immigrants, was something of an intruder. By the end of the campaign, Helms had convinced a critical mass of white Anglo-Saxon voters that Galifianakis was too liberal and too ethnically untrustworthy to represent a traditionalist ex-Confederate bastion.
Robinson was hardly more subtle. Early in the campaign, he blared messages that were coded liberal, un-Southern and untrustworthy. Felts cynically gloated, “[Stein]’s one of the five lawyers in North Carolina who went to Dartmouth,” knowing that most Robinson supporters are high school-educated white men in less-educated communities. Stein’s politics would be unremarkable for a Democrat in most of the country. But the broader picture of a Jewish, left-wing Harvard progressive was a caricature Robinson fervently believed he could impose upon his opponent. And no doubt claims that Mark was baiting Stein’s religion could be flipped into attacks on the censorious liberal media, strengthening Robinson’s solidarity with resentful Anglos.
This strategy has turned to dust. Last summer, Robinson’s image underwent such a thoroughgoing destruction that his campaign could scarcely obtain enough oxygen to attack Josh Stein at all. Stein destroyed Robinson’s credibility. He took the raw material of an unknown candidate and molded Robinson into the epitome of hateful and wild-eyed right-wing political extremism. In response, Robinson spent an extraordinary $20 million desperately trying to mitigate the damage, running half-hearted ads emphasizing his supposedly homespun roots and lamely regurgitating four decades of boilerplate attacks on the Democrat Stein. “Candidate quality advantage,” the principle of politics that holds one contender can be materially more appealing than their opponent, had forcefully landed on the side of the Democrat.
Facing double-digit deficits in the polls and palpably desperate, Robinson has given up on trying to tarnish Stein’s image. He is in too weak a position to defeat Stein one-on-one. With no other recourse, the Large Fellow From Greensboro is trying to nationalize the race. He’s attempting to tie Stein to Kamala Harris — a national figure with a less-established image — and desperately cling to Donald Trump’s coattails in a forlorn effort to limp, tired and wounded, through the gates to the governor’s mansion. The mini- (or macro-) Trump is hoping that Trump can win the election for him.
This is still possible, but I consider it unlikely. Like no other previous campaign, the Stein-Robinson race has illustrated how North Carolina has changed since the benighted days of the Old South. At one point, a candidate’s Judaism would have been disqualifying for white, Anglo North Carolinians — as would have any other minority religious or ethnic identity. Jews could not even vote in North Carolina until after the Civil War, and Irish-Catholic Al Smith was the only Democrat to lose North Carolina in a presidential election between Reconstruction and 1968. The era of ethnic rejection seems to have ended, although North Carolina’s many, many years of insularity and suspicion suggest that caution is still in order. I hope that caution will prove unnecessary.
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