North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, was still in the race for governor on Friday morning after the deadline passed overnight for him to withdraw or be removed from the ballot.
Robinson has faced increasing pressure to drop out from the gubernatorial race after a damning CNN story published on Thursday afternoon reported that he made lewd and sexually explicit comments on the pornography site Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012.
Pressure for Robinson to withdraw has privately come from North Carolina Republicans as well as Donald Trump’s election campaign following the Republican presidential nominee’s enthusiastic support of Robinson, the Carolina Journal reported. Trump has previously praised Robinson, calling the gubernatorial nominee, who is Black, “Martin Luther King on steroids” during a campaign rally this year.
The election campaign of Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, wasted no time in posting previous high praise for Robinson from Trump, in which he called him a friend and “one of the hottest politicians in the United States”, and a compilation of images of the two together with the caption “best friends”.
Trump is expected to hold a rally in North Carolina on Saturday, but it was not known on Friday morning if Robinson would attend.
Robinson has pledged to continue his campaign, preemptively denying the CNN report.
According to the CNN story, Robinson previously referred to himself as a “black Nazi” in one comment. In a separate remark made in 2012, Robinson said that he would have preferred Adolf Hitler as US president over then president Barack Obama.
Robinson also wrote that slavery should be reinstated. “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring [slavery] back. I would certainly buy a few,” he wrote in October 2010.
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Robinson also allegedly made several sexual comments on the pornography website, CNN reported. He claimed that he enjoyed “peeping” into the locker room of a women’s gym when he was younger.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
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