Donald Trump was in North Carolina just two weeks ago. And a week before that. And on Friday he’ll be back. Again. It seems he can’t get enough of my state.
Or maybe he’s worried that we’ve had enough of him.
Other Republicans are, with excellent reason: North Carolina isn’t just one of the seven principal battleground states in the 2024 presidential election. It’s a singularly fascinating test case of how much MAGA extremism could cost the Republican Party — and Trump himself.
Of those seven states (North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada), North Carolina is the only one that Trump won — by less than 1.4 percentage points — in 2020. But he can’t be remotely confident about it this time around.
And that’s not just because Vice President Kamala Harris’s replacement of President Biden on the Democratic ticket has palpably reanimated the party here or because her campaign is making significant investments in the state, where the latest voter surveys suggest that she and Trump are effectively tied. It’s also because of how miserably the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, has been polling in his race against the state’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Stein, to become the next governor. The Real Clear Politics average of recent surveys gives Stein an 8.7-point advantage over Robinson.
Could Robinson — who is shockingly light on leadership credentials and even more shockingly heavy on misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic and altogether repulsive remarks — lose by a margin big enough that he takes Trump down with him? It’s an unusual question, a reverse direction twist on the common belief that the person at the top of a party’s ticket can affect candidates lower down. But it’s on Republicans’ minds, and it’s a constant topic of conversation among political insiders here.
Mick Mulvaney, who served as Trump’s acting chief of staff in the White House, recently told News Nation that his former boss had a peculiar challenge in North Carolina. “Trump is being weighed down by a very unpopular Republican candidate for governor,” Mulvaney said.
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