The Republican Party is apparently stuck with Mark Robinson.<\/p>\n
Some Republicans and people working on behalf of Donald Trump\u2019s campaign pushed Thursday for the North Carolina lieutenant governor to drop out of the governor\u2019s race there amid ugly allegations about decade-old posts on a pornographic website, but Robinson has not done so. The deadline passed at midnight for the party to be able to replace him as the nominee. Robinson has been defiant and insisted that the posts weren\u2019t from him.<\/p>\n
With Robinson\u2019s decision to press on, the question is less what it means for the governor\u2019s race \u2014 in which Robinson already trailed by double digits in most quality polls \u2014 than what it means elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Most notably: Could this damage a Trump campaign that might have preferred to rid itself of this nuisance?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s complicated, but Robinson\u2019s decision to stick it out gives the Trump campaign and Republicans reason to fret. North Carolina is crucial to Trump\u2019s most readily apparent path to victory \u2014 which runs through it, Georgia and Pennsylvania \u2014 and every little bit counts. Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s campaign, meanwhile, appears to sense a political opportunity, judging by its decision Friday to launch a TV ad tying Trump to Robinson.<\/p>\n
The dynamic at play here is called a \u201creverse coattails effect,\u201d which basically means that a candidate running below the presidential race on the ballot could damage the top of the ticket. The term traces back to Adlai Stevenson\u2019s Democratic presidential candidacy in 1956.<\/p>\n
The conventional wisdom is that things mostly happen in the opposite direction: a bad candidate at the top of the ticket harming candidates further down the ballot. After all, the presidential race is generally voters\u2019 No. 1 priority.<\/p>\n
But those two effects aren\u2019t mutually exclusive, and just because one is more prominent doesn\u2019t mean the other doesn\u2019t exist. North Carolina was decided by just over one percentage point in 2020, so even a slight shift in voter preference or turnout caused by disillusionment with Robinson could matter. And as noted, North Carolina is that important.<\/p>\n
The first thing to note is that we\u2019re in largely uncharted territory. While we\u2019ve seen flawed candidates before, we\u2019ve seen a growing number of Trump-backed ones in recent years \u2014 to the point where they\u2019ve plausibly cost the GOP control of the Senate more than once.<\/p>\n
But we\u2019ve also seen how other Republicans can persevere on the same ballots. Plenty of voters do split their tickets. That was especially the case in 2022 in states such as Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Other Republicans ran an average of between six and 25 points better than the GOP\u2019s flawed Senate and gubernatorial candidates in those states.<\/p>\n
Those split tickets already loomed large in the 2024 election, with GOP Senate candidates consistently running worse than Trump. When President Joe Biden was still in the race but voters were disillusioned with him, his campaign hoped a \u201creverse coattails effect\u201d might help him.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s clear that the vast majority of would-be Trump votes in North Carolina won\u2019t be affected by Robinson\u2019s candidacy \u2014 that plenty of voters will probably split their tickets between Trump and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein, just as the 2022 voters described above did. Polls already show Trump running way ahead of Robinson, and a recent Fox News poll showed Stein winning the support of 13 percent of Trump voters.<\/p>\n
But that doesn\u2019t mean zero votes will be affected. There\u2019s reason to believe they could be.<\/p>\n
For one, Robinson is just that unpopular. A recent YouGov poll showed just 3 in 10 voters had a favorable opinion of him, vs. about half who disliked him. Women were twice as likely to dislike him as to like him. While just 8 percent of independents had a \u201cvery favorable\u201d opinion of him, 47 percent had a \u201cvery unfavorable\u201d one.<\/p>\n
Those are awful numbers \u2014 worse even than many of the 2022 GOP candidates described above. And all of that was before the most recent allegations, which could drive Robinson\u2019s numbers down further.<\/p>\n
Another key factor is how easy it will be to attach Trump to him. This isn\u2019t just a case of Trump endorsing a random candidate and their paths never otherwise crossing; Trump has not only appeared with Robinson, but has called him \u201cMartin Luther King on steroids\u201d and urged voters to \u201ccherish\u201d Robinson, who is \u201clike a fine wine.\u201d<\/p>\n
What sorts of Trump voters might this turn off? Trump has maintained his political stature over the years despite his own mounds of baggage. But it\u2019s not as if all his supporters are true-believer MAGA types. He also relies on more traditional Republicans who don\u2019t love him but support the team. (Recall that during the GOP primaries, as many as 1 in 5 voters continued voting against him even after Nikki Haley dropped out.)<\/p>\n
In North Carolina, that \u201cteam\u201d could look even less appealing than Trump alone. Those voters will be confronted with not just a presidential candidate they might not love, but a gubernatorial candidate they might have even less regard for.<\/p>\n
Robinson\u2019s presence on the ticket could bolster the Harris campaign\u2019s strategy of promising to turn the page on the chaos and extremism of the past nine years. It could also make it easier to tie Trump to the hard-line positions on issues like abortion that he has sought to distance himself from but that Robinson has embraced.<\/p>\n
It might not be enough to get Democrats over the line in a stubborn state they\u2019ve won just once since 1976 (in 2008), but it surely doesn\u2019t hurt. And if it does help them tip the state and snatch its 16 electoral votes, that would severely hamper Trump\u2019s path to victory.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Republican Party is apparently stuck with Mark Robinson. Some Republicans and people working on behalf of Donald Trump\u2019s campaign pushed Thursday for the North Carolina lieutenant governor to drop out of the governor\u2019s race there amid ugly allegations about decade-old posts on a pornographic website, but Robinson has not done so. The deadline passed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9890,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}