When Will Republicans Tire of Touching the Hot Stovetop?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 20, 2024

 

GOP primary voters knew Mark Robinson was a terrible candidate. They just didn’t care.

 

We know how this is going to go.

 

The deadline for North Carolina’s Republican nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, to drop out of the race passed last night. Robinson ignored the calls from his fellow Republicans to drop out. In November, he’ll lose. And when he loses, the loudest voices in the Republican ecosystem will insist he owes his fate not to his own characterological defects but to the fact that the GOP doesn’t have the stomach to do what’s necessary to win. Not like the Democrats do.

 

By that, this embittered sort of Republican will not mean that the GOP should avoid elementary political malpractice. They won’t be referring to the Democratic Party’s capacity to act collectively in a concerted effort to push leading lights who’ve reached their sell-by dates off to the sidelines. What they’ll be referring to is their impression that Democrats are so monomaniacally focused on securing power that they rally around even their most unfit candidates. Unlike the GOP, Democrats can muster the courage to ignore the realities to which everyone else is privy and muscle their preferred narratives into the public consciousness. If Republicans were unscrupulous enough to follow their lead, they’d be winners. But their parochial attachment to their good names, their standing among the elite-cocktail-party crowd, or their secret contempt for their own constituents prevents them from doing the dirty work that needs to be done.

 

This tiresome rationalization serves only to liberate the GOP’s primary voters from having to take any responsibility for their own bad judgement. Not only does it paint a portrait of a hypercompetent Democratic Party that no Democrat would recognize; it also deflects from the fact that Republicans knew Robinson was a problematic candidate. They just didn’t care.

 

The bombshell allegations that made the rounds on Thursday can only be read through the slits in your fingers. As a contributor to a message board on a pornographic website –—which should itself disqualify someone from serious contention for political office — Robinson referred to himself as a “perv.” He called himself a “black Nazi” who would “take Hitler” over the American political class. He talked about his teenage escapades “peeping” at nude women in a public gym locker room. “Slavery is not bad,” he reportedly wrote. “Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.”

 

Yeah, not great. But none of it should come as a shock to anyone who’s been paying any attention to Robinson’s record. As Jim detailed in today’s Morning Jolt, evidence of Robinson’s ill-suitedness to high office was available to anyone who hadn’t reflexively dismissed the people and institutions warning them of his unsuitability. In early 2024, Commentary’s Seth Mandel detailed the many times in which Robinson indulged in antisemitic conspiracy theories and bigoted language. The Marvel movie Black Panther is the creation of an “agnostic Jew” and a “satanic Marxist” designed to “pull the shekels out of your Schvartze [a derogatory Yiddish term for black people] pockets,” he wrote. The “goyim” produced the 1977 classic Roots to demonstrate the “weakness of the shvartze,” he later added. The “liberal media fills the airwaves” with historical presentations about the Nazis to popularize claims about “the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” he wrote with scare quotes.

 

Robinson proudly retailed the fictions to which Trump is partial about the 2020 election. He indulged conspiracy theories about the moon landing, the 9/11 attacks, and the Kennedy assassination. As a result of all this, he was unpopular among his own constituents. North Carolina’s GOP voters knew that nominating him as their candidate for the state’s highest office was an unnecessary risk, but they were persuaded to haul the baggage Robbinson brought with him onto their own backs because Donald Trump insisted on it. In a contested primary, Trump branded Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids” — indeed, “I think you’re better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two,” he said. That’s all the GOP primary electorate needed to hear.

 

If all you care about is the presidential race, maybe Robinson’s imploding candidacy doesn’t matter to you. It’s hard to imagine how Robinson — who was on track to lose this race long before yesterday’s revelations became public — could hurt the top of the ticket in November. But it’s equally difficult to envision a circumstance in which Robinson’s toxicity doesn’t detract from the GOP’s totals farther down the ballot, losing the party winnable legislative races, taking talented upcoming Republican lawmakers off the board, and scuttling the prospect of conservative reforms at the state level in North Carolina. That should matter, but we have precious few indications that it does.

 

Polling has consistently indicated that the Republican Party’s most engaged voters trust Trump and his judgement above all else. The press, election results, even their fellow Republicans — nothing can compete with Trump’s perspicacity. The problem with that calculation is that Trump has consistently demonstrated comically bad judgment. His endorsements are informed by the degree to which his endorsees flatter him. So, in deference to Trump, North Carolina’s voters looked past Robinson’s obvious, knowable defects. As a result, they’re about to sacrifice yet another winnable race.

 

Republicans have made a virtue of the shallowest heuristic: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If the media, the establishment, and the whole of polite society are against him, then I’m for him. The people I hate are adamant in their opposition to this candidate, so he must be doing something right! That is the opposite of discretion. It is the sacrifice of logic and even self-interest to the demands of tribal loyalty.

 

And now that the foreseeable consequences of their imprudence are upon them, we can anticipate that the people who backed Robinson’s nomination will insist that the only problem here is that those who warned them in advance of the mistake they were making didn’t have the gumption to ignore our shared reality and stand with him.

 

It’s a con job. It has robbed Republicans of too many competent and capable stewards who might actually advance the party’s political interests in positions of authority. There should come a point at which Republican primary voters reconcile the cold comfort they appear to take from their persecution complex with the unsatisfying election results they keep voting for themselves. Perhaps after November, there will be a reckoning. But I wouldn’t hold out hope.