https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/opinion/trump-north-carolina-election.html

Will North Carolina’s MAGA Extremists Doom Trump?

Sept. 4, 2024




Ben Wiseman


Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
You’re reading the Frank Bruni newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Reflections on the mess (and magic) of politics and life.

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.

Doug Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee who has worked for several U.S. senators from North Carolina, told me this week that he speaks regularly to Republicans in the state and is hearing "real concern — from voters, from consultants — that Robinson could hold back Trump."

Heye said that he’s skeptical of that, as are many other political analysts, who tell me that they’re hard pressed to come up with precedents for a down-ballot candidate determining a presidential contender’s fate.

Several of them also point out that polls in past races for governor here have underestimated the Republican candidate’s eventual performance. And they say that while they can imagine many North Carolinians splitting their tickets and voting for Trump and Stein — much as some of them voted for Trump and the state’s current, term-limited governor, Roy Cooper, a Democrat, in 2016 and 2020 — they doubt that a Trump supporter would abandon him because Robinson gives the whole Republican Party such a hateful and unhinged taint.
"I’m very wary of the reverse coattails theory," said Amy Walter, the publisher and editor in chief of The Cook Political Report, which last week moved the presidential race in North Carolina from "leans Republican" to "tossup" on the same day that it moved the Robinson-Stein race from "tossup" to "leans Democratic."

But among statewide Republican candidates in the MAGA age, Walter added: "I don’t know that there’s been anyone more controversial than Mark Robinson. Robinson seems to be in a whole different category." And that could translate to more Democrats in North Carolina turning out to vote — to make sure Robinson loses — and some Republicans being discouraged enough about the election to stay home.

With North Carolina, you never know. From 1980 to the present, only one Democratic presidential candidate (Barack Obama in 2008) has won the state, but from 1992 to now, only one Republican candidate for governor (Pat McCrory in 2012) has triumphed. The state’s two senators are Republican, and its junior senator, Ted Budd, beat his Democratic opponent, Cheri Beasley, by more than three percentage points in 2022.

That casts Harris as an underdog. But North Carolina political analysts sense more Democratic energy than in any presidential contest since Obama prevailed here.

And then there’s Robinson. Although he’d be the state’s first Black governor, he has denigrated the civil rights movement. His religious talk — he proudly and assertively promotes himself as a conservative Christian —goes hand in hand with a vicious streak: He has called Michelle Obama a man, suggested that the attack on Paul Pelosi was a sexual tryst gone bad, told an audience of North Carolina churchgoers in late June that "some folks need killing" and, several years ago, posted a video of himself on Facebook saying that abortion is "about killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down or your pants up — and not get pregnant by your own choice — because you felt like getting your groove thing on." Stein used part of that statement in an ad that his campaign released in early June. It marked a turning point in the race.
For Robinson, bad news and bad headlines keep on coming: about his campaign’s lack of money; about Republicans’ frustrations with its direction; about his apparent failure, during his four years as lieutenant governor, to attend even one meeting of North Carolina’s Military Affairs Commission, on which he sits; about allegations (which his campaign has strenuously denied) that in the 1990s and early 2000s, he was a regular at Greensboro, N.C., porn shops, visiting as often as five nights a week to watch videos in a private booth.

"Robinson is not fully vetted at this point," Paul Shumaker, a Republican strategist here, told me on Tuesday, saying that there’s no telling what else might come out. Shumaker isn’t persuaded that Robinson’s troubles will doom Trump, but he thinks there’s a solid chance that Trump — who not only endorsed Robinson but also called him "better than Martin Luther King" — will feel compelled to un-endorse him.

Cutting someone loose? Trump? I can’t imagine it.

For the Love of Sentences


Stewart Sawyer/Getty Images

In The Wall Street Journal, Dan Neil bemoaned the mismatch of his aged endoskeleton and his assignment to review a low-lying, physically inaccessible car by alluding to the god of Graceland: "After a lifetime of swiveling and gyrating, my pelvis has left the building." (Thanks to Trevor Hale of Washington, D.C., for nominating this.)

In The Washington Post, Ron Charles soured on a new novel by Matt Haig: "Charming moments and light touches of wit run throughout ‘The Life Impossible,’ but they’re overwhelmed by the story’s commitment to refrigerator magnet inspiration. The whole thing starts to taste like a tepid dish of coq au vin made from the plucked carcass of Jonathan Livingston Seagull." (Liz Davidson, Redway, Calif., and Sharon Stepler, Albuquerque, among many others)

Additionally, in his Post newsletter, Charles questioned a certain kind of cost cutting: "I hate to break it to the bean counters, but a university library without academic librarians is called a storage room." (Debra McDonald, Washington, D.C., and Carol Kohnen, Creve Coeur, Mo.)

Also in The Post, Ty Burr explored a certain subgenre of haunted-house story that, he wrote, "I like to call home-icide: narratives about domestic technology turning against the trusting, foolish, vulnerable humans who think they’re calling the shots." (Hugh Ellis, Baltimore)

In Slate, Jim Newell explained why Trump’s remarks about unmuted debate microphones and his representatives’ position contradict each other: "The Trump campaign is not the same as Donald Trump, who’s a fan of having a live microphone near him at all times in case genius — as it so often does — strikes." (Bill Breedlove, Oakville, Wash.)

In The Times, Mark Landler took stock of Britain’s Tory Party: "Hungry for publicity and heedless of authority, the Tories have become all but unmanageable, less a big tent than a chaotic campground." (Eric Eales, Kelowna, British Columbia)
Anaïs La Rocca cleverly measured a short span of the calendar: "Somewhere in the time it took for the hospital’s holiday décor to morph from turkeys to tinsel, the relationship between me and Audrey changed." (Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.)

And Mireille Silcoff traced the impact of that infernal little glowing screen on her daughter: "Before the phone, I had a child who was like a gregarious Tigger, squealing with delight at something as simple as a new dessert cooling in the fridge. Post-phone, I had a monosyllabic blanket slug who wanted only to stay in her room with the blinds down, door closed, under a duvet, palming that little rectangle as if unhanding it would make her social life disappear." (Philippe Golle, San Francisco)

To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in "For the Love of Sentences," please email me here and include your name and place of residence.

What I’m Reading, Watching and Listening To


Jan M. Rosen/The New York Times

  • Many of you sent in favorite passages of Caity Weaver’s excellent article in The Times Magazine about our national embarrassment of pennies, but most were too long for For the Love of Sentences or had to be read in the context of everything around them. So I hereby recommend reading everything around them.
  • Dog lovers, behold and treasure this tidy collection of impossibly gorgeous pooch pics. And if you’re nota dog lover? We can still get along, and you should still look at these because they’re exquisite photographs, period, in which skill and serendipity form a perfect marriage. (Thanks to Frank Thoms of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, for bringing them to my attention.)
  • For escapist diversion, I’ve long been abashedly partial to movies in — or adjacent to — the horror genre, be they works of serious craftsmanship ("The Silence of the Lambs," from 1991) or pulpier fare ("Barbarian," 2022). So the many rave reviews for "Longlegs," which was released in July, caught my attention, and when it began streaming for a rental fee on Apple TV+ about two weeks ago, I watched it right away. What a letdown. Comparisons between Nicolas Cage (wearing prosthetics and heavy makeup) as the madman in this clunker and Anthony Hopkins in "Lambs" are beyond absurd — like trying to pass off a half-eaten bag of stale Cheetos as a wheel of the finest Cheddar.
  • One perk of aging is the music library you amass, so large that you forget some of your favorites and, rediscovering them, get to enjoy them all over again. The other day, a playlist I’d long neglected presented me with "Ladder," from Joan Osborne’s superb 1995 album "Relish." "Relish" yielded a huge hit single, "One of Us," that’s all that many listeners ever knew of it. But the whole of it is terrific, thanks in largest part to the range, rasp, warmth and wallop of Osborne’s voice.

What You Said


Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

I’d like to stop for my baby tonight
And blow my top with my baby tonight
But I’d be a flop with my baby tonight
Cause it’s too darn hot
The naughty, witty lyrics of the Cole Porter song "Too Darn Hot" amount to a compendium of ways to talk about having (or not having) sex without actually naming the activity, and Robin Bickel of Randolph, N.J., mentioned that in an email to me after I wrote last week about some of our verbally inaccurate evasions ("sleeping together," "intimate with") of "sex." I called them prudish.

But the bounty of those euphemisms is also testament to our verbal inventiveness, as Bickel’s and other readers’ emails pointed out.

Before Cole Porter, there was William Shakespeare, whose play "Othello" includes one character’s statement that "your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs." That is not, ahem, a reference to two artists painting or carving the image of a fantastical monster.

I thank William Hoelzel of Simsbury, Conn., for reminding me of the Bard’s ingenuity, and I thank Eric Tishauer of Kansas City, Mo., for pointing me to a recent BBC News article explaining how "badminton" has become a code word for sex. Badminton!

Turns out that educators in Hong Kong published materials that recommended encouraging a pair of teenagers lusting after each other to play a game of badminton instead. The internet discovered this and did what the internet reliably does with such silliness: mocked it to a fare-thee-well.

From the BBC News article, by Fan Wang:

Social media has been flooded with jokes centered around "playing badminton."

"FWB [Friends with benefits]?? Friends with badminton," read one comment on Instagram that had more than 1,000 likes.

"In English: Netflix and chill? In Cantonese, play badminton together?" read a Facebook post which was shared more than 500 times.

Even Olympics badminton player Tse Ying Suet could not resist a comment.

"Everyone is making an appointment to play badminton. Is everyone really into badminton?" she asked on Threads with a smirking face emoji.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book "The Age of Grievance" and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram Threads @FrankBruni • Facebook

Download PDF