North Carolina pollster: Is Mark Robinson electable? | Opinion

After losing the Republican primary contest for governor to Mark Robinson, challenger Bill Graham said: “Mark Robinson is an unelectable candidate in the general election in North Carolina, and he puts a conservative future at risk for everyone, from the courthouse to the White House.”

While it could be easy to write off Graham’s comment as sour grapes after Robinson easily won the Republican primary, his prediction about Robinson’s electability is highly probable.

The controversial statements will catch up with Robinson in the fall.

From the moment he entered the political stage in 2018, Robinson’s comments on a range of issues — LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, the Holocaust, and more — have generated headlines. Although his comments get regular cable news coverage and go viral on liberal social media, the average North Carolinian is much less aware of his comments than pundits would like to believe. According to political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, about 80% of Americans follow political news casually or not at all. Strong partisans follow the news regularly and the remainder of the population follows more closely as Election Day nears.

The Stein campaign and independent expenditure groups will likely make Robinson’s comments a focus of their political advertising going forward. That, along with the fact that the general election voting population is more ideologically diverse than the primary voting population, may mean Robinson’s extreme comments will become an electoral liability for him in the fall.

Here are reasons why:

▪ His positions on culture war issues are too extreme for general election voters.

Robinson has promised to support legislation banning all abortions without exception, vowed to have transgender women arrested for using the women’s restroom, and advocated for increasing access to firearms, including assault weapons.

While these issue positions are “red meat” for many Republican primary voters, they do not reflect the positions of the majority of North Carolinians. On abortion, Robinson’s position reflects just over 7% of North Carolinians. Even Trump does not favor Robinson’s position on abortion, telling advisers that he supports a 16-week national ban.

▪ Robinson can’t continue to hide from opponents and the media.

In a primary campaign that was never competitive, Robinson did not debate his Republican challengers and turned down interview invitations from many newspapers and TV stations. Although this strategy did not hurt his primary campaign, the same approach may not be effective against Stein in the general election race. Robinson needs debates and media interviews to become better known to general election voters. Last fall, the Meredith Poll found that only 43% of registered voters could identify Robinson from his photograph or title. Among Democrats or unaffiliated voters, less than 30% could identify him. Comparatively, Gov. Roy Cooper was correctly identified 80% of the time.

▪ The lieutenant governor’s position is not a stepping stone to the governor’s mansion.

In the last 50 years in North Carolina, Jim Hunt and Beverly Perdue successfully ran for governor from the lieutenant governor post, but there have been more failures. Robinson’s two immediate predecessors — Walter Dalton and Dan Forest — each lost in the general election. Jim Hunt’s second lieutenant governor, Dennis Wicker, did not even make it to the general election, losing in the 2000 Democratic primary to then-Attorney General Mike Easley.

▪ Race is an issue.

In the most recent Meredith Poll, Robinson runs behind Trump among white and minority voters. Trump garners double-digit support among Black voters and almost one-third of Hispanic voters. Robinson is in the low single digits (3%) among Black voters and around 25% among Hispanic voters. Among white voters, Robinson only trails Trump by two percentage points, but the gap is much larger among rural white voters in the state (62%-48%).

The 2024 governor’s race in North Carolina will be closely watched by partisans and pundits nationwide, with everyone expecting a closely contested race. Although it is possible that Robinson could win the election with a very strong showing at the top of the ticket by Trump, it is likely that Democrats continue to hold the governor’s mansion for four more years.

David McLennan is a professor of political science at Meredith College and director of the Meredith Poll.