Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate campaigning to become North Carolina’s first Black governor and the man Donald Trump called “Martin Luther King on steroids,” could threaten the former president’s 2024 campaign performance in the state.
The 55-year-old political figure — and current North Carolina lieutenant governor — is controversial, to say the least. He’s made incendiary online statements, like downplaying racism and claiming that Black American descendants of enslaved people should pay reparations. The Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate also said that Black gang members and Planned Parenthood did more than the Ku Klux Klan to “eradicate the Black race.”
“The MAGA movement has made it a practice to platform their most dangerous views and harmful stereotypes through figures like Robinson, [Herschel] Walker, Diamond and Silk and other borderline minstrels,” Markus Batchelor, national political director with People For the American Way, told theGrio. “It’s given room for conspiracy theorists and attention-seekers to be masqueraded as legitimate representatives of Black America.”
While Robinson may have found an embrace in Trump’s Republican Party as a conservative firebrand, political experts and advocates predict his candidacy could backfire in November. North Carolina is growing increasingly competitive for Democrats and has seen more Black and brown voters.
A polarizing candidate who has used social media in the past to call Black America’s “forever first lady” Michelle Obama a man and to support the racist birther conspiracy about America’s first Black president, Barack Obama, Robinson could activate Black voters, a loyal Democratic voting bloc, to go to the polls on Nov. 5. Voters will elect either Robinson or Democratic nominee Josh Stein, North Carolina’s current attorney general.
“Mark Robinson should make North Carolina a winnable battleground state for Democrats,” said…
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