Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is attempting to rally Republican support in the final stretch of the North Carolina governor’s race — but it won’t include the GOP governors in all four neighboring states.

In the days since CNN published an investigation connecting Robinson to a series of explicit racial and sexual posts online, the governors of South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia — all Republicans — have distanced themselves from Robinson’s candidacy.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, head of the group for GOP governors, has withdrawn his endorsement. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said he “will not be offering further support,” while Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office similarly said he had “no plans” for future support. And South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster plans to direct his attention elsewhere.

“I don’t think I’ll be going back to North Carolina,” McMaster told South Carolina reporters. “They haven’t asked me to come. I have been there before. I campaign for a lot of Republicans, and I will continue to do that. But I think there are others that may need help as well.”

The comments come as the Republican Governors Association, the campaign group dedicating to electing GOP governors, halted spending in the state despite it being one of the only competitive races this cycle. RGA’s most recent spending expired on Tuesday; they have not made any new investments.

Robinson, meanwhile, has sought to rally what remaining support he has left among Republicans, while stamping out criticism within the party. In a short video posted to social media Wednesday, he appears to be speaking on a video call on a computer.

“This morning I spoke with Republican leaders across the state and made it clear: This is an election about policies, not personalities,” Robinson wrote. “Now is not the time for intra-party squabbling and nonsense.”

“A surefire way to destroy this country is to start attacking each other rather than enemies at hand,” Robinson wrote in another post. “As Republicans, we should have one mission, and that is VICTORY in November.”

His campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the four governors distancing themselves from Robinson.

NC GOP candidates want answers — but those in top races stop short of calls to step aside

The reception from North Carolina Republicans down the ticket have been slightly less chilly.

GOP candidates for statewide office have urged Robinson to get to the bottom of the online comments. He has hired an attorney to investigate CNN’s reporting, and today pledged “complete cooperation.”

Hal Weatherman, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, said if Robinson can prove the allegations are false, “he will win in a landslide.” If not, “he will lose, because the comments being attributed to him are highly disturbing.”

Weatherman said Republicans in the state “need to stay focused on winning our own races.” He did not call for Robinson to step aside as nominee if he cannot find evidence that proves he did not make the online comments.

U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop said he was “focused on winning the attorney general’s race.”

“As a matter of law, any decisions about how to proceed in the governor’s race rest solely with Mark and are between him and the people of North Carolina,” Bishop wrote on social media.

One Republican candidate has explicitly called for Robinson to step aside if he’s unable to refute the allegations made in the CNN story — Brad Briner, the nominee for state treasurer.

“If Mark Robinson cannot put these allegations to rest in the coming days, he should step aside for a candidate that can turn the focus of the campaign back to issues like inflation, healthcare costs and taxes that voters tell me they are concerned about,” Briner wrote.

U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis did not explicitly call for Robinson to step aside, but did write on social media that if the reporting is true, Robinson should “take accountability for his actions and put the future of NC & our party before himself.” He gave Robinson a deadline of Friday. U.S. Sen. Ted Budd called the allegations “disturbing,” and said Robinson should prove they’re not true.

Robinson has not listed any public events on his campaign website since Monday.

Several media outlets reported Wednesday that top staffers in the lieutenant governor’s state office have issued resignations this week. Robinson announced Thursday afternoon that Krishana Polite would serve as his new chief of staff.  She previously served as the deputy chief of staff.

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina Republicans are taking both a data-driven and hand-to-hand approach to target key voters in the battleground state whose electoral votes are historically decided by just a small fraction of people.

Republicans won North Carolina in the past three presidential elections, but the results have consistently come down to just a couple of thousand votes, with former President Trump winning by about 4% in 2016 and 1% in 2020. The last Democrat to win the state, former President Obama in 2008, won by less than 14,000 votes.

As Republicans ramp up their get out the vote efforts this cycle, leaders at the forefront of the movement told Fox News Digital that they are focusing their resources on encouraging early voting and delivering their message to the key 1% to 2% that could swing the election for either party.

Jason Simmons, chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, told Fox News Digital that there has been an “overwhelming” response to their knocking on doors and grassroots activism.

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“We’ve been very engaged with all of our grassroots activists and have a very enthusiastic response. People are fired up. As I travel from one end of the state to the next, you see our Trump captains really engaging with the voters of North Carolina, taking the message of why it’s important in this year to go out more so than ever,” Simmons told Fox. “They’re out there every day knocking [on] doors, making phone calls, talking to the voters of North Carolina about the issues that matter most.”

Republicans in the state are also using data to help turn out the vote for residents who haven’t been engaged in voting in past elections.

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“It’s really drilling down into the data and identifying those voters that we know will vote our way, especially the low- to mid-propensity voters, by getting in front of them and talking to them about those issues that matter most to them and then encouraging them to make that plan and to go vote,” Simmons said.

After speaking with voters across the state, Simmons said the economy, inflation and the southern border are the issues of top concern among North Carolina voters. 

Republicans are also investing in encouraging early voting this cycle, and according to Dallas Woodhouse, state director for a conservative training outfit, American Majority, the data reveals that more early voting would benefit the GOP in 2024.

“We have field teams out right now educating conservative voters about the importance of actually voting early, voting by mail in North Carolina, how it is safe to vote by mail. We’re trying to turn around some of the trends that were difficult for conservatives in 2020 and 2022,” Woodhouse said. “What we know is that the earlier you get the vote in, the more efficient it is for candidates, for parties. And if you wait till the last minute, you are at risk of illness and bad weather and your cost per vote goes way out.”

Woodhouse said that by Election Day, America Majority expects to have knocked on half a million doors in the state, reached a million voters by phone and a million and a half voters through text messages.

A canvasser for American Majority, a conservative training outfit, is shown in North Carolina. (Fox News Digital)

“All you can do is go out and fight every day, go out, push the message of free markets, limited government, strong national defense, and get people out to vote what they do from theirs up to them.”

Woodhouse added that the presidential race in North Carolina is going to be “razor-close to the end.”

“The fact is, North Carolina is razor-close. … So, voter by voter or house by house, that’s what you’re into: hand-to-hand political combat to get every single voter to the polls.”

Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s lieutenant governor and the Republican gubernatorial candidate, recently came under fire after CNN published a report alleging that Robinson had previously made salacious comments, such as referring to himself as a “Black Nazi” on pornographic websites in the late 2000s. Just days later, his campaign released a statement that staff in various senior roles had stepped down. 

Republican presidential nominee former President Trump speaks during a campaign event on Sept. 25, 2024, in Mint Hill, N.C. (Evan Vucci)

“It’s very unfortunate, and it’s disturbing, troubling, the remarks that we’ve seen and the allegations attributed to Mark Robinson,” Simmons told Fox of the recent controversy. “But ultimately, it’s up to him to go and talk to the voters of North Carolina and show them that these are not his words, his values. And we’ll continue to talk to the voters of North Carolina about those issues that matter most to them.”

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Both Trump and his Democrat opponent, Vice President Harris, have been campaigning throughout the Old North State with just weeks left until the highly anticipated presidential contest on Nov. 5.

When CNN reported last week that Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican lieutenant governor, had once called himself a “black NAZI” on a porn site, the political world came to one quick consensus: He was totally cooked in his race for governor. (Most of his staff promptly quit.) What was less obvious was how the news would budge the deadlocked presidential race there. At Kamala Harris campaign headquarters in Delaware, and on the ground in Raleigh, Democratic operatives saw a clear opportunity to gain an edge in a state only one Democrat has won at the presidential level since Jimmy Carter. When Priorities USA, an influential Democratic super-PAC, finished running its latest private North Carolina forecast on Sunday, just days after the CNN report, it had Harris at 50.3 percent and Trump at 49.7.

No one in Wilmington or Washington, let alone Charlotte, expects Harris to open up much of a lead in a state that often looks more burgundy than purple, but Harris’s team began making aggressive moves to flood North Carolinians with reminders of Robinson’s extremism, and his latest scandal, within hours of the news — and to tie him to Donald Trump.

Along with Georgia, North Carolina represents the second-biggest electoral-vote haul of all the battlegrounds. Joe Biden, who’d lost it by just over a point in 2020, set out to win it when he launched his 2024 campaign. His troops invested in an ambitious field and advertising operation there, recognizing it as the most obvious opportunity to flip a state Trump won four years ago. As Biden struggled, though, North Carolina slipped further from his grasp than any other core battleground; by the time he dropped out this summer, Trump held a seven-point lead there in the FiveThirtyEight polling average.

It’s been a different story entirely since Harris took over the ticket. Since then, the same polling average has never shown a gap of more than one point between her and Trump. For over a year, the vice-president had been visiting the state regularly, occasionally at the invitation of Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat with whom she has been friends since they were both attorneys general. The national vibe shift in her favor was perhaps the most pronounced in North Carolina, where nearly 25,000 new volunteers have signed up since she became the nominee and voter registration has spiked, especially among women, and women of color in particular. (People who have spoken with Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign’s chair, say she appears especially eager to win the state back after losing it narrowly as Barack Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012. He’d won it in 2008, when she was his battleground-states director.)

While Harris’s political brain trust put North Carolina back on the front burner the week she took over for Biden, in their eyes Robinson’s implosion has only made the opportunity more ripe. It’s hardly one they can afford to pass up. The most important state this year is Pennsylvania, but her campaign does not believe it can count on winning it since it’s so close and both campaigns are pursuing it so aggressively. If she can’t win Pennsylvania, she’ll very likely need either Georgia or North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes to reach 270, and Georgia is looking like a tougher climb even though Biden won it in 2020. (A New York Times–Siena College poll this week had Trump up four in Georgia but just two in North Carolina.) Meanwhile, Trump’s path back to the presidency is exceedingly difficult without North Carolina.

The two candidates and their running mates visited the state eight times in the first three weeks of September alone. And though Democrats have more ad money booked in North Carolina than Republicans in the home stretch of the race, it’s the only battleground where the Trump campaign itself has outspent Harris’s since she got in the race, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

For months, the Harris team had been “expecting a close race, and trying to win a close race,” in the words of Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s director of battleground states, building a campaign to fight for marginal votes. Much of the campaign’s messaging already tied Robinson — who was infamous for being a Holocaust denier and arguing that abortion is “about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down” — to Trump.

“We knew this a year ago, we knew this a month ago: We recognize that Mark Robinson was the example of what Donald Trump’s politics have done to the Republican Party and to America,” Kanninen told me. Since last week’s revelations, less engaged voters have tuned in. “It doesn’t represent to me a shift in the imperatives or the strategy, but it does mean there is a hotter spotlight on that extremism,” he said.

The Harris campaign didn’t announce a new infusion of cash to North Carolina, but its immediate shift in attention and energy has been obvious to voters, activists, and operatives in the state. Pro-Harris forces wasted no time last week in trying to make sure hardcore Democrats, wavering independents, and conservatives associate Robinson with Trump and vice versa. The Democratic National Committee, for one, paid for billboards around the state showing the pair of Republicans together, highlighting Trump’s extensive praise for Robinson (whom he’s called “Martin Luther King on steroids”). Harris’s campaign, too, started circulating an ad explicitly tying the pair together, showing footage of them side by side. Yet the ad’s focus isn’t on Robinson’s newly revealed comments, rather on his harsh right-wing views on abortion. On the ground, the Harris operation immediately started planning press events aimed at getting more coverage of Robinson’s extreme views and, especially, his ties to Trump.

Since last week, Harris staffers have argued that Robinson’s continued outrages help their cause with both Black voters and moderate white ones in the suburbs. For months, the campaign had been working on its appeal to the latter group by focusing largely on abortion, and by specifically reaching out to the nearly one-quarter of voters in the GOP primary in March who chose Nikki Haley over Trump. This group has been bombarded with reminders of Trump’s and Robinson’s far-right views, but also those of congressman Dan Bishop, the former sponsor of the state’s infamous HB2 anti-trans “bathroom bill” who’s running for lieutenant governor, and Michele Morrow, the superintendent candidate who was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and called for Barack Obama’s execution. Now the Harris camp is turning up the volume on this messaging, previewing in a campaign memo that it would be specifically outlining how Trump and Robinson share a backing of abortion bans, their wish to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and their joint hope to gut the Department of Education.

As the campaign enters its final stretch, Wilmington is looking for even more ways to make sure its many staffers on the ground in North Carolina can disseminate the Robinson news — and reminders of his Trump association — to every last voter who may be undecided. “This is when people start paying attention, and all of a sudden there’s this conversation in real life, in stride, about the election. And that’s where the presence we’ve had on the ground matters,” Kanninen said.

Democrats’ imagined path to victory in North Carolina is straightforward but relies on maximum turnout from a few different groups and likely some Republican discouragement. Over the last decade, many liberal hopes for the state have rested on demographic change, especially on the influx of highly educated left-leaners moving in, particularly to big cities like Charlotte and Raleigh. Now Harris is hoping for higher margins of victory — and blockbuster voting rates — in those metropolitan areas. Yet she is also expected to rely largely on nearly two years of organizing work led by Anderson Clayton, the state party’s 26-year-old chair, who has been adamant about building and maintaining a presence in rural and traditionally deep-red parts of North Carolina, too. The idea is not to win there, but to cut into Trump’s margin of victory in places such as Statesville, the county seat of Iredell County, which Trump won by a two-to-one margin in 2020.

Still, most of their hope is pinned on gains in the fast-growing suburbs, where Democrats have been making particular inroads in recent years by focusing on the fall of Roe and MAGA extremism. The playbook worked to great effect in 2022, and even more in elections since then. Democratic operatives in the state point often to unexpected off-year party gains in local offices — like flipping the mayor’s office in Huntersville and a state house seat in Cabarrus County, both outside of Charlotte — as reason for optimism.

While many local Democrats insist they see no evidence of a serious Trump organizing plan, Harris has been running ads in Black-focused and Spanish-language media for months, and has established 26 field offices across the state. Among these are outposts in highly valuable suburbs like those in Cabarrus and Mecklenburg counties, and others in far more conservative areas like Gaston County, which Trump won by 28 points four years ago. (Catawba College professor Michael Bitzer told my colleague Benjamin Hart this week that the infrastructure is “the most ambitious ground-game operation I’ve seen since Obama’s ’08 campaign.”) And Harris’s operation is stacked with North Carolina experience: Kanninen, for one, helped run Hillary Clinton’s operation there in 2016, and has made sure this operation is more robustly organized across the state than Clinton’s had been. On the ground, Harris’s team is led largely by veterans of Cooper’s campaigns and governor’s office, including senior advisers Scott Falmlen and L.T. McCrimmon, and Dory MacMillan, the campaign’s state communications director.

Yet the irony is that Cooper’s repeated success in the state is one reason there’s no clear consensus about how much Robinson’s collapse will actually help Harris. The state’s voters have a decades-long history of electing Democratic governors along with Republican presidents — Cooper, who was elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2020 while the state twice went for Trump, is only the latest example.

Local operatives agree on how continued revelations about Robinson’s past could theoretically help Harris: by convincing some undecided suburbanites of GOP madness, but mostly by discouraging conservatives from voting at all. Yet many are skeptical that this would necessarily translate up the ballot, especially if it seems like Attorney General Josh Stein, Robinson’s opponent, will win easily and Robinson poses little threat. Plus, while many Democratic operatives close to Harris have firsthand experience in campaigns defeating Trump-inspired extremists, most are quick to acknowledge those candidates’ unpopularity seldom dents Trump’s own appeal to his voters. “In normal times, the Robinson thing would be a killer up and down the Republican ticket,” said Bruce Thompson, a prominent Democratic lawyer in Raleigh. But since the CNN report, “It’s hard to feel a tide shift, because it’s going to be decided on the margins. Trump supporters have proven it does not matter what he does, or who he’s associated with.” Still, Thompson said, there’s always a good chance that some groups of Republicans “get frustrated and don’t show up.”

Republicans have mostly scoffed at the idea that Robinson could bring Trump down. But the former president himself isn’t taking any chances.

Just two days after Robinson was revealed to have called himself a Nazi and advocated for reinstating slavery, Trump touched down in Wilmington. Robinson had been at Trump’s side in his appearances in the state for months, and spoke at Trump’s convention in Milwaukee. This time, though, Robinson wasn’t invited and Trump never mentioned his name.