The biggest news on the swing-state map this week: election expert Larry Sabato moving North Carolina’s gubernatorial race from “lean Democratic” to “likely Democratic” in the wake of the latest round of embarrassing revelations about embattled Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the hapless GOP candidate this cycle.
Sabato is being generous.
It’s more than likely Democratic at this point.
Which is why Robinson should do the right thing — after neglecting to do it by withdrawing by Thursday night’s deadline — and stop campaigning to be governor.
While the latest discoveries CNN reported — in which Robinson described himself as a “black Nazi,” defended chattel slavery as “not bad” since “some people need to be slaves” and delighted in “tranny on girl porn” — are uniquely horrifying even in this debased era of American politics, they aren’t the first time we’ve heard disqualifying details about Robinson’s sordid predilections.
In other words, Robinson was already a threat to “dampen turnout,” as they say, given what was known about him even before Thursday’s cable-news killshot.
As The Post reported way back in March, Robinson had already made comments that would have ended campaigns in a different political era.
“I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,” Robinson told a group of female Republicans, all of whom can and do vote.
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Robinson misgendered Michelle Obama, called gay people a “satanic cult” and offered bilious and racist commentary on the “Black Panther” film as “trash . . . only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets” — using a Yiddish slur for black people — while complaining African Americans get “so excited about a fictional ‘hero’ created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by a satanic Marxist,” as the Daily Dot reported.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg of the reported antisemitism.
He offered a similar review of the 1977 “Roots” miniseries, calling it “Hollywood trash that depicts the ignorance and brutality of the goyim, and the helplessness and weakness of the shvartze.”
And, predictably enough, he’s an on-the-record Holocaust denier.
He used the word “hogwash” to describe Nazi genocide.
He also likened Jewish bankers to “the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
Any one of these statements would have been disqualifying decades ago in any race — never mind one against a Jewish candidate (North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein).
The full body of Robinson’s comments are disqualifying now, but he’s staying in the race, with cover provided by the Trump operation and the North Carolina Republican Party.
The deadline to withdraw was after CNN published the latest revelations — but Robinson insisted on staying in.
One particularly hollow argument for this is the ballots were already printed.
A Trump world source denied reports the former president wanted the man he once called “Martin Luther King on steroids” out of the race, saying it’s “not accurate” that Donald Trump or the campaign “has any role in a request” to drop out.
And just as the Jets game kicked off Thursday night in MetLife, the North Carolina GOP attempted a punt.
The party accused “the left” of working to “demonize Robinson with personal attacks,” framing the damning quotations as a distraction from a “policy contest” about, among other things, the “open-borders policies” promulgated by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Speaking of Harris, she’s got a new ad out tethering Trump to Robinson that people will see through Election Day during airings of “Wheel of Fortune” and (appropriately enough) “Jeopardy!”
The campaign says it “intersperses Trump’s high praise for Robinson with Robinson’s own extreme comments on abortion, including his support for a total abortion ban without exceptions to protect the life of the woman.”
It also shows that if Robinson doesn’t stand down as an active candidate, the rest of his sad-sack campaign is just an in-kind contribution to Harris, Tim Walz and the Democratic National Committee.
Trump is clinging to a 0.1% lead in the Tar Heel State, per FiveThirtyEight’s average.
A poll may simply be a snapshot in time, but we have a stack of surveys at this point suggesting a photo finish.
Trump can win North Carolina without the Robinson distraction.
But that won’t happen if a thoroughly discredited candidate is dragging him down.
Mark Robinson needs to do the former president and Republicans a solid.
He needs to go away, sooner than later.