In purple North Carolina, Democrats hope to defeat a MAGA candidate for governor even as the presidential race remains close

(CNN) — Four years ago, North Carolina voters handed Democrats one of the party’s toughest losses and one of its most consequential wins.

Despite years of Democrats hoping that changing demographics in the fast-growing state would tip the presidential race, Donald Trump defeated Joe Biden here by 1 point, his narrowest winning margin in the country. But further down the ballot, voters reelected Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who has spent much of the next four years serving as a check on the Republican-controlled legislature and advancing priorities such as Medicaid expansion.

With 54 days until the November election, voters in the Tar Heel State seem equally split this year. At the presidential level, Trump and Kamala Harris have increased their campaigning in the state, where both have made multiple visits and ramped up ad spending. On Thursday, Harris will return, rallying supporters in Charlotte and Greensboro.

The race to succeed the term-limited Cooper, however, seems to be leaning toward the Democratic nominee, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein.

Stein and his Democratic allies have covered the airways with millions of dollars worth of devastating TV ads highlighting Republican opponent Mark Robinson’s past remarks on abortion and a troubled day care center he and his wife ran in the early 2000s – spending the GOP hasn’t yet matched. Prominent state Republicans, including Sen. Thom Tillis and former Gov. Pat McCrory, have declined to endorse Robinson, the incumbent lieutenant governor. Democrats have a new presidential nominee who has energized the base, and recent polls have shown Stein edging toward a double-digit lead.

But North Carolina is still a purple state with a history of elections decided by razor-thin margins. Democrats are hoping that Stein’s record as attorney general and his centrist, economy-focused campaign will win over voters, regardless of what happens at the presidential level. Republicans argue that Robinson’s focus on parental rights in schools will boost him and that conservatives will choose even a controversial Republican over a Democrat come November.

Both parties acknowledge that early polling leads don’t preclude close races as past cycles have shown.

“We obviously feel good about what we’re seeing in the polling, but this is North Carolina,” said a source familiar with the Stein campaign’s thinking. “This is going to be a tight race.”

Jonathan Felts, the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Council of State committee, said Democrats had failed to finish off Robinson before Labor Day and predicted that Republicans’ core support would stabilize in October.

“We are a cantankerous lot who find fault with everything,” Felts said of his party. “And then, when it’s time to actually make a binary decision – Democrat vs. Republican – our base comes home.”

A ticket-splitting state

Historically, North Carolina voters have favored ticket-splitting. In the 12 presidential elections of the past half century, the state has backed the Democratic nominee just twice – Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008. But the state has only elected three Republican governors in the past 100 years – the most recent being McCrory in 2012.

McCrory’s 10,000-vote loss in 2016 has been attributed in part to legislation he signed that forced transgender people to use the bathroom of the gender matching their birth certificate in state government buildings. The law, HB2, led to massive boycotts from companies and missed revenue opportunities, before being repealed in 2017. That same year, however, Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by 4 points.

“There’s no connection between the gubernatorial ticket and presidential ticket,” said North Carolina Republican strategist Paul Shumaker. “There’s still a good 25% of voters who don’t even know who the gubernatorial candidates are right now. The presidential candidates are much more better defined.”

A Quinnipiac poll of likely voters released this week had Stein leading Robinson 51% to 41% overall, with the attorney general holding a 38- point advantage among women. A Fox News poll from last month found the attorney general up 54% to 43% among registered voters, with a 21-point advantage among women. Both polls showed Stein winning the support of virtually all the Democrats surveyed, leading with independents and capturing the support of about a tenth of Republican voters. Both polls also showed the presidential race with no clear leader.

Democrats have swamped Republicans on the airwaves, according to AdImpact data through September 11.  America Works USA, a political action committee allied with the Democratic Governors Association, has spent $18.3 million on TV ads, while Stein has spent more than $29 million in ads touting his work to clear a backlog of rape kits in the state and criticizing Robinson over the day care center he operated with his wife. The most damaging ads have featured Robinson’s past remarks criticizing abortion.

Robinson has said he supports the state’s 12-week abortion limit, which includes exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother, despite his past support for bans with no exceptions. He’s attributed his opposition to the procedure to his and his wife’s decision to seek an abortion 30 years ago.

“Everything Josh Stein and his campaign say about Mark Robinson is either an outright lie or twisted so far out of context it might as well be,” Robinson campaign spokesman Mike Lonergan said in a statement.

Robinson’s campaign has spent more than $8.9 million on the airwaves through September 11, and the Republican Governors Association has spent $9.9 million attacking Stein’s law enforcement record. One Robinson ad, in particular, criticized Stein’s handling of racial justice protests in 2020.

“As Attorney General, Josh Stein has been intent on keeping North Carolina communities safe – whether it be urging Congress to spend $300 million to detect fentanyl at the border, clearing the rape kit backlog, or putting drug traffickers, murderers, rapists and child sex abusers behind bars,” Stein campaign spokeswoman Morgan Hopkins said in a statement.

Robinson also has the support of Trump, who called him “Martin Luther King on steroids” as he endorsed the lieutenant governor in March ahead of the state’s Republican primary. Robinson has embraced the former president’s backing and campaigned with him in Asheville last month. There, the lieutenant governor made an argument that many of his own supporters have made for him: It’s not about the personality or how “brash” Trump may seem, but his policies.

“We’re suffering because of bad policy,” Robinson said. “We need to get the good times back. And how do we get the good times back? We reelect President Donald Trump to fix this economy.”

Contentious remarks

The governor’s race may come down to how much Robinson has turned off moderate and independent voters after years of comments in interviews and Facebook posts that have been criticized as anti-LGBTQ, antisemitic and misogynistic.

Stein has sought to capitalize on that history by arguing that Robinson is unfit for the office and framing his inflammatory comments as distractions.

“We have to focus on the fundamentals: great schools, solid infrastructure, affordable and accessible health care, safe communities,” the attorney general told voters at a campaign event with business leaders this summer. “And we must leave to the side these job-killing culture wars.”

Robinson has also made an economic pitch, focused on his experiences growing up in poverty, being laid off and watching his jobs get sent overseas.

Susan Myers, an entrepreneur from Pink Hill, North Carolina, said those experiences showed that Robinson has “lived a real life.” Myers said she was a longtime supporter of the lieutenant governor and had held a fundraiser for him at her home during his 2020 race.

“I was amazed at the turnout in a very rural area,” she told CNN. “He’s a rock star. He draws people across racial and sexual and income and education barriers, and that’s what we need.”

She was willing to look past his history of contentious remarks.

“There are a lot of lies, a lot of taking a little bit here, a little bit there,” Myers said of the criticisms of Robinson. “Mark’s not a lifelong politician, so he said things off the cuff that maybe he shouldn’t have said.”

A contrast in styles and biographies

Democrats say Stein’s record – and his lack of viral moments – is part of his appeal.

“He is a public servant,” state party chair Anderson Clayton said. “He’s not a showboat.

Stein grew up in Chapel Hill, where his father – civil rights attorney Adam Stein – helped found the state’s first racially integrated law firm. The attorney general received a bachelors degree from Dartmouth and law and public policy degrees from Harvard University.

He’s also highlighted his work clearing the state’s massive backlog of untested rape kits. During his first term in office, Stein worked with the Republican-controlled legislature to conduct an audit that revealed there were more than 16,000 untested rape kits in the state and to pass legislation to clear the backlog and reform the testing system. Stein’s office announced in April that the backlog had been cleared.

Republicans have argued that despite his inflammatory comments, Robinson appeals to working-class North Carolina residents in a way that the Ivy League-educated, two-term attorney general may not.

Robinson grew up in Greensboro, the ninth of 10 children, and speaks often of how his mother kept the family afloat after his father died. After serving in the Army Reserves and briefly attending college, Robinson spent years working in furniture manufacturing. In 2022, he received a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

In 2018, he rose to prominence after his remarks at a Greensboro City Council meeting defending gun owners’ rights after the Parkland , Florida, school shooting. (Months earlier, Robinson took to Facebook to label survivors of the shooting calling for gun control “spoiled, angry, know it all CHILDREN” and “media prosti-tots.”) Two years later, he won his first political campaign, for lieutenant governor, in the same cycle that Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Stein won second terms.

Both candidates have centered their pitch on the economy and education. Earlier this summer, the two shared a stage for the first time at a town hall style event hosted by the Wilmington Business Journal.

Stein spoke first, touting his record as attorney general and repeating his warning of “job-killing culture wars” and the memory of the state’s bathroom law.

Then he blasted what he called Robinson’s “division and hate,” and ran through a list of his opponent’s past comments, including describing homosexuality as “filth,” calling public school teachers “wicked people,” suggesting that Pearl Harbor and 9/11 might have been inside jobs, and referencing women who “can’t keep their skirts down” to explain his support for banning abortion.

“Friends, being governor is not performative outrage,” Stein told the crowd. “It is a real job. It’s an important job. It is a hard job.”

When he took the stage minutes later, Robinson said he would be focused on the economy and education.

“There are a lot of folks are going to say that Mark Robinson is some culture warrior, is going to be focused on the culture wars. That is not true,” he told the crowd. “That is not the message that we have been presenting, and that is not what we will be doing as governor.”

A few minutes later, however, the topic turned to those battles when Robinson was asked to elaborate on his pledge to remove what he believes to be inappropriate materials from classrooms. He pointed to the book “Gender Queer,” a memoir about coming out as nonbinary and frequent target of bans.

Deloris Rhodes, a former high school principal who moved to Wilmington after she retired, said she’s been following Robinson since he was elected lieutenant governor in 2020. She bristled at his efforts to overhaul public school education in the state.

In his 2022 memoir, Robinson called for eliminating science and social studies classes for elementary school students, a proposal he later backed away from, and shuttering the State Board of Education.

“Anyone that has common sense knows that they’re going to vote for Josh Stein,” Rhodes said.

Heather Horak, a 48-year-old Wilmington resident who attended the event, said she appreciates Robinson’s approach to education policy. Horak is an unaffiliated voter whose politics defy easy categorization. She supported Democratic presidents – including Obama twice – until 2016, when she backed Trump. Her support for Trump this year was only solidified after independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr dropped out and endorsed the former president. At the same time, Horak also supports abortion rights.

Horak said she wasn’t focused on negative ads about Robinson’s conduct because it didn’t affect the issues that matter to her. She wanted people to vote on policy, not emotions, she said.

“If – whoever your candidate is – is just triggering your emotions and you say, ‘I don’t like that person because I think they’re a bully, I don’t like that person because he’s got a harsh tone,’ let’s be realistic and look at the facts,” she said. “That’s my biggest concern.”

CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to reflect that the ad that criticized Josh Stein’s handling of racial justice protests in 2020 was from Mark Robinson’s campaign.

CNN’s David Wright contributed to this report.

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