It’s hard to imagine a worse week for a campaign than the one North Carolina’s Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson experienced last week. On Sept. 19, just one day before military ballots were to be sent out, CNN published a damning article on Robinson, tying the candidate for governor to grotesque posts made on a forum for a porn site over a decade ago.
CNN found that the account’s name, “minisoldr,” was used by Robinson for other social media sites, alongside an email he was using for those accounts, with later findings matching the IP address to near where Robinson lived. This information was found due to a 2018 data breach of the porn site’s parent company, before Robinson announced his intention to run for public office.
To make matters worse for Robinson, Politico released a story the same day that matched Robinson’s email to an account on the adultery website Ashley Madison. Ashley Madison had suffered a data breach even before the porn site did, dating all the way back to 2015.
Though Robinson has hired attorneys and says he will sue CNN over what he claims are false allegations, the evidence provided seems to create a nearly airtight case that it was Robinson. What makes it look even worse for him is that many of his campaign staff and official staff within the lieutenant governor’s office resigned following the story. Even worse for Robinson, the Republican Governors Association announced it is no longer running ads in the North Carolina governor’s race.
I emphasize all this to show just how strong the case against Robinson appears to be. Even still, many conservative base voters are unlikely to believe the story — and I don’t blame them one bit.
According to Gallup polls, trust in media has steadily declined over the years, especially among Republican and unaffiliated voters. Only 11% of Republicans nationally trust media, with unaffiliateds just behind them at 29%. Democratic trust in media has declined the least, sitting at 58%.
This historic distrust and the great rift between Republican and Democratic trust in media have been exacerbated by such sensational reports as the now-discredited Steele dossier, the Jesse Smollet hate crime hoax, the media’s lambasting of high school student Nicholas Sandmann as a racist (resulting in CNN settling on a $275 million libel suit), and the media’s attempt to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Stories such as these have made people wary of big media stories, especially ones dropping at election time. This distrust is not helped by the perceived left-leaning bias of most media, such as NPR. This perceived bias was reinforced earlier this year when a long-time reporter for NPR wrote a now-infamous op-ed discussing the network’s growing bias and its intentional burying of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Conservatives’ distrust of major news publications puts many other North Carolina Republican candidates in a lose-lose situation. If a candidate condemns Robinson’s alleged actions, they risk alienating Republican base voters who do not believe the story. If they don’t condemn him, they may hurt themselves with moderates who believe the allegations.
Democrats across North Carolina have already started to attach their Republican opponents to Robinson, as has Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Even before the allegations, Robinson had significantly trailed his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein. The question is no longer who will win the governor’s race, but whether Robinson will be a lead balloon for other Republican candidates down the ballot.
Trump is likely the only candidate who would not be affected by the Robinson situation. Trump is a polarizing political figure, and few people do not hold strong opinions about him. You either love or hate him, with little to no room in between. Attempts to link Trump to Robinson are unlikely to change anyone’s opinion.
While there is plenty of room to speculate about how much these allegations will impact the election, we still have a long way to go before Election Day and plenty of time for more game-changing October surprises.
