Josh Stein’s campaign is a master class in campaign ads

The most recent round of polls suggests that Josh Stein, the Democratic nominee for governor in North Carolina, is ahead of his Republican adversary, Mark Robinson, by nearly 16 points. That surprises exactly no one. Robinson has always been a ridiculous candidate for the highest office in the country’s ninth most populous state, and since he won the Republican nomination in March, he has been rocked by revelations about his past statements and behavior. The only people who have fled his sinking ship faster than voters are his own campaign staff, which, to go by some reports, is down to a doomed crew that could fit into a dinghy.

But his spectacularly turbulent voyage casts Stein’s smooth sailing as a matter of extraordinary luck when, in fact, Stein and his aides have consistently demonstrated the kind of smarts that might have given them an edge even if Robinson weren’t such a disaster. I’ve been especially impressed with their ad campaign. It should be remembered and emulated long after Nov. 5.

Not that most or even many future candidates will have opponents who give them a feast of material to rival the buffet that Robinson spread out for Stein. Before Robinson emerged as a possible contender for governor, he had a habit — actually, more a vocation — of using social media and public appearances to stake out extreme right-wing positions in the brashest, meanest way possible. There’s video of him — on social media, on various stages — ranting about all the evil in America and all the evildoers to be vanquished. It’s strangely mesmerizing to watch.

And the people working with the Stein campaign clearly watched all of it. But while that’s Politics 101, they also did something less obvious: In a disciplined fashion, they decided to get as far out of Robinson’s way as possible.

In many of the 14 television commercials that the Stein campaign has produced since its ad campaign began in June, Robinson is the star, with Stein refraining from even a fleeting voice-over cameo to denounce whatever ugliness Robinson is shown uttering.

That’s what’s so effective. Any political consultant with any acumen and experience will tell you how jaded voters are. They’ve seen attack ads galore and regard most politicians as sharks; Candidate A’s screed about Candidate B is ipso facto untrustworthy. And suspiciously short, disjointed, context-free snippets of Candidate B seeming to say something untoward during an unguarded moment also emit the stench of political trickery. Viewer beware.

But Candidate B shouting his cruelest message when he means to be seen and heard? That’s what the Stein campaign had on Robinson. And they recognized what treasure it was.

The 16-point spread in the polls is undoubtedly misleading in a purple state where Donald Trump only barely edged out Joe Biden in 2020, and the manager of Stein’s campaign, Jeff Allen, was reluctant to look back on Stein’s ads and their impact because, he said, he’s focused on the remaining days until Nov. 5. “This race will be close,” he said, “so we’re not taking anything for granted.”

But he said that in putting together the Stein ads, a collaboration between the campaign and Ralston Lapp Guinn Media, “It really came down to a question of — are we going to run just clips or put a little bit more spin on the ball and editorialize a bit? We came down on: Show Mark Robinson in his own words.”

Perhaps the most devastating of those words are from a Facebook video, posted by Robinson, in which he thunders that abortion is “about killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down or your pants up — and not get pregnant by your own choice — because you felt like getting your groove thing on.”

The Stein campaign used at least a portion of that tirade in ad after ad, including one of its first two, which were released on June 4. Soon after, polls showed Stein moving ahead of Robinson in what had seemed to be an essentially even race. Throughout that month, I saw the ad, titled “Listen,” again and again. My neighbors in North Carolina brought it up in conversation.

And political analysts said that it felt like a turning point. Paul Shumaker, a veteran Republican strategist in North Carolina, explained why: “The skirt ad is not about abortion,” he told me, adding that it’s about a lack of respect for women. Shumaker recounted that a Republican woman, after seeing the ad, told him: “I spent most of my professional career trying to keep men from pulling my skirt down.”

The ad released in tandem with “Listen,” titled “Keep,” doesn’t include Robinson but, like “Listen,” omits Stein’s voice and words in favor of having other people vouch for his law-and-order bona fides as North Carolina’s attorney general. That’s another way of getting around voters’ cynicism, and the portrait of Stein implicitly acknowledges (and attempts to refute) many voters’ perceptions of Democrats as soft on crime. So while “Listen” fingers Robinson as an extremist, “Keep” frames Stein as anything but.

And it does so in large part by showing him talking and looking comfortable with men and women in law-enforcement uniforms. In politics, images are often more persuasive than words. That’s another bit of wisdom that Stein and his impressive campaign have embraced.