A series of racist and lewd posts on a pornographic website more than a decade ago, unveiled last week, have produced a surreal scenario: The election to decide the next leader of the free world could be upended by a down-ballot candidate in the ninth-largest state in the country — a Republican North Carolina gubernatorial nominee who has amassed a mountain of negative headlines that Democrats are weaponizing in the presidential race.

North Carolina is considered one of only a few battleground states in the presidential election, along with Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and others. It’s a state former president Donald Trump carried by less than 75,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election, and one he’ll need again to return to the White House.

And yet Democrats believe — and Republicans fear — that Trump’s odds of defeating Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris could be hampered by a North Carolina man Trump has endorsed and praised on multiple occasions: Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.

The Republican gubernatorial candidate has made a number of controversial statements about abortion, women, the LGBTQ community and Jewish people. Attorney General Josh Stein, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, has used those comments to attack Robinson and build up a double-digit lead in the race.

Now national Democrats are elevating Trump and Robinson’s relationship in hopes that can sink both campaigns. On Thursday, a CNN report tied Robinson to sexually explicit and racist comments on a pornographic website. The report said Robinson referred to himself as a “Black Nazi” and a “perv” on the site, plus comments advocating for the reinstatement of slavery and expressing admiration for Hitler — allegations Robinson denied Thursday and again Saturday night.

“While everybody else wants to focus on the garbage and the trash that tries to besmirch people, we’re out here telling people about what we want to do, how we want to partner with you to make this state better,” Robinson told a crowd at the Fayetteville Motor Speedway.

Less than 24 hours after the CNN article was published, the Harris campaign launched its first television advertisement linking the two Republicans together. The 30-second spot shows footage of Robinson’s abortion comments alongside clips of Trump praising Robinson. The campaign also sent a statement referring to the “extreme Trump-Robinson agenda.” Another ad campaign, by the Democratic National Committee, shows images of the two together in billboards across the state.

The barrage continued Saturday when the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group led by former Republicans, launched a video ad underscoring Trump’s statements of admiration for Robinson, saying “the felon loves the weirdo,” referring to convictions against Trump.

A spokesperson for the Robinson campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Trump is now distancing itself from a candidate who he once described as “Martin Luther King on steroids.” A Trump spokesperson told the Associated Press that Robinson — who Trump has regularly campaigned with in years past — wasn’t invited to speak at Trump’s rally in Wilmington Saturday. The two haven’t shared the stage in a month.

Meanwhile, Republicans in other competitive North Carolina races deleted pictures of themselves with Robinson and issued statements condemning his alleged comments on the porn site. Democratic groups have already sent mail ads to voters accusing Republican legislative candidates of sharing Robinson’s beliefs.

Robinson may prove toxic to GOP candidates up and down the ballot — a prospect that has outraged Republicans such as Pat McCrory, the only Republican elected governor of North Carolina in the last two decades.

In interviews Friday, McCrory blamed Republican National Committee leader Michael Whatley for Robinson’s rise. Whatley served as chair of the North Carolina Republican Party from 2019 until March, when he was elevated to lead the RNC.

McCrory told CNN Whatley “ignored many known flaws that many of us knew about [Robinson] and just assumed they'd be brushed over. But [Robinson’s campaign] has been a ticking time bomb for several years now.”

Whatley didn’t respond to a request for comment.

McCrory echoed the feelings of many Republicans who believe party leaders should have done something to prevent Robinson from weighing-down other candidates.

But party officials are limited in what they can do when it comes to its nominees. State party bylaws prohibit its officials from interfering in GOP primaries. Party officials rely on campaigns to find their own candidate’s vulnerabilities and prepare for scrutiny. That could include scrubbing unflattering internet histories or paying off debts. They expect primary opponents to conduct robust opposition research — a process that culminates in a nomination made by voters.

Even if a candidate touts multiple endorsements and becomes a crowd favorite, it’s the responsibility of the voters and the front-runner’s opponents to investigate whether that person is fit for office, said Paul Shumaker, a longtime Republican strategist.

“It’s not for the party to pick and choose one candidate over the other. It’s not the party’s role to vet these candidates,” Shumaker said. “It’s the party’s role to remain neutral.”

But until recently, political strategists and Republican candidates said, none of Robinson’s opponents had the financial or political support — or the gumption — to mount a more aggressive campaign against him.

Now that other Republican candidates may face political consequences for their associations with Robinson, some are calling on the GOP to intervene.

Erick Erickson, a Georgia-based conservative pundit, posted on social media Thursday that Robinson needed to be pushed out of the race — either by Trump or other Republicans.

Replacing Robinson on the ballot was a longshot, though. Under state law, Robinson would have needed to drop out before midnight Thursday — something he vowed he wouldn’t do, and he didn’t. The CNN article posted at 3:21 p.m.

“In cases like this, some people go, ‘Well, the Republicans should have done something,’” said Dallas Woodhouse, former executive director of the state Republican party. “OK, what Republicans? And what should they do?”

Some Republicans had asked Woodhouse if the state party could rescind Robinson’s nomination, he said.

“The answer is no,” Woodhouse said. “It's real easy to play Monday morning quarterback and … it's tremendously more complicated than people want to make it.”

Right wing media darling

Robinson rose to the top of Republican politics in North Carolina almost overnight.

In 2020, he went from private citizen to the state’s first Black lieutenant governor, the second-highest ranking executive official in North Carolina. With his commanding presence and forceful speeches, he was seen as a darling of a party that was angling to attract more minorities.

Robinson had never sought elected office before running for lieutenant governor in 2020. But by the time he launched his campaign, he had already gained name recognition among members of the party’s base for a speech he gave to the Greensboro City Council in 2018.

That February, a shooter killed 17 people at a Florida high school. Afterward, Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan publicly questioned whether the city should allow gun shows at the Greensboro Coliseum, a city-owned property.

Robinson spoke during the public comment portion of the April 3 council meeting.

“Every time we have one of these shootings, nobody wants to put the blame where it goes, which is at the shooter’s feet,” Robinson said. “You want to put it at my feet. You want to turn around and restrict my right.”

Then-U.S. Rep. Mark Walker, a Republican who represented Greensboro in Congress, shared video of Robinson’s speech on social media. Robinson was also asked to appear on Fox & Friends, a morning show on the conservative Fox News cable channel.

Within hours, the Greensboro mayor was inundated with dozens of emails and calls from people concerned about their gun rights.

“He’s a good orator,” Vaughan told WRAL in an interview. “Obviously he was not speaking to the topic at hand, but the people who watched it didn’t care what the topic was.”

The 2020 primary

In 2020, then-Lt. Gov. Dan Forest decided to run for governor, a race he lost to incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. Nine Republicans filed to run for lieutenant governor, including a former member of Congress, a state senator and the state's superintendent of schools.

Robinson won the GOP primary easily, emerging unscathed even though many of his divisive views were documented on his personal Facebook page.

For instance, Robinson acknowledged in a 2012 post that he paid for the mother of his “unborn child” to have an abortion in 1989. Such news could have prompted backlash against Robinson, a political newcomer and abortion opponent. But the revelation didn’t come to light until 2022.

Other Robinson posts bashed Black people for giving their "shekels" to satanic or Jewish movie producers, insulted famous women and disparaged gay people.

Some candidates had looked into Robinson’s financial past, said former State Sen. Scott Stone, one of Robinson’s opponents in the primary. That history includes criminal convictions for writing bad checks, plus multiple bankruptcies and, at the time, liens for tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes, rent and car payments.

For Republicans hoping to win the primary, though, attacking Robinson could have backfired.

The field of Republican lieutenant governor candidates was big. And candidates needed to spend what few resources they had on ads promoting themselves. There was also no guarantee that Republican voters would reward a candidate who attacked Robinson.

With nine candidates in the race — and a winner needing 30% support to secure the nomination — many expected the primary to go to a runoff. And that’s where candidates might’ve considered a more aggressive strategy against Robinson.

“Many of us considered [attacking Robinson] and had seen a lot of the [opposition research] that we believed would hurt him in a general,” Scott said. “But with nine in the race, if one person goes after him, it only helps the others.”

Robinson stood out from the other candidates because of his speaking prowess and race, Stone said. At many GOP events on the campaign trail, candidates give speeches in alphabetical order. Robinson usually spoke before Stone — giving Stone a front row seat to Robinson’s rise.

“He’d come in and give this big, fiery speech,” Stone told WRAL. “And then I’m coming in milquetoast, just giving answers that make sense. But it was like, nobody cares.”

Stone knew Robinson had made some fans at candidate forums. But other candidates had spent more money and touted more accomplishments than Robinson. So it wasn’t until a month before election day that Stone realized Robinson might be the top vote-getter. Buzz was building on social media, he said.

Voters would post: “I don't know any of these people. Who's everybody's choice for this race or that race?” Stone recalled. “And people would go, ‘Oh, we love Mark Robinson.’”

By the end of election night, Robinson had won the party’s nomination with 32% of the vote. He cleared the second place finisher by 18 percentage points.

Becoming lieutenant governor

The office of lieutenant governor comes with a big title but little power compared to other offices elected statewide. The lieutenant governor can’t take executive action and doesn’t lead an agency. The officeholder is primarily responsible for presiding over the state senate and sitting on various state boards and commissions.

As a result, candidates for lieutenant governor draw far less financial support — and less attention — than candidates for federal office, governor or many other statewide races.

Former State Rep. Yvonne Holley, Robinson’s Democratic opponent in the lieutenant governor’s race, told WRAL she paid for someone to investigate Robinson’s background in advance of the general election.

Her team didn’t find Robinson’s post about paying for an abortion or any of the comments revealed in CNN’s article Thursday.

“I had stuff like the bankruptcy, the general stuff that you could find looking through public records,” Holley said.

She said didn’t see much value in attacking Robinson with those details.

“I wanted to run a clean campaign about what I was going to do,” Holley said, adding: “Then I would do nothing to tear down, purposely, tear down another Black person. That’s just not my thing.”

In a race in which 5.5 million votes were cast, Robinson beat Holley by 3 percentage points.

Holley told WRAL she thinks Robinson and other North Carolina Republicans won because they were willing to attend large campaign events — “Covid-spreaders,” she called them — and she wasn’t.

“He was out there going to churches and doing those kinds of things, and all I was doing was Zoom calls,” she said.

Amid all of Robinson’s controversies, Holley said one big disappointment stands out.

“He talked about on the campaign trail that he thought Black men needed a lot of help and he was going to work with Black men,” Holley said. “But I didn't see him do anything for Black men after he won.”

Momentum builds

Upon entering office in 2021, Robinson almost immediately became the face of the Republican brand in North Carolina.

Other Republicans, such as State Senate leader Phil Berger and state House Speaker Tim Moore, had more power and longer records. But it was Robinson who was invited to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-abortion rallies and various other national political events — all within his first few months on the job.

In addition to his oratory skills, Robinson is equipped with a life story unique within the North Carolina Republican Party: a conservative Christian Black man who made a name for himself despite being raised in poverty and losing two jobs to NAFTA, a trade agreement that prompted American businesses to move automotive and textile jobs to nations with lower labor costs.

“I don’t think the party had ever seen anyone like that,” McCrory said in an interview with WRAL. “He brought diversity and opinion and showmanship — everything but qualifications.”

However, McCrory said, Robinson “would always take it too far.”

“He’d cross the line,” McCrory said, “but he'd have the audience in the palm of his hand.”

Before the end of Robinson’s first year in office, the lieutenant governor said he was “95% sure” he’d run for governor in the next election. By then, though, Republican political strategists had identified several Robinson comments denigrading the LGBTQ community — statements that they thought would limit his appeal in a general election.

“To win in North Carolina, the numbers show you cannot have an anti-LGBTQ platform,” Lawrence Shaheen, a Charlotte-based attorney and Republican campaign consultant, said at the time.

A candidate can oppose what they view as explicit material in classrooms or the teaching of critical race theory, Shaheen said, “but you cannot run while slamming the LGBTQ community. There just isn’t a path to victory there. Period.”

The gubernatorial primary

Robinson launched his campaign for governor in April 2023 and soon had two reputable Republican competitors: State Treasurer Dale Folwell and Mark Walker, the former congressman who had helped Robinson rise to stardom.

It’s common for primary candidates to talk about their own professional résumés and political agenda. Candidates may disagree over policy, but they rarely attack each other personally. Folwell and Walker went after Robinson directly, claiming his character and offensive comments made him unelectable.

Folwell criticized Robinson for not showing up to boards and commissions, one of the few ways a lieutenant governor can directly impact state policy. Walker denounced Robinson for comments in unearthed social media posts about Jewish people and the Holocaust. He also cited Robinson’s financial past, accusing him of “cheating people” out of money.

Facing pushback on social media, Walker posted: “Better to know this covered-up information now or after the primary?”

In October, Walker dropped out of the gubernatorial race to run for congress again. That same month, businessman and political newcomer Bill Graham launched a gubernatorial campaign targeted directly at Robinson. Graham aired a television ad attacking Robinson for his antisemitic remarks.

“When you read about Mark Robinson’s past, the facts are disturbing,” a narrator said. Graham’s press release about the ad went on to say: “Mark Robinson is not who he says he is.”

U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-NC, was the only high-profile North Carolina Republican to endorse Graham. Tillis told National Review that Robinson “has virtually no legislative experience, very little business experience.”

“We’re a very, very important state and we have to have people with that kind of experience,” Tillis said at the time.

Still, no one came close to beating Robinson. He won the GOP primary with 64% of the vote, while Folwell drew 19% and Graham got 16%.

And while it’s customary for primary candidates to back their party’s eventual winner, neither Folwell nor Graham backed Robinson after his victory.

Folwell doesn’t blame the voters. In an interview with WRAL, Folwell blamed party leaders who didn’t warn Trump of Robinson’s flaws before Trump endorsed him.

“We have selections, followed by an election,” Folwell said. “And he was selected by Donald Trump, Michael Whatley, Senator Berger and Speaker Moore.”

Folwell says he knows Whatley was aware of Robinson’s vulnerabilities, because Folwell took his concerns to Whatley directly. It didn’t matter, he said.

“Except for one handshake, sometime in the last eight years, I was never allowed to talk to President Trump about my vision for this state,” Folwell said.

The outcome of the primary matched what many had expected. Jim Blaine, a Republican strategist, predicted that Robinson’s primary opponents would turn out to be merely “a bump on his road to the nomination."

Woodhouse, the former state party director, said other GOP primary candidates would’ve needed more prominent Republicans behind them in order to compete with Robinson.

“It would have taken legislative leaders, maybe former governors, former US senators,” Woodhouse said. “It would have taken this massive effort to go out and raise tens of millions of dollars to … attack him. And, by the way, it may not work.”

Trump’s challenge in North Carolina

Trump threw his support behind Robinson early in the campaign, telling a Greensboro crowd in March that Robinson “is Martin Luther King on steroids.”

“I told that to Mark. I said, ‘I think you’re better than Martin Luther King,’” Trump said. “‘I think you are Martin Luther King times two.’”

As the Harris campaign began airing those Trump remarks in a new ad on Friday — hoping to undermine Trump’s odds of winning the presidency — Tillis called on Robinson to back up his claims about the CNN article. Robinson called them “salacious tabloid lies.”

“If the reporting on Mark Robinson is a total media fabrication, he needs to take immediate legal action,” Tillis said in a social media post. “If the reporting is true, he owes it to President Trump and every Republican to take accountability for his actions and put the future of NC (and) our party before himself.”

Despite Trump’s endorsement, Robinson has trailed Stein by a far-wider margin than the 3-point lead Harris has over Trump in the state, according to a recent WRAL News Poll. It’s a data point that worries Trump supporters.

As news of the Robinson comments came to light on Thursday, and as Trump prepared to visit Wilmington, signs of the distancing were amplified.

“We must stay focused on the races we can win,” Tillis said in a social media post. “We have to make sure President Trump wins NC and support the outstanding GOP candidates running for key NCGA and judicial races.”

Asked Thursday whether Trump was still endorsing Robinson, the former president's campaign sent WRAL a statement that didn't even mention Robinson.

"President Trump’s campaign is focused on winning the White House and saving this country," said Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman.

"North Carolina is a vital part of that plan,” she said. “We are confident that as voters compare the Trump record of a strong economy, low inflation, a secure border, and safe streets, with the failures of Biden-Harris, then President Trump will win the Tar Heel State once again. We will not take our eye off the ball.”

On Saturday, Trump whipped a Wilmington crowd into a frenzy, giving a standard stump speech that featured praise for Whatley and North Carolina Republicans including U.S. Sen. Ted Budd, U.S. Reps. David Rouzer and Dan Bishop, who is running for state attorney general against Democratic U.S. Rep. Jeff Jackson.

Missing from the speech were the words Trump once enthusiastically said from podiums across the Tar Heel state: Mark Robinson.

As Trump spoke, Robinson was preparing to meet with voters at the Fayetteville Motor Speedway, where supporters brushed off the news about Robinson’s alleged comments on the porn site.

Before the race started, Robinson took the microphone near the track and looked up to address the crowd. He described himself as a down-to-earth Christian who knows what it takes to deliver for North Carolinians.

“We have been where you have been,” he said. “We’ve seen what you have seen. We have come back, we have bounced back, and we continue to succeed.”

After the brief speech, Robinson led a prayer and then entered the stands to meet with fans.

Racegoer Justin Hall, who wore Robinson campaign gear, made his way through the small cluster of people to get Robinson to sign his hat.

“If I could call it true, I would definitely be concerned,” Hall said of the CNN reporting. “But I don’t believe it’s true. I believe it’s something that was made up because Democrats are getting desperate.”

A spokesman for the North Carolina Democratic Party said the party had nothing to do with the article. A CNN spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Another race fan, Susan Daniel, said it didn’t matter if the details were true.

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Daniel said from the stands, where she sat to watch her nephew race.

“You live and you learn, and nobody truly knows a person’s background and really knows the truth about things," she said. "What matters to me is you do the right thing, and that’s important.”

WRAL News reporter Carly Haynes contributed to this report.