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Guest Essay
By Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
On Nov. 5, North Carolina will determine whether a slate of Republican candidates who believe that the 2020 election was stolen, who dismiss Trump’s 91 felony charges and who are eager to be led by the most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency, can win in a battleground state.
Pope McCorkle, a Democratic consultant and professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, argued in an email that the results of this year’s Republican primary election on March 5 demonstrate that “the North Carolina G.O.P. is now a MAGA party. With the gubernatorial nomination of Mark Robinson, the N.C. G.O.P. is clearly in the running for the most MAGA party in the nation.”
As they are elsewhere, MAGA leaders in North Carolina are confrontational.
In February 2018, Robinson, the first Black lieutenant governor of the state, described on Facebook his view of survivors of school shootings who then publicly call for gun control. They are “media prosti-tots” who suffer from “the liberal syndrome of rectal cranial inversion mixed with a healthy dose of just plain evil and stupid permeating your hallways.”
In a March 2018 posting on Facebook, Robinson declared: “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”
In an October 2021 sermon in a North Carolina church, Robinson told parishioners, “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth. And yes, I called it filth.”
There are many ways to express MAGA extremism.
On May 13, 2020, Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for North Carolina Superintendent of Public Schools, responded on X (formerly Twitter) to a suggestion that Barack Obama be sent to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on charges of treason. Morrow’s counterproposal?
I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad. I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.
In Morrow’s world, Obama would be unlikely to die alone. Morrow’s treason execution list, according to a report on CNN, includes North Carolina’s current governor, Roy Cooper, former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, Representative Ilhan Omar, Hillary Clinton, Senator Chuck Schumer, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates — and President Biden.
As Morrow put it succinctly on Facebook in 2020: “We need to follow the Constitution’s advice and KILL all TRAITORS!!!”
The mainstream is worried. The North Carolina Chamber of Commerce voiced its concern in a statement on March 8:
Tuesday’s primary election results were a startling warning of the looming threats to North Carolina’s business climate. While we celebrate the victories of Chamber-backed candidates, many of the races we were watching turned for candidates that do not share our vision for North Carolina.
Particularly in Republican races, populist candidates enjoyed great success. In many instances, previously unknown candidates defeated sitting legislators and elected officials with stronger qualifications, pristine voting records, and significantly more funding.
North Carolina Republicans have been able to maintain a slim advantage over Democrats, in large part because of the racial gulf between the two parties.
In 2023, according to a University of North Carolina study, whites were a minority of registered Democrats, at 40 percent, while Black voters were a plurality, at 46 percent, with the remainder being Hispanic, Asian American and other ethnicities.
Registered North Carolina Republicans, in contrast, were 88 percent white, 2 percent Black, 2 percent Hispanic and the rest other ethnic groups.
The racial divide has turned North Carolina politics into a battle between overwhelmingly white rural counties and increasingly diverse urban centers like Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-Salem.
Urban and suburban population growth has given the Democrats some advantage, but there has been a large and expanding difference in white and Black turnout rates.
Democracy North Carolina, a nonpartisan research organization, released a report showing a consistent gap between white and Black turnout in nonpresidential year elections, from 2002 to 2022, ranging from a 6-to-11 point white advantage up through 2020, which grew to a........