Is GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson too MAGA for North Carolina?

After the Super Tuesday primary in North Carolina, the state’s political observers are turning their eyes to what will likely be the nation’s most competitive presidential and gubernatorial contests — with diametrically opposed nominees leading the ballot. North Carolina voters are familiar with this dynamic, having a long political history of electing Republican candidates at the federal level and Democratic state-level candidates.

Donald Trump will have a provocative soulmate on the North Carolina ticket with Mark Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, as the GOP gubernatorial nominee. Robinson’s rhetoric marries well with that of Trump, who endorsed him; at times, Robinson is even more extreme in attacking “others” who fall outside his strong social conservative views. North Carolina voters have a very clear choice of Trump and Robinson against Democrats Joe Biden and Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general.

But the GOP primary results show early warning signs within the Republican base about Robinson’s popularity in an evenly divided state. North Carolina’s politics have been nationalized in regional division: urban vs. suburban vs. rural. But the state’s suburbs must be thought of as two distinct locations: the “urban suburbs” found within an urban county but outside the central city limits, and the more conservative areas in the suburban counties that surround urban counties.

In 2020’s big three elections (president, U.S. Senate, and N.C. governor votes combined), Democrats dominated the central cities 70-30 percent. The state’s rural counties have been realigning themselves Republican, with 2020’s election seeing a 60-40 GOP favor. The suburbs, however, are a tale of two regions: the urban suburbs were the most competitive region of the state, going just 53-47 Republican, while the surrounding suburban counties were the state’s most Republican region at 63-37. In the end, Trump won the state by 1.3 percent, Republican Thom Tillis won a Senate seat 48.7-46.9, while Democrat Roy Cooper was reelected governor with 51.5 percent.

This regionalism played out once again in Tuesday’s GOP primary. In unofficial results, Trump received 74 percent of the state-wide vote, while Robinson got 65 percent. If the two are indeed bosom political buddies, one would think that the spread between would be closer than 10 points among Republican primary voters.

With the ability to assign at least 90 percent of the unofficial primary votes to the four regions, marked differences are evident in Robinson’s slippage from Trump’s performance. In the central cities, Trump took 60 percent of the vote against Haley; but in those precincts, Robinson only managed a 52-48 win over the combined vote for State Treasurer Dale Folwell and businessman Bill Graham. In the rural counties, Trump had his best performance, getting 83 percent of the vote, while Robinson got 70 percent. In the surrounding suburban counties, Trump received 80 percent, with Robinson getting 68 percent. And in the competitive urban suburbs, Trump got three-quarters of the vote, compared to Robinson’s two-thirds.

In terms of actual votes, Robinson dropped over 42,000 votes in the surrounding suburban counties from Trump’s numbers. In rural North Carolina, Robinson dropped 28,000, and another 20,000 in the urban suburbs. Combined, Robinson ended up with 116,000 votes than Trump on Tuesday.

Considering Donald Trump won North Carolina in 2020 by less than 75,000 votes, and Democrat Roy Cooper beat a Republican challenger, who presented himself as a strong social conservative, by nearly 250,000 votes, the swing in North Carolina is small but extremely powerful when the margins of victory are on a knife’s edge.

In campaign strategy terms, will Trump be able to bring non-Robinson Republican voters back into the party fold? Or will the likely Democratic deluge of Robinson’s inflammatory rhetoric remind those same voters to disavow the party’s gubernatorial candidate and keep to the state’s political tradition of splitting the ballot between the top offices and parties?

Or could the two Republicans’ potentially divisive rhetoric turn off the small sliver of swing voters, and these critical voters choose not to vote or to hold their collective noses and vote Democratic at both the presidential and gubernatorial levels? North Carolina has not seen that dynamic of one party winning both top offices since 2012’s Republican presidential and gubernatorial victories, and that followed 2008’s Democratic sweep of the top offices.

Michael Bitzer holds the Leonard Chair of Political Science at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC, where he is a professor of politics and history and blogs at OldNorthStatePolitics.com