Controversial Mark Robinson loses effort to become North Carolina governor

The closely-watched North Carolina gubernatorial election between Democratic state Attorney General Josh Stein and Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson has ended in a victory for Stein, Fox News and ABC.

The contest, which also comes as former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have been competing hard in the battleground state that narrowly went for Trump twice at the presidential level, was the Republicans' effort to win back a gubernatorial seat the party hasn't held since 2017, when then-Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper unseated incumbent GOP Gov. Pat McCrory.

Robinson, a gun-rights activist who was unexpectedly propelled to the lieutenant governor's office in 2020, has become a constant source of controversy over his long history of incendiary social media posts, including pushing conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial, attacking school shooting survivors and speaking in defense of accused domestic abusers.

He also struggled to moderate his previously absolutist anti-abortion stances in the face of backlash from women voters, even admitting his wife had an abortion in one campaign ad.

Perhaps the most explosive scandal, however, dropped in September, when it was revealed that Robinson made posts calling himself a "Black Nazi" and praising slavery on a pornographic internet message board prior to taking office.

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To this day, Robinson has maintained that the posts were not his and it was fabricated by AI — even though forensic evidence exhaustively ties the posts to him — and threatened to retaliate against CNN for breaking the story.

However, after this scandal broke, Robinson was largely abandoned by fellow Republicans in North Carolina and even Trump, who had previously endorsed Robinson and made joint appearances with him at rallies, claimed not to know who he is.

As all of this has been going on, North Carolina Democrats have also been trying to pick off the GOP's supermajority in the legislature, which a newly-appointed right-wing state Supreme Court allowed to be re-gerrymandered. These lower-level contests would determine whether a Democratic governor would even hold meaningful power to veto legislation.