In recent years, some truly bizarre, fringe figures have excelled in Republican politics, but even in the radicalized GOP, there are some limits. A few years ago, for example, a former member of the American Nazi Party and white supremacist activist ran as a Republican and won a congressional primary in Illinois. There was an immediate and unsubtle stampede among party officials to denounce him.
More recently, the GOP in Missouri took steps to reject one of the party’s gubernatorial candidates after learning of his affiliation with the KKK.
It is, in other words, possible to be too extreme for the Republican Party, even in 2024. Remarkably, however, North Carolina’s lieutenant governor apparently didn’t meet the threshold. NBC News reported overnight:
Democrat Josh Stein and Republican Mark Robinson have won their parties’ primaries for governor in North Carolina, NBC News projects, setting up a closely watched November matchup between two statewide elected officials that is all but certain to feature many of the themes that will define the national 2024 campaign. … The stakes will be high in the race to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, as North Carolina is just one of two presidential swing states with races for governor.
The outcome was not close: The right-wing lieutenant governor finished with 66% support in a three-way primary, outpacing his next closest Republican rival by more than 47 points. North Carolina has 100 counties, and Robinson won all of them.
Even in an era in which over-the-top crackpots can excel in electoral politics, Robinson stands out as unique. For one thing, he’s shown the kind of overt antisemitism that candidates for major offices tend to avoid — up to and including his doubts about whether the Holocaust occurred.
We could end the conversation here, but to fully appreciate the North Carolinian’s radicalism, we have to keep going. As we discussed earlier in the week, Robinson condemned the LGBTQ community in…
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