With Robinson Candidacy, North Carolina Republicans Fear Damage to Years of Gains

Explosive posts by the Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, are sending waves of anxiety through a state party that has long been tactical and disciplined.

The great Republican wave that swept the South starting in the late 20th Century — the very wave that Lyndon Johnson predicted after signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 — came relatively late to North Carolina.

But when it finally hit in 2013, with Republicans controlling both the legislature and the governor’s mansion for the first time since Reconstruction, it did so with breathtaking force. Led by a group of savvy, tactically skilled state lawmakers, North Carolina Republicans set out to undo decades of center-left policy enshrined by Democrats, and to remake the rules of the political game in their favor.

They engaged in gerrymandering that ensured the party a near-lock on the state legislature and lopsided control of the state’s House delegation in Congress. They paved the way for a conservative state Supreme Court that upheld a strict voter ID law. And after gaining a veto-proof majority last year, they banned most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy.

And while Republicans lost the governorship in 2016, they had harbored hope of winning full control of state government again this year, bringing North Carolina in alignment with most other Southern states.

Then came Mark Robinson.

Long before this week, when CNN reported that Mr. Robinson had called himself a “black NAZI!,” discussed his pornography habits and praised slavery in an adult online forum, the bellicose Republican nominee for governor (and current lieutenant governor) was polling poorly against his Democratic rival, Josh Stein.

But now more than ever, Mr. Robinson, with his antisemitic and anti-gay rhetoric and performative, polarizing brand of politics, is sending waves of anxiety through the state party.

Former Gov. Pat McCrory, the Republican who was narrowly voted out in 2016, said on Friday that Mr. Robinson was a threat to the many gains that Republicans have made in the state. “He is the most effective populist and the most dangerous populist I’ve ever encountered,” Mr. McCrory said in an interview.

Mr. McCrory proudly recalled the period a decade ago when his party found itself in full control, saying, “My administration, and a lot of people in the legislature, were extremely serious people about fiscal responsibility and long-term economic development policy and infrastructure.”

Mr. Robinson, he said, is something else altogether. In 2018, he was working in furniture manufacturing when he gave a speech against gun control at a City Council meeting in Greensboro. The speech went viral, ultimately leading to his election as lieutenant governor in 2020.

Mr. McCrory said that he was initially intrigued by Mr. Robinson, but came to conclude that he cared little about policymaking and budgets.

Mr. Robinson has said that the online posts that shook his campaign this week are fakes generated by artificial intelligence. He has also said he has no intention of leaving the governor’s race.

His campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

The CNN report, published on Thursday, has raised questions about whether the scandal will harm former President Donald J. Trump’s chances of winning North Carolina and its 16 potentially crucial electoral college votes.

But inside the state, Republicans are also wondering what kind of down-ticket damage could be wrought by Mr. Robinson staying on the ballot. Dallas Woodhouse, a former head of the state Republican Party, said on Friday that the party could conceivably lose the slim legislative supermajorities that have recently allowed it to override vetoes from Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat who is leaving office because of term limits.

Republicans this year also have an extreme candidate for public schools superintendent. The party’s nominee for the post, Michelle Morrow, once proposed executing former President Barack Obama and showing it on pay-per-view television.

Such candidates have few if any analogues in the recent North Carolina past, said John Hood, a longtime conservative commentator in the state. Mr. Hood said it is not yet clear whether candidates like Mr. Robinson and Ms. Morrow are anomalies or the new future of the Republican movement in the state.

Mr. Hood, who also teaches at Duke University, said that by 2010, the year the party gained control of the legislature, its leaders had moved on from the racist rhetoric of Jesse Helms, the late United States Senator who embodied the vestiges of old segregationist sentiment in the state.

But many liberal North Carolinians maintain that the party has continued following the old playbook, albeit in a subtler form, particularly when it comes to issues like redistricting and voting rights.

In state and federal courtrooms, the Republican ascendancy led to years of intense legal skirmishes over redistricting that largely resulted in Republicans coming out on top. Many in the party saw these and other changes as much-needed correctives after decades of Democratic dominance and gerrymandering.

Few moves better cemented the Republican political monopoly than the decision to hire Thomas B. Hofeller, the undisputed master of gerrymandering, to draft maps of the state’s congressional and state legislative seats in 2011 and 2017. After his daughter released computer files of his work in the wake of his death in 2018, Mr. Hofeller — whose primary work was for the national Republican Party — was shown to be the architect of successive gerrymanders that largely enshrined GO.P. control of the state’s political boundaries for more than a decade.

The North Carolina Supreme Court flipped from a Democratic to a Republican majority in 2022, a change helped by the Republican Legislature’s decisions to end public financing for judicial campaigns and make elections to the court partisan. One of the new majority’s rulings upheld a strict voter ID law; another allowed the legislature to draw new district maps that heavily favor Republicans.

It was during Mr. Robinson’s 2019 campaign for lieutenant governor that some of his incendiary Facebook comments came to light. Still, many Republican leaders saw Mr. Robinson, who is Black, as a potentially promising newcomer with humble origins and a preacher-like aura who could help diversify the party.

But in March, fueled by the Trump-aligned base of the party, Mr. Robinson decisively beat two more moderate Republicans to become the party’s nominee for governor.

Paul Schumaker, a veteran Republican strategist, had sounded the alarm earlier this year on Mr. Robinson, saying his toxic brand of politics would be detrimental to the ticket.

Phil Berger, the top Republican in the State Senate, may have seen it differently.

For him, “the goal is to keep a veto-proof majority in the legislature,” regardless of who the governor is, said Jonathan Bridges, a Republican consultant in Wilmington.

Still, Mr. Bridges said that Republican legislative leaders believe they could take fuller control on matters of policy if Mr. Robinson were to win. “If Robinson becomes governor, that’s icing on the cake,” he said.

Mr. Berger did not respond to requests for comment.

Carter Wrenn, who was an adviser to Mr. Helms, the former North Carolina senator, said that Mr. Helms was viewed as divisive and problematic by many voters in the 1980s, similar to how Mr. Robinson is viewed today.

President Ronald Reagan’s support for Mr. Helms carried a lot of weight then, Mr. Wrenn said. While Mr. Trump heartily endorsed Mr. Robinson in March, it remains to be seen what stance he will take toward the Robinson campaign moving forward.

Though Mr. Robinson’s bid may end up blowing up his party’s well-laid plans for governance, a number of conservatives say that his clinching of the nomination may have been inevitable given the Trumpist passions that continue to ignite the Republican base in North Carolina and beyond.

“I think this idea that somebody could have snapped their fingers and done something is just a fantasy, right?” said Mr. Woodhouse, who is currently the state director for American Majority, an organization that trains conservative grass-roots activists. “The voters made the choice.”