If you wanted to attend a Kamala Harris or Donald Trump rally, living in North Carolina would be a good place to start, as polls show it as a toss-up despite last going blue in 2008 for Barack Obama. 

For all the attention it gets, the state’s unique political landscape, from its large rural strongholds to its growing cities, is often misunderstood. It is a state with a Democratic governor, the outgoing Roy Cooper, and a history of Republican Party leaders who have vacillated over the years from fringe to mainstream and back again. It’s one of the few battleground states this election, which also has some of the most extreme Republican candidates in the country on its ballots. 

“The Republicans have a deep base here, a very conservative [base] on the cultural issue. Think [staunchly anti-LGBTQ+ former senator from North Carolina] Jesse Helms,” Pope “Mac” McCorkle, a professor at Duke Sanford School of Public Policy and a former Democratic strategist, told LGBTQ Nation.   

Helms said, “Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches.” He attempted to block Roberta Achtenberg from becoming assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development because she was, in his words, “a damn lesbian.” During his 1990 campaign against former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, Helms claimed he was facing a “secret campaign” funded by gay bars from Washington to San Francisco.

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Helms won that race. And while he’s been dead for over a decade, his legacy looms large in the Tar Heel State. Many of the same types of voters are still around, supporting rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ candidates like Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R). 

“At the same time, there’s a deep base of, I wouldn’t say, real lefties, but pretty strong progressive elements,” McCorkle added. “Especially in Research Triangle Park [bounded by Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh], and we have a lot of universities, [as well as] the Charlotte area, with the finance and the tech going on, and so it’s a split state. And it swings between Republicans and Democrats depending on the election, but it’s not like it’s a state full of classic moderates, so to speak.” 

So, what exactly is going on in North Carolina in 2024, and what does it say about where the overall election, and indeed the nation, is headed?  

Anti-LGBTQ+ Republicans dominating the ticket

Lt. Gov. Robinson, who is running for governor, has been making national headlines for months for his extreme positions and sordid personal life.

Robinson was getting national attention well before the election for his extreme statements. They include comparing gay people to maggots, saying transgender women should “find a corner outside somewhere to go” to the restroom instead of using public restrooms, calling Black Democrats “slaves,” and targeting Marvel’s “Black Panther” as the work of an “agnostic Jew” and “satanic Marxists.” 

Then came the discovery of his bizarre habit of letting his freak flag fly on an online porn forum, where he called himself a Black Nazi who would like to enslave people, as well as a “perv” who reminisced about times when he spied on women in a gym shower. He also shared his love of watching adult content featuring transgender women. (Robinson denies he wrote these comments.)

While polls showed that he was already losing the race to Democratic opponent, Attorney General Josh Stein, his support has since cratered. 

But he’s not the only Republican extremist who has targeted the LGBTQ+ community. Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) is running against Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC) to replace outgoing Attorney General Stein. Bishop is perhaps best known for being the architect of the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, more commonly known as HB2, or, more simply as “the bathroom bill,” which banned trans people from using facilities that match their gender identity and blocked local pro-LGBTQ+ ordinances. According to most political observers, the bill — and the state boycotts it ignited — cost then-Gov. Pat McCrory (R) his reelection bid.

Then there’s Michele Morrow, a former nurse and homeschool teacher running against Mo Green for superintendent of public instruction. Morrow cited Green’s promotion of his endorsement from LGBTQ+ rights advocacy group Equality NC on X, claiming their mission is to “promote LGBTQ+ power” and falsely stating the “+” includes pedophilia, a far-right conspiracy theory found on the darkest corners of the web. Morrow has also called public schools “socialism centers” and “indoctrination centers.” She also called for the execution of former President Barack Obama.

In the race to replace Robinson as lieutenant governor, Democratic candidate Rachel Hunt faces Republican Hal Weatherman, who, as a college student writing for his school paper, compared abortion to slavery and the Holocaust and said a mandatory educational session on date rape “did little more than remind us that girls can be teases and guys have active hormones,” comments which have resurfaced and drawn controversy.   

Why all the extremists? 

So why, then, are Republican candidates in a purple state spewing rhetoric more extreme than what is heard from the likes of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) or Matt Gaetz (R-FL), both of whom represent deep red districts?

“I mean, the reality is partisanship trumps almost everything,” Dr. Steven Greene, a professor of Political Science at North Carolina State University, told LGBTQ Nation.

“People don’t like anti-LGBTQ extremism, but if they’re a Republican and that’s what the Republican politician represents, they’ll take it, just like people regularly vote for Republican politicians who have much more extreme views than even many of the Republican voters. So the key is once these people with these views, when the primaries Republicans are going to vote for them,” he added. “And they’re voting on their perceptions of Joe Biden, of inflation, of immigration and all these other things, which people rank much more highly on their issue priorities.”

“[They’ll] say, ‘Given the choice, I would prefer Dan Bishop was not such an opponent of LGBTQ rights; however, he’s going to stand up for these immigration policies that are really important to me.’”

McCorkle noted that Republicans quickly returned to nominating extreme candidates after the compromise on HB2.

“They compromised, licked their wounds, [Democratic Gov. Roy] Cooper got in because of it, but then all of a sudden Mark Robinson and these even more MAGA candidates were elected in the primaries because the Republican electorate in this state is so far to the right,” McCorkle said. “It was so far to the right that an incumbent conservative state superintendent of education [Catherine Truitt] lost to a woman [Morrow] who thinks that Obama should be assassinated on TV, that kind of thing.”

Steven Greene said that LGBTQ+ issues aren’t going to swing independents in the state (who are “functionally Democrats and Republicans and have attitudes that reflect that”), giving Republicans space to use those issues to galvanize their base while nominating candidates who appear more moderate but won’t oppose the anti-LGBTQ+ extremism.

“So the Republicans have had a very tough formula in federal races, and others, and they’ve tended since Jesse Helms to nominate what I would call, kind of, don’t rock the boat conservatives: Richard Burr, Thom Tillis, before McCroy got stuck with HB2 because of what the legislature did, [former] Governor Jim Martin; they aren’t liberals, they aren’t pro-LGBTQ, but they’re not demagogue, rock the boat cultural radicals,” he said. 

“They want business to flow, and they don’t want all kinds of disruption like the HB2 bill. That is a very tough formula in North Carolina, and kind of still explains North Carolina as kind of purplish, maybe even center-right… But the problem now is that the Republican primary electorate has gotten so MAGA that the Republicans really have this problem of how are they going to get more mainstream people out of their primaries.” 

Equality North Carolina Executive Director Eliazar Posada said the election cycle is playing out as expected.

“We know that the Republican party has been using the LGBTQ community as a galvanizing tool for their base, spreading misinformation about trans kids, about trans people in general, about what the community stands for and what the community is,” he said. He added that he wasn’t surprised to see them continue pushing that rhetoric “just knowing that it polls well for them.”

Posada also noted a recent rise in anti-LGBTQ+ bills, three of which were made law after Republicans overrode Gov. Cooper’s veto.

“I think one of the big disconnects here is while the candidates are very, very much not middle of the road as we’ve seen in the past, one of the big things that they’re driving into is the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric because it brings out Republican voters. We know that it’s a proven case. And if I was to guess, that would be one of the reasons that we have very anti-LGBTQ and just pretty far-fetched candidates this time around.” 

Increased polarization on the rise nationwide

And this heightened polarization is not just a North Carolina issue.

As Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, notes in her paper Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says, “… more ideologically extreme politicians have been running for office since the 1980s. Among the pool of people wishing to run, party chairs more often select and support extreme candidates, especially on the right.” 

She also points out that research suggests “Americans are not as ideologically polarized as they believe themselves to be, [but] they are emotionally polarized.” This means Americans “harbor strong dislike for members of the other party,” which likely also plays a role in voting behavior.  

However, concerning North Carolinians this year, McCorkle sees a potential shift owing to one candidate in particular.

“Maybe it won’t matter, maybe the Republican label still works enough in enough of these races, and the Democratic label is still too shaky,” McCorkle said, “but it looks like the Republicans with Mark Robinson have come up against the wall finally and people are just going, ‘No, we’re not going to have this.’” 

But he is still unsure how it will all play out. 

“With Robinson, that has really turned out to be probably the death knell. The question is, what happens in these other races? Do people not know what’s going on in these other races?” he asked. He sees a scenario in which many “low information voters” could vote along traditional party lines, assuming these candidates might turn out to be like their less zealous predecessors who, in some ways, didn’t want to “rock the boat.”

“But boy, the ones who are running now, they rock the boat and punch a hole in the boat every day, it seems like.” 

Moving forward, Democrats are trying to tie Republicans to Robinson as LGBTQ+ advocates prepare for the worst

It’s a shift Democrats are taking full notice of, with candidates and campaigns working overtime to tie the rest of the Republicans to Robinson. 

Jackson has pointed to a series of quotes his opponent, Bishop, has made over the years in support of Robinson. These include calling himself “a big fan” of his and saying they were “very close friends,” as well as promising to be his “sidekick” if both are elected. 

Mo Green, the Democrat running for superintendent of public instruction, recently shared an event flier to Instagram highlighting that Morrow would be appearing alongside Robinson at an event in the small town of Swansboro, calling them a “dangerous duo.”

The Harris campaign has also gotten in on the act, with the Associated Press reporting that Robinson has been a key topic of conversation with volunteers, a message they have then been putting forth to voters. They also noted “Democrats wave signs warning of Trump-Robinson extremism at their press conferences” and a billboard campaign “in key cities warning that Robinson … is ‘unhinged.’ ”

Harris also released a campaign ad showing clips of Robinson making incendiary and controversial remarks about abortion interspersed with clips of Trump praising him. 

Whether this effort will prove fruitful for Democrats remains to be seen, while advocates have little choice but to remain optimistic, if cautiously so. 

“[If anti-LGBTQ candidates win], it would mean we have a lot of work to do to secure our community and educate the population overall. But one of the things that I tell my community and my team is that we’re going to work hard every day so that doesn’t happen,” Equality North Carolina’s Posada said.

“And in the worst case scenario,” Posada said, “if these candidates become elected officials, our work just becomes that much more important to combat the policy that they want to pass and to protect our community members.”

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