Amber Sniff, a Democrat in Durham, N.C., finds the prospect of Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson winning the governor’s race so alarming that she teared up talking about it one recent morning.
“He honestly scares me,” Sniff said recently, adding: “He’s not what I want for me and my children.”
But for Jimmy Connor, a Republican who lives across the state in tiny Clyde, Robinson represents a Christian-centered way forward and a chance for Republicans to wrest control of an office that they have held only three times in the past century.
“He refers to the Bible, and it makes a difference in the South,” Connor said, his voice breaking. “My grandkids’ lives are at stake, and the future of this country.”
The sense that North Carolina is at a particularly consequential crossroads looms over the contest, by far the most expensive and closely watched governor’s race in the nation this year.
And the two candidates’ styles and politics could not be more different. Robinson, an evangelical firebrand who has faced criticism for his extensive record of incendiary remarks, is facing Josh Stein, the Democratic state attorney general, who has cast himself as a subdued moderate in the style of Governor Roy Cooper.
The race was considered neck and neck through much of the summer; North Carolina has a staunchly conservative legislature, a history of close elections, and an outgoing Democratic governor who has played a moderating role for most of the past decade. But the dynamic has been shifting amid several recent developments, the biggest being Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket.
At the same time, Stein has ramped up advertising, with a focus on Robinson’s strident anti-abortion stance. In late August, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report noted that Stein had outspent Robinson on television ads by about $11 million.
A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in mid-August showed Stein with 48 percent of the vote and Robinson with 38 percent; the poll also found abortion to be the second-most important issue to participants, after the economy. Several other recent polls have shown Stein leading Robinson by between 4 and 14 percentage points.
But Robinson’s campaign aides say that polling often underestimates support for Republican candidates, especially in North Carolina, which is known for extremely tight races up and down the ballot.
In interviews with dozens of North Carolinians across the political spectrum, some Republicans said they were eager to have an anti-abortion champion in the executive mansion who would govern through a Christian lens. Several Democrats said they feared North Carolina would follow the rightward trajectory of Florida, a bygone battleground state, or perhaps even be viewed as red as Alabama. And several independent voters said they still did not know much about either candidate.
Democrats are trying to hold on to an office that they have won consistently — if often narrowly — for decades, their best foil against a Republican-controlled legislature that has been fortified through gerrymandering.
Stein’s campaign is hoping to benefit from the momentum that has swirled around the Democratic Party since President Biden withdrew from the race last month and endorsed Harris. But a Democrat has not won North Carolina in a presidential race since 2008, and Robinson is hoping to ride the coattails of former president Trump, who won the state by 1.3 percentage points in 2020.
Some voters said they viewed Stein as a safe successor to Roy Cooper, a relatively popular moderate who is term-limited.
But most of the attention in the race has gone to Robinson, whose MAGA-aligned views and bellicose style mirror those of Trump, who has endorsed him.
Raised in Greensboro, N.C., with an alcoholic father who abused his mother, he later struggled financially, failing to file five years of federal income taxes and filing for bankruptcy three times. But Robinson, 56, has proudly used his story to connect with voters.
In 2018, he was working in furniture manufacturing when he spoke out against gun control at a City Council meeting in Greensboro. A year later, after a video of the speech went viral and he was invited to speak at a National Rifle Association convention, he entered the race for lieutenant governor.
“He’s a regular person, he came from nothing and he built himself up,” said Lorrie Hancock, 63, a cosmetologist in Whitsett, who said she worked on tobacco farms as a girl. She said she had donated $50 to the Robinson campaign because Robinson’s upbringing reflects her own.
Stein, 57, who would become the state’s first Jewish governor if elected, was raised in the politically liberal college town of Chapel Hill, N.C., graduated from Dartmouth College and Harvard University, and served seven years as a state senator.
Some political strategists have questioned how much Stein’s elite credentials could hurt him in the race, saying they could turn off the rural voters who helped elect Cooper and former governor Jim Hunt, both of whom came from rural areas.
But as Stein has crisscrossed the state, telling voters about the opioid crisis settlements that he won as attorney general and his office’s work in clearing a rape-kit backlog, he has often returned to a central theme: Robinson is too divisive for an electorate that has historically preferred tame center-left governors.
As evidence, Stein points to Robinson’s past comments. Some of his Facebook posts and speeches have been widely criticized as conspiratorial, racist, antisemitic, transphobic, and hateful. Robinson said in one post that he was “skeptical” of everything he heard on television about 9/11. He has quoted Adolf Hitler on Facebook, called Michelle Obama a man, and said that Kwanzaa, an African American and Pan-African holiday that celebrates history and community, “is Hanukkah on food stamps.”
Robinson, who is Black, also once said that Black History Month was for “a people who have achieved so little.”
“Extreme, radical, negative — those are the words I would apply to him,” said James Chambers, 64, a Stein supporter in Wilmington. He added that, as a Black man, he was particularly “disgusted” by how Robinson uses disparaging language about Black people.
Robinson has insisted that he has never been racist or antisemitic. In his 2022 book, “We Are the Majority!,” he defended his social media page as a “scrolling marquee of bold, unapologetic political commentary.”
In recent months, Robinson has focused his speeches on the economy and crime.
Unaffiliated voters make up roughly one-third of the electorate in North Carolina, and many are only now beginning to mull which candidate to support. Among them is Jackie Baker, who was walking around downtown Asheville on a recent afternoon.
Robinson had just spoken at a Trump rally there, and a number of red-hatted Republicans strolled by, many of whom were happy to denounce Stein as an extreme liberal. Nearby were Democratic protesters with signs declaring Robinson a clown.
Baker, who voted for Cooper and Biden in 2020, curiously watched it all.
What did she think of Robinson? “He’s got a lot of energy. Makes me want to listen.”
And Stein? “I’m still learning about him.”
How about the race in general?
“I want to know: What can you do for the people? What direction are we going?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.