In today's Questions We Never Thought We'd Have to Ask Department, we have this doozy. Did North Carolina's lieutenant governor frequent porn sites a decade ago, identifying himself as a "black Nazi"? 

CNN's K-File dug up a number of comments on porn sites that Mark Robinson allegedly left. Robinson, who is running for governor this cycle for the Republican Party, issued a categorical denial. And is it any coincidence that this story has dropped just hours before North Carolina's deadline for a change of candidate?

Enquiring minds want to know:

Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.

Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”

The comments, which Robinson denies making, predate his entry into politics and current stint as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor. They were made under a username that CNN was able to identify as Robinson by matching a litany of biographical details and a shared email address between the two.

The story goes on to detail some of the content of the postings, which can best be described as ... well, nasty. That doesn't mean Robinson was the person that posted these comments, but it certainly raises the temperature in North Carolina. That had already begun to happen, as this CNN probe didn't come out of nowhere. Earlier this summer, another local website alleged that Robinson frequented porn stores a couple of decades ago. Robinson and his team categorically denied that too:

CNN’s reporting on Robinson’s comments comes a few weeks after The Assembly, a North Carolina digital publication, reported that Robinson frequented local video pornography shops in the 1990s and 2000s. The story cited six people who interacted and saw him frequent the stores in Greensboro, North Carolina. A spokesperson for Robinson called the story false and a “complete fiction.”

Robinson insists that this is nothing more than a "high-tech lynching" by the news media. In a video message about two hours ago, Robinson called it "lies," paralleled it to Clarence Thomas' treatment, and insisted that it was entirely false:

I wanted to take a minute to address the latest outrageous lies coming from my opponent’s dishonest campaign: #ncgov #ncpol pic.twitter.com/RtteVUiozr

— Mark Robinson (@markrobinsonNC) September 19, 2024

Robinson argues that this is a dirty trick. If it is, it's among the dirtiest in recent memory, just on the topic and content alone. 

But if it is a dirty trick, then who perpetrated it? Robinson blames the natural suspect in such cases -- his opponent, Democrat Josh Stein, currently Attorney General. There's a problem with that claim, though; Stein has a solid lead over Robinson already. Pollsters haven't done a ton of work in this case, but RCP has three polls over the past month and another from April in their aggregation. Stein leads all of them outside of the margins of error, with leads between six and ten points and an average of 7.7 points. 

In other words, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason for Stein to pull the pin on a grenade like this. But if the Democrats were inclined to do it, they would have waited for the deadline on replacing Robinson to pass first. And again, that deadline is very conveniently ... today:

Thursday evening is the state deadline to withdraw from the race. The deadline to remove Robinson’s name from the ballot already has passed. There are just four weeks to go until early voting, and absentee ballots are due to go in the mail Friday. ...

Should Robinson decide to withdraw from the race, something that Carolina Journal’s sources say he is opposed to at the moment, the North Carolina Republican Party Executive Committee would need to choose a replacement candidate for November.

According to elections expert Andy Jackson of the John Locke Foundation’s Civitas Center for Public Integrity, the deadline to change the name on the ballot has passed under state law. Once the North Carolina State Board of Elections mails the absentee, overseas, and military ballots on Friday, changing the names could run afoul of the 14th Amendment.  Instead, any votes Robinson receives on Nov. 5 would go to the replacement candidate chosen by the NCGOP.

Well, who benefits from a switch? Probably not Stein, who had a pretty comfortable lead already and who could expect to benefit even further from a Robinson scandal. Would Republicans have set this trap to pull a switch after looking at the polls? Some of our readers suggested that in the Headlines item earlier today, but that doesn't make much sense either. Robinson isn't that far behind and could have hoped to get an updraft from Trump supporters when voting began. Given the all-in nature of GOP support for Robinson over the last several years, it would be almost Pyrrhic to torpedo him in an internecine attack to force a switch that won't benefit the GOP much, if at all. 

Of course, we can't entirely rule out either scenario, because people do some pretty stupid things, in and out of politics. If this turns out to be true, that would also be the explanation for Robinson's actions, but again, he's adamantly denying that he created these postings. If he sticks to his guns, there won't be much the NCGOP can do but to rally around him -- especially after tonight.