North Carolina voters elevated state Attorney General Josh Stein to the governor’s office Tuesday, rejecting scandal-plagued Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.
Stein’s received 775,821 votes (51.7%) of the vote to Robinson’s 653,335 (43.6%), with 25% of the votes in, the Associated Press reports.
Stein will succeed fellow Democrat Roy Cooper, who’s served since 2016 and term limited.
Despite this state-level loss for Republicans, North Carolina voters are expected to deliver the state’s 16 electoral votes to Donald Trump, bringing him his third win in the Tar Heel state.
Many Trump voters were expected to split their ballot and vote for Stein, as polls showed Robinson didn’t drag down Trump at the top of the ticket.
Republicans hoped Robinson, once a rising star in the party, would win back the executive branch in North Carolina.
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But scandal dogged the lieutenant governor’s campaign, culminating in a bombshell September CNN report exposing his dozens of “gratuitously sexual” and racist remarks on a pornography forum over the course of 16 years.
Revelations from the posts, written under the pseudonym “minisoldr,” included fantasies about his time “peeping” on women in public showers and declaring himself “a black Nazi.”
He allegedly shared these creepy thoughts on the message board of porn site Nude Africa from 2008 to 2012.
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“Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few,” a 2010 post said.
Before those posts were discovered, several employees at a Greensboro porn-video store told a local news outlet Robinson was a regular client of the establishment in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Robinson, whose political identity is built on staunch social conservatism and frequent references to his journey of faith as a Christian, continues to deny all allegations.
