EVERY TRUE REPUBLICAN COULD SHOOT SOMEBODY ON FIFTH AVENUE AND NOT LOSE ANY REPUBLICAN VOTERS

A couple of weeks before the 2016 Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump made a memorable boast:

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump remarked at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. "It's, like, incredible."

Eight years later, he's in his third consecutive close presidential race, and he might win for the second time. He's trailing in the polls and seems likely to lose, but one thing is clear: no matter what he's said or done, he's lost only a handful of Republican voters.

Many people believe Trump has a unique appeal to the GOP base. He doesn't. The case of Mark Robinson proves that every Republican in good standing could shoot somebody and not lose party voters.

It's possible that Robinson will be brought down by the latest story: that he posted comments for years at a porn site called Nude Africa that included graphic descriptions of (undoubtedly imaginary) sexual encounters, along with pronouncements such as "I'm a black NAZI!" and “I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” But four years ago, when he was elected lieutenant governor, and earlier this year, when he won the Republican gubernatorial primary with 65% of the vote, it was widely known that he had a long history of posting conspiratorial, anti-Semitic, anti-Black, and anti-LGBTQ remarks on social media.

It didn't matter. He hated the people Republican voters hate, so nothing he'd ever said or done could be a dealbreaker for the base.

In early August of this year, the virulently anti-abortion Robinson made an ad in which he and his wife revealed that she'd had an abortion. Not long after that, his opponent, Democrat Josh Stein, began running an ad that featured a clip of Robinson saying that abortion is "about killing the child because you weren't responsible enough to keep your skirt down." Axios quoted a Republican political operative who said, "The 'skirt' ad has been the most effective messaging point against Robinson to date because it speaks beyond the issue of abortion. It speaks to the issue of blaming women." Then, in early September, a North Carolina news outlet reported that Robinson was once a regular at a porn shop in Greensboro, showing up as often as five times a week.

After all that, Robinson trailed Stein by only 5 points in a Victory Insights poll, and by only 8 in an Emerson College poll. Unlike Trump, Robinson appears to be losing swing voters, a process that's likely to continue in the aftermath of the latest story, but it's clear that the vast majority of Republican voters are still with him. He might still drop out of the race, although his name will appear on the ballot and voters who want to pick his replacement will have to vote for him, but he's vowing not to quit, and if he hangs on until the end, I think it will be a single-digit loss.

We saw this with Herschel Walker two years ago in Georgia. The headline of a Vox story published two weeks before Election Day 2022 summed up his Georgia Senate race: "Herschel Walker Is an Epically Flawed Candidate. He Could Still Win." Walker was an anti-abortion zealot who'd paid for a girlfriend's abortion. He'd denounced absentee fathers but was an absentee father to one of his own children, and it was learned during the campaign that he had children he hadn't even acknowledged to his campaign staff. He was credibly accused of domestic violence by former romantic partners and his own son. He said peculiar things at campaign appearances, like this bizarre monologue about horror movies:



Then he lost the November election to incumbebnt Democrat Raphael Warnock by only one point, and when the race went to a runoff because neither candidate won 50% of the vote, he lost to Warnock by only three points.

There's only one way Republicans can lose the support of the party's voter base: by consorting with the enemy. If you're Liz Cheney, you're a pariah in the party. But Robinson is fine.

And no, I don't believe even this will lose him GOP votes:

Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography....

“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote. “And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”

Obtaining sexual gratification from people you don't believe deserve human rights? That's what slaveowners did, and when you try to talk about that fact now, or teach it in schools, Republicans get angry. So this won't bother the Republican faithful.

I think they're much more likely to be grateful to Robinson for denouncing Martin Luther King.

In a series of seven posts in October 2011, Robinson disparaged Martin Luther King in such intense terms, calling him a “commie bastard,” “worse than a maggot,” a “ho f**king, phony,” and a “huckster,” that a user in the thread accused him of being in the KKK.

The base believes whites are the real victims of racism in America. They'll hear about this and wish they could say what he said.

I could have written this post about other Republicans -- Matt Gaetz, for instance. (He won his last election 68%-32%.) Just remember the principle: any Republican who clearly despises the people Republican base voters despise will retain their support under any circumstances.