[Modified 3/7 11:30 PST]
It has been brought to my attention (h/t to Kinetic1) that the Robinson quote is more complicated than HuffPost (and by extension, Political Wire) made it out to be. Here is what Robinson actually said (my transcription from the closed-captions):
I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote, do you know why, because in those days we had people who fought for real social change and they were called Republicans and they are the reason why women can vote today.
So it’s not what quite what HuffPost — and the DNC, while we’re at it — said it was. See also SNOPES).
However, I’m leaving this diary up, with modifications, for these reasons:
The sentence is an illogical construction, but it makes sense when one looks at Robinson’s history of misogynist comments:
In short, I look at Robinson’s wish to go back to pre-XIX Amendment times as an unintentional “tell.” So even though the quote itself is less definitive than it seemed at first read, it is still useful, as long as various caveats are added.
Next, Robinson is (surprise!) wrong about Republicans being responsible for the XIX Amendment. It was a bipartisan effort — led by President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat. When Wilson was running for reelection in 1916, his gave a speech to the Suffrage Convention in which he said:
[The Amendment] is going to prevail, and that is a very superficial and ignorant view of it which attributes it to mere social unrest. It is not merely because the women are discontented. It is because the women have seen visions of duty, and that is something which we not only cannot resist, but, if we be true Americans, we do not wish to resist.
Wilson went to the floor of the Senate in September 1918 to promote the amendment (something no president had done before). It passed the House then, but failed in the Senate. Five times. Finally, in May 1919, responding to suffragist pressure, Wilson called a special session of Congress to vote on the suffrage amendment. It passed the House 304-89. In the Senate, it also passed 56-25. with 14 not voting. The breakdown was this way (from Wikipedia, with confirmation):
Republicans: 36 Y, 8 N, 5 NV
Democrats: 20 Y, 17 N, 9 NV
Hardly a Republican-only effort. If it had been it would have failed. Also, today’s Republican party would never even entertain the idea if it were up to them.
The third reason I’m keeping this diary up is to remind me, and everyone, that we can’t take sources like Huffington Post for granted.
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As seen in the 1913 1917 map above, North Carolina was one of the states where women couldn’t vote prior to the Nineteenth Amendment (ratified in 1920). Guess which North Carolina politician wants to return to those bad old days: Mark Robinson, the GOP’s new nominee to be governor. Huffington Post just unearthed this gem from 2020, when he was running for lt. governor:
Mark Robinson: 'I Absolutely Want To Go Back To The America Where Women Couldn’t Vote'
On Tuesday, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson won the GOP primary to become his party’s nominee for North Carolina governor, presumably with the help of female voters.
But just four years ago, Robinson said he’d “absolutely” like to return to the days when the 19th Amendment didn’t exist ― when women didn’t have the right to vote.
“I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,” Robinson said in a newly resurfaced video of his remarks at a March 2020 event hosted by the Republican Women of Pitt County.
There’s more (there’s always more):
There’s plenty more to revisit with Robinson’s attacks on women, including calling them “whores,” “witches” and “rejected drag queens.” There’s also his record of quoting Adolf Hitler, fanning Islamophobia, saying trans people should be arrested for using bathrooms, casting doubts on the Holocaust and spreading countless dangerous conspiracy theories.
And in an interesting twist, one of NC’s senators is already distancing himself from Robinson:
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who endorsed one of Robinson’s challengers in the GOP primary, said Wednesday that it’s up to the voters in his state to decide in November if they want him to be the governor.
Asked if he agrees with Robinson’s inflammatory rhetoric, Tillis told HuffPost, “Not at all.”
“Now that we’re past the primary ... he just needs to go to the people in North Carolina, explain that and get their vote,” he said.
Women make up 51% of the state’s population. Presumably the same percentages apply to registered voters. This is one of the many messages about that putrid excrescence of a candidate that needs to be shouted from now to November, and louder than most.
Added by request from samanthab: Here is the link to Josh Stein’s website, which includes a donation page. Stein, the Democratic nominee for governor, is currently the state’s attorney general and has been doing a great job upholding the law. You can read more about him starting here:
Stein grew up in Chapel Hill and has spent the last seven years as attorney general focusing largely on consumer protection issues — going after robocallers, opioid manufacturers and tech giants. His first term overlapped with Trump’s time as president, and Stein sued the Trump administration over multiple issues including the Muslim travel ban and child separation policies at the Mexican border.
“For these past seven years, I've been fighting for people here in the state as their attorney general and delivering whether it's tackling the opioid crisis or eliminating the backlog of untested rape kits or taking on polluters who poison folks drinking water or protecting kids from exploitation,” Stein said in a recent interview.
Also, Stein is Jewish, and would be the first Jewish governor of North Carolina. Expect a lot of nasty attacks from Robinson on that as well, with the potential for some severe backlash.