Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s lieutenant governor and front-runner for the Tar Heel State’s Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2024, will co-host a “special event” with Donald Trump at the former president’s Palm Beach home, Mar-a-Lago, on December 13, according to an invitation 0btained by National Review.
“We are excited about the event and honored President Trump is hosting us,” Robinson’s political strategist Conrad Pogorzelski III confirmed to NR.
It’s unclear whether this December event will coincide with a formal endorsement of Robinson’s 2024 campaign. Speaking at the North Carolina GOP convention in Greensboro back in June, Trump pledged that Robinson “can count on” the former president’s endorsement but added that a formal announcement would come at a later date.
“I’ll leave it with President Trump to announce endorsements. His endorsement is the single, most sought-after endorsement in political history,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told NR.
Tickets are $12,800 for host-committee members, $6,400 for the event’s sponsors, and $1,000 per guest. The Palm Beach event could constitute a major fundraising boon for Robinson in the purple state’s GOP gubernatorial primary, in which wealthy attorney Bill Graham (who has already pledged to spend $5 million of his own on the race) and State Treasurer Dale Folwell are also competing for term-limited Democratic governor Roy Cooper’s seat.
Roughly a year out from the general election, early polling averages show a neck-and-neck race between Robinson and the likely Democratic gubernatorial nominee, North Carolina attorney general Josh Stein. The race is expected to be hotly contested: Even though the 2024 congressional maps heavily favor Republicans, and the GOP has a supermajority in the state legislature, the governorship traditionally skews Democratic. Robinson reported raising $2.2 million through the first half of the year and having $3.2 million on hand at the beginning of the third quarter. Stein reported raising nearly $6 million in the same period and having $8.2 million in the bank as of June 30.
The Mar-a-Lago event comes as Robinson looks to cement his front-runner status in the primary, shore up financial support for his campaign, and bat away criticisms of a number of controversial statements he has made in the past, including calling Parkland school-shooting victims “media prosti-tots” and dismissing Marvel’s Black Panther as a film created by an “agnostic Jew” to “pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets.”
Robinson has sought to allay some donor concerns about the trove of opposition research against him this far out from the general election. “I know there’s probably a lot of stuff out there swirling around. . . . People are trying to put doubt in the air about our campaign, about me, but none of that stuff is true, I guarantee you,” Robinson said in a voice mail he left for a prospective Republican donor earlier this summer.