Written by: Jason Kerr
During the first week of March, the primaries for the North Carolina gubernatorial election concluded, with few surprises. The incumbent attorney general Josh Stein won the Democratic primary with nearly 70% of the vote, and Mark Robinson won the Republican primary by a margin of 40 percentage points over the state’s current treasurer, Dale Folwell. Robinson, the incumbent lieutenant governor, had already gained notoriety for some of his controversies, and his primary victory caught national attention and scrutiny.
Lieutenant governors exercise both executive and legislative power in North Carolina. Robinson presides over the state senate and can vote in various state boards, such as the Board of Education and the Board of Community Colleges. Robinson purports that his time as lieutenant governor has primarily focused on bettering education for North Carolinians. According to his website, he has fought for the ability of students to access the best type of education for themselves whether in the form of public, private, charter, or home school; he has also worked to provide millions of dollars from the state for apprenticeship programs for high school graduates. Robinson’s pitch for governor includes lots of details about his difficult personal life beginning as one of ten children in a poor household, to his electoral success in the race for lieutenant governor.
However, missteps have plagued his 2020 campaign and subsequent tenure. His campaign finances include inexplicable expenses according to The News & Observer in Raleigh. Robinson and his wife reimbursed themselves over $7,000 from campaign funds for clothing. The candidate also withdrew a couple thousand dollars—unexplained, which violates the law—and received plenty of shady donations. Near the beginning of his term, Robinson set up a legally ambiguous “F.A.C.T.S (Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students) Task Force” to bring to light “indoctrination in the classroom.” Robinson appointed members to the task force to generate a report but the said force provided virtually no details about their meeting despite state law requiring public bodies to do so. However, the task force could be considered an “informal convening” rather than a public body because the constitution neither permits nor prevents the lieutenant governor’s supposed ability to create such a body and appoint people to positions within it. Robinson has also suggested that elementary school students should not learn history or science.
Robinson is the source of a vast repository of too many downright indefensible remarks to list that more than call into question his electability in a tight race and have drawn criticism from Republicans and Democrats. He has made numerous antisemitic comments, claimed that the Illuminati organized the sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby, derided school shooting victims, somehow justified the 1970 Kent State massacre, and encouraged people to read such dictators as Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot.
The most recent poll according to ABC’s FiveThirtyEight website has Stein leading Robinson by two percentage points. Current Democratic Governor Roy Cooper won elections in 2016 and 2020 despite Trump being on the ballot and also winning in NC both times. In 2020, Cooper bested Republican Dan Forest by 4.5 percentage points, while Trump beat Biden by 1.3% and Republican Senator Thom Tillis beat the Democratic challenger by 1.8%. On a national and local scale, Republicans seem to not learn the lesson that candidate quality matters. In 2022, none other than Dr. Oz ran for Senator on the GOP ticket in an important election in Pennsylvania and unsurprisingly lost; the same year in Georgia, former football player Herschel Walker also lost the Senate race as a Republican while the GOP governor won reelection by a whopping 7.5%. Although it is yet unclear if Stein will manage to follow in Cooper’s footsteps and win the election, the GOP trend of expecting votes solely by virtue of the (R) next to candidates’ names aggravates and alienates consequential portions of the electorate.