Accused of denying the Holocaust, the candidate for governor of North Carolina praises Israel
The front-runner supported by Trump, Mark Robinson, is unfit to hold office, according to moderate Republicans; if elected, Josh Stein, the presumed Democratic contender, would be the state’s first Jewish governor.
North Carolina’s Roxboro (AP) — One contender is an attorney with an Ivy League education who has spent more than 25 years building supporters and moving up the Democratic ladder in North Carolina. The other is a former employee of a furniture firm who has a reputation for making direct remarks and who entered Republican politics four years ago after becoming well-known thanks to a widely shared film on gun rights.
Attorney General Josh Stein and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson have emerged as front-runners for their parties’ nominations for governor next month in the contest to replace term-limited Democrat Roy Cooper in the ninth-largest state in the union, despite having quite different career trajectories.
Each has respectable opponents, including two Republicans who want to unseat Robinson by persuading GOP voters that he is too controversial to be governor of the state by leveraging their own riches. However, Robinson and Stein have outperformed their respective sectors in terms of money, and they have secured crucial endorsements for their campaigns from Cooper and Donald Trump.
Regardless of the winner of the March 5 primary, national party organizations were preparing for a costly and intense general election campaign as early in-person voting got underway on Thursday.
“There’s no doubt that people view this as the most competitive [gubernatorial] race of 2024,” stated Mac McCorkle, a public policy professor at Duke University and advisor to two of Cooper’s predecessors.
Democrats want to continue and even expand upon their relatively modest achievements in the South in the executive branch of North Carolina government, where they have controlled the mansion for thirty-one years, including Cooper’s term since 2017. The legislature and the appellate courts are dominated by Republicans. In essence, a GOP win for governor would nullify Cooper’s veto authority, which he has exercised an unprecedented number of times with varying degrees of success.
