Stein defeats scandal-plagued Robinson in North Carolina governor’s race
RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) — North Carolina has elected a new governor.
On Tuesday night, voters picked Josh Stein (D) as the successor to Roy Cooper, who termed out after being in office for eight years, according to the AP.
The result comes at the end of a long and sometimes contentious campaign between Stein, a Democrat and lawyer who has held a political office for more than a decade, and Mark Robinson, a Republican who molded himself in the fashion of Donald Trump's conservative populism and affiliated himself with the 45th president's base.
Until last spring, polls had shown a close race between Stein and Robinson. Over the summer, Stein began to build a lead , which increased significantly after a bombshell report was dropped by CNN in late September. In that report, CNN exposed multiple controversial comments purportedly made by Robinson on a porn website years before his foray into politics.
The controversy from that report led to calls from within his own party to drop out of the gubernatorial race, but a defiant Robinson dismissed the claims and said he would not back down. In the aftermath of that report, several key members of his campaign staff resigned , and the Republican governors in neighboring states Tennessee and Georgia pulled their endorsements of Robinson , as did the Republican Governors Association.
A poll released a week after the report was released showed Stein's lead over Robinson, which had been slowly growing, jumped to 11 points . In October, another poll showed Stein's lead had grown even further to 16 points .
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Since then, Robinson had been facing an uphill battle in the race without the support of national GOP figures. Despite both Trump and running mate JD Vance campaigning across North Carolina several times in the last month before Election Day, Robinson did not appear with either candidate on the Republican presidential ticket.
Stein was first elected North Carolina's attorney general in 2016 when he narrowly defeated Republican Buck Newton by just over 20,000 votes. He was reelected in 2020, edging out Republican Jim O'Neill by just over 13,000 votes.
Prior to that, Stein served in the state legislature as a senator representing the 16th district, which covers part of Wake County, from 2009 to 2016. Stein was raised in Chapel Hill, graduating from Chapel Hill High School before getting his undergrad degree from Dartmouth College and his law and public policy degrees from Harvard University.
Mark Robinson has served as North Carolina's lieutenant governor since 2020, when he defeated Yvonne Holley by slightly over 177,198 votes. Before his pivot to politics, Robinson, who was born and raised in Greensboro, served in the U.S. Army Reserved and worked in furniture manufacturing.
