NC GOVERNOR
NOTE: You may vote for one. Candidates are presented below in the order they appear on your ballot.
Reason for my Endorsement: Because the choice is either this or this.
Mark Robinson (Republican)
https://www.markrobinsonfornc.com/
https://www.facebook.com/robinsonfornc
Mark “Some-Folks-Need-Killing” Robinson perfectly fits the Trumpist mold of bloody minded, revenge-seeking MAGA extremist, one of those people Trump gleefully rallied to go trash the Capitol on January 6th, who scared the wits out of Sen. Josh Hawley among several others, or one of those people who excuse the rioters and cover for them.
Since Robinson won the election for Lieutenant Governor in 2020, and even before, Robinson was celebrated by the NCGOP for his Trumpist pugnaciousness, his willingness to say outrageous things and stand by them, his talent, like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, to loudly call out the sins of the progressive left. Unwanted pregnancies are totally the fault of women who “couldn’t keep their skirts down,” he thundered. Homosexuality and transgender individuals constitute a threat to community and family because they’re “filth” and must be stamped out.
Robinson’s disrespect for women extends to his paternalistic attitude toward abortion — all abortions. Last I checked — because he’s moved his position several times to hide his real druthers — he says he now favors the restrictions passed this year to prohibit abortion after 12 weeks, but he was once (and recently and probably still is) strongly on board for a much more restrictive “heartbeat” bill . Now he pretends he never thought or said anything else but that the 12-week ban in North Carolina is totally all right after all..
Reporter Bryan Anderson published a long article about the NCGOP power and donor base’s discomfort with Robinson, based on the belief that he’s headed for defeat. In the meantime, according to Anderson, Robinson’s handlers, particularly his lead consultant and confidant, had advised him to stay out of sight and avoid all interviews with the press. He can’t hide from that record.
Mike Ross (Libertarian)
https://www.facebook.com/MikeRossforNCGovernor
The Libertarian obsession with “free markets” often sounds tempting but the nuts and bolts of achieving a Libertarian existence without government reminds me too much of Thomas Hobbs’ opinion that mankind’s life in “a state of nature,” would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
For example, Ross is calling for something fairly unimaginable, a “free market education system,” which I guess would mean lots of schools-for-profit over which no regulator is setting watch, which would lead to, like, depressing pockets of advanced “know-nothingism.” A “free market education system” sounds positively dystopian!
Josh Stein (Democrat)
https://www.facebook.com/JoshSteinNC
Ok. I have sometimes been known to get pissy about Stein’s super-cautious campaigning style, brought on, I think, by the super-cautious political advice of his chief strategist, Morgan Jackson, who seems to be keeping Stein out of rough-and-tumble face-to-face campaign situations in favor of the sanitation of TV spots.
I have heard complaints among rank-and-file Democratic activists that Stein only shows up among “the people” when he’s looking for campaign cash. Some of my readers have given me hell for this, and maybe it’s unfair. But I call ’em like I see ’em.
Thomas Mills defends Stein’s style as really a show of character. Mills points out that Stein fits the profile of his two immediate predecessors in the Attorney General’s office. Neither Roy Cooper, who went directly from A.G. to Gov, nor Mike Easley, who did so before Cooper, was “flamboyant.” “They kept relatively low profiles while overseeing highly competent offices. Stein, likewise, has a low-key demeanor. All three put consumer protection and a commitment to law and order above the rancor of partisan politics.”
That perception of “hiding out” couples with another problem for Stein spelled out in a February article in The Assembly, “Josh Stein’s Challenge with Black Voters.” Collette Alston, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party’s African American Caucus, said she only remembers Stein showing up “whenever it was time for us to vote for him. There was no other time that there was a visit or any other kind of correspondence or anything. We haven’t seen Josh Stein out in public, around North Carolina, nowhere near as much as we’ve seen Michael Morgan” — who was Stein’s chief rival in the Democratic primary.
The African American Caucus endorsed Morgan in the primary, and did I, and he was also quite popular with college-age voters.
At the time that article came out in The Assembly, the lily-white nature of the upper levels of the ballot in North Carolina changed substantially with the substitution of a dynamic Black woman at the top of the ticket, so perhaps the hand-wringing over Stein’s standing with Black voters has dissipated somewhat. Plus the negative capabilities of Mark Robinson himself is perhaps enough to drive even pissy people to the polls for Stein.
Here’s why I’m voting for Stein, as outlined in my discussion of his campaign for this year’s primary. Stein is a standup guy and has been an extremely effective Attorney General. As Attorney General, among other things, Stein…
*helped finalize a settlement with the opioid manufacturer Mallinckrodt in which the company agreed to pay $1.6 billion for its role in the epidemic.
*filed a brief with the United States Supreme Court arguing in favor of the Affordable Care Act.
*became the first attorney general in the country to sue e-cigarette manufacturer JUUL for unlawful marketing to minors.
*sought and received additional funding to test North Carolina’s backlog of untested sexual assault kits.
*negotiated eight Anti-Robocall Principles with a bipartisan coalition of 51 attorneys general and 12 companies to protect phone users from illegal robocalls.
*launched Operation Silver Shield, an effort to protect older North Carolinians from fraud and scams.
*refused to appeal the findings of a lower court that a North Carolina state law that disenfranchised anyone convicted of a felony was unconstitutional.
*joined Gov. Roy Cooper in filing a brief supporting the plaintiffs in Pierce v. NCSBOE which alleges unconstitutional racial discrimination in the gerrymandering of some Eastern NC Senate districts late in 2023.
In fact, after the landmark and disastrous U.S. Supreme Court Dobbs ruling in 2022 that repealed the federal right to abortion, Republican leaders urged Stein to reinstate the state’s existing 20-week ban. He denied the request, writing in a statement that the Department of Justice would not “take action that would restrict women’s ability to make their own reproductive health care decisions.”
Wayne Turner (Green)
https://www.agreenforgovernor.org/
Turner’s platform is classic “green, and I can get behind all of it: fair wages, an end to state use of taxpayer dollars to fund private and for-profit schools, better environmental enforcement, Medicare for All, criminal justice, and a repeal of the “right to work” law in North Carolina.
I’m perhaps as attuned to the Green Party’s pillars of faith — #GrassrootsDemocracy, #SocialJustice, #Ecology, #Peace — as I am to the historic progressivism of the Democratic Party (in its finest moments since the rise of John F. Kennedy), but our state Republicans have slithered their way into too much power in the state (pretty much absolute). The stakes are simply too high this year to be veering off into a splinter rump that only offers to decrease Democratic performance.
Case in point: Jill Stein, the current Green Party candidate for President, didn’t do the Greens a bit of good in 2016 when her vote margins in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania likely tipped those states to Donald Trump.