By 8:45 p.m., North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson walked out onto the stage inside the ballroom at the Koury Convention Center in Greensboro, dressed in a dark grey suit and a red and blue-striped tie.
“Tonight is the cultimation [sic] of a lot of doggone hard work,” Robinson said, speaking to a crowd of about 300-400 supporters.
By 9:30 p.m., most media outlets had called Robinson as the Republican nominee for governor after he took 64 percent of the vote with 52 percent of precincts reporting. His opponents in the primary, Dale Folwell and Bill Graham, both trailed Robinson by more than 40 percentage points.
The race in the Democratic primary had an even larger percentage difference with Democratic nominee Josh Stein pulling 70 percent of the vote by 9:30 p.m. Runner up Mike Morgan had 14 percent while the rest of the three candidates — Chrelle Booker, Marcus Williams and Gary Foxx — trailed with less than 7 percent of the vote.
As Robinson addressed the crowd, he talked about his humble beginnings as one of 10 children who grew up to a single mother in Greensboro off of Logan Road. He also talked about his two main campaign platforms: education and the economy.
Since he was elected lieutenant governor in 2020, Robinson has been actively vocal against diversity in the classroom, has called LGBTQIA2S+ North Carolinians “filth” and created a statewide schools taskforce that aimed to target members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community. He’s also staunchly pro-life, though he admitted to paying for an abortion for his wife in 1989. He also spoke during former President Trump’s rally this past Saturday, where he received a strong ovation from the crowd of thousands.
During his speech on Tuesday night, Robinson alluded to Stein, stating that he has an opponent who doesn’t understand what it’s like to struggle like he has.
On Facebook, Stein wrote that he was “incredibly humbled, honored and pumped to officially be the Democratic nominee for governor.”
Stein currently serves as the state’s attorney general, a position he won in 2017 and again in 2020. According to his website, he was born in Washington, DC and his family moved to Charlotte and then Chapel Hill, where he attended high school. From there he matriculated at Dartmouth College and went on to earn degrees from Harvard Law School and Kennedy School of Government.
While Robinson had never held office or worked in politics prior to his run for lieutenant governor, Stein interned for NC Rep. Dan Blue and also managed the US Senate campaign for John Edwards in 1998.
As attorney general, he has gone after corporate polluters and e-cigarette makers, brought home $50 million in federal opioid-addiction treatment money and chipped away at a backlog of untested rape kits, among other initiatives. He’s secured more than 100 key endorsements, including Gov. Cooper, Rep. Pricey Harrison, Forsyth County Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough, former Gov. Jim Hunt, the AFL-CIO president and dozens of former and current rotate and federal reps, judges, mayors, sheriffs and DAs. His platform seems to be a continuation of Cooper’s work, wrangling against a GOP-heavy legislature and defending freedoms like abortion, education and voting.
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