Josh Stein appears poised to become North Carolina’s first Jewish governor set to defeat an opponent who once declared himself a “Black Nazi”.
Stein, a Jewish democrat, is up against the controversial Republican nominee Mark Robinson, who was recently found to have made a series of provocative comments on a pornography website’s message board over 10 years ago; in several comments, Robinson referred to himself as a “Black NAZI,” a “perv,” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, according to the findings of a CNN investigation.
Mark Robinson, candidate for Governor, has called himself a "Black Nazi" and a "perv." (Photo by Grant Baldwin/Getty Images)
Polls taken prior to the discoveries of Robinson’s inflammatory comments showed that Stein already had a significant lead in the race for the North Carolina governor’s mansion. Stein, 52, who has been serving as the Attorney General of North Carolina since 2017, is a member of his local synagogue and comes from a long line of well-known North Carolina liberals.
His mother Jane Stein is a lifelong activist, and his father Adam Stein is a renowned civil rights attorney whose firm was responsible for persuading the US Supreme Court to order desegregation in schools in the city of Charlotte.
Stein has followed in his parents’ footsteps in many ways, according to those who know him, and has built his campaign around the liberal values with which he was raised.
As the first Jewish person to win a statewide election in North Carolina when he was made Attorney General in 2016, Stein has not shied from expressing his Jewishness.
“Almost every single time he mentions the fact that his faith is crucial to who he is,” Steve Schewel, the Jewish former mayor of Durham, told JTA.
“I would say that his Judaism has definitely informed his values,” Schewel, who is involved in Stein’s campaign, said. “Judaism is a religion where justice is at the forefront of everything that we do.”
As Attorney General, Stein has worked to address the national opioid epidemic, negotiating a settlement with drug companies that totaled more than $50 billion. He also worked to eliminate North Carolina’s backlog of nearly 12,000 rape kit tests with the aim of resolving cold cases, an effort which has led to multiple arrests in cases from 2015, 2010, 2009, and 1993.
Stein has also been an advocate for environmental reform, negotiating the largest coal ash clean-up in the USA and convincing power company Duke Energy to pay for remediation rather than charge more than $1 billion in energy costs to its electricity customers.
North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein arrives to speak at an event with US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris at the Hendrick Center for Automotive Excellence on the Scott Northern Wake Campus of Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina. (Photo by ALLISON JOYCE/AFP via Getty Images)
Unlike his opponent Robinson, who said in 2019 that “abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers, it’s about convenience; it’s about abortion on demand” and said he wants to bring the limit for abortions down to six weeks of pregnancy, and “ideally zero” weeks, Stein has been a strong defender of women’s access to reproductive health care. In 2023 he opposed North Carolina’s ban on abortions past 12 weeks and has expressed support for medication abortions.
While Stein has not centred his campaign on the issue of Israel, he has generally aligned with the position taken by President Joe Biden in his support for Israel’s right to self defense and support for a two-state solution. After October 7, Stein wrote in a letter of solidarity to the Asheville, NC Jewish community: “Dates like December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, are etched in our minds forever as Americans. Now, October 7, 2023, will forever be indelibly marked in the hearts of Israelis,” he wrote. He ended the letter by saying: “We stand with Israel.”
