North Carolina’s highly anticipated 2024 governor’s race has been finalized, with Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein squaring off to replace outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) in November.
Both men easily won their respective primaries over relatively crowded fields, with Stein fending off four other Democrats and Robinson outlasting two other Republicans.
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The Associated Press called the races just after 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday night. Robinson pulled in 62% of all GOP votes, with roughly 8% of the ballots counted, while Stein earned 72% support with 7% of Democratic ballots counted.
The North Carolina race will be closely watched ahead of the general election, as just one of two battleground governor’s races taking place alongside an expected general election rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
The Robinson-Stein race itself will undoubtedly be compared to the Biden-Trump rematch, but the state’s high number of split-ticket voters could provide a surprise down the ballot. The Tar Heel State has voted for a Republican president in 10 of the last 11 general elections but has elected just two Republican governors across that same time frame.
Robinson, who scored an endorsement from Trump over the weekend, would be the state’s first-ever black governor and could hand the GOP total control of the state government. Republicans in the state House fell just one seat shy of a supermajority in the 2022 midterm elections but gained that advantage after former Democratic state Rep. Tricia Cotham switched parties in April of 2023. Her defection allowed Republicans to circumvent Cooper and enact a 12-week abortion restriction in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
And Robinson himself has campaigned heavily on abortion, vowing to expand Republicans’ abortion ban if he wins in November.
“We got it down to 12 weeks. The next goal is to get it down to six, and then just keep moving from there,” he said at a campaign event in February.
Still, Stein and Democrats writ large believe that abortion will prove a winning issue for them up and down the ballot in North Carolina, and Stein promised to make reproductive rights a “central issue” of his campaign.
“He’s much more extreme than any of my Republican opponents either in 2016 or 2020 were,” Cooper said of Robinson. “It will be important for the Stein campaign and the Democratic Party to let people know who Mark Robinson is.”
Meanwhile, Stein plans to tie his campaign closely to Biden, something not all Democratic strategists believe is entirely wise, given uncertainty about the president’s age and recent handling of both domestic and foreign policy.
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“His agenda is the right agenda for North Carolina,” Stein told NBC when asked about potentially campaigning alongside Biden.
Biden and Trump cruised to primary victory themselves on Tuesday night in North Carolina and beyond. Biden had amassed more than 92% of Democratic votes when the race had been called, while Trump bested former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley by nearly 50 points.
