What to know about Josh Stein, the Jewish attorney outpolling Mark Robinson in NC governor’s race

Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor, is facing renewed criticism amid revelations that he once called himself a “Black NAZI” and a “perv” online.

Josh Stein, his Jewish Democratic opponent, may be the biggest beneficiary.

Stein had already been leading in the polls before this week’s report, following a prior string of allegations about, and bizarre conduct by, Robinson. Stein would be North Carolina’s first Jewish governor — and a groundswell of support for him could prove to be a potential obstacle for Donald Trump’s bid to retake the White House.

Though the state has a record of electing Democrats as governors while supporting Republicans for president, the turmoil in this year’s race suggests that pattern could be broken and Stein’s popularity could buoy Kamala Harris’ candidacy.

“If Stein continues to dominate and make the broader case that Robinson is tied to Trump and other Republicans on the ballot, it may be helpful” as an additional push for Harris to win “when the margins of victory are so narrow in this state,” said Michael Bitzer, professor of politics and history at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina.

Stein’s consistent lead — between 5 and 14 percentage points, according to recent polls — has been fueled in part by a litany of revelations about inflammatory and uncouth past comments by Robinson, currently the lieutenant governor, about women, LGBTQ people, Jews and others.

In a 2017 Facebook post, before he entered political office, he wrote, “I am so sick of seeing and hearing people STILL talk about Nazis and Hitler and how evil and manipulative they were. NEWS FLASH PEOPLE, THE NAZIS (National Socialist) ARE GONE! We did away with them.”

In a post the following year, he wrote that the hit superhero movie “Black Panther” was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist” and was “only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets.”

A similar vein

The latest revelations are in a similar vein. A CNN report on Thursday unearthed Robinson’s comments between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa,” a pornographic website with a message board. In the comments, Robinson declared, “I’m a black NAZI!,” said that “some people need to be slaves,” described his arousal as an adult when recalling “peeping” at women as a teen at a public gym, and characterized himself as a “perv” who appreciated transgender pornography. (Robinson opposes transgender rights.) About the Obama administration, he posted in 2012, “I’d take Hitler over any of the sh-t that’s in Washington right now!”

Following the CNN story, Politico reported that an email address belonging to Robinson was registered on Ashley Madison, a website for married people seeking to have affairs.

Robinson, 58, has denied the CNN accusations and his campaign denied that he ever had an Ashley Madison account. He has also said that he apologized for his inflammatory Facebook posts, though he did not do so publicly.

Republican leaders in the state were so concerned about the stories that they pressed Robinson to exit the race — which would potentially have teed Stein up to face a more conventional opponent. But Robinson refused to step aside before the deadline to do so passed on Friday morning.

Now, North Carolina voters will face a stark choice in November — between a Trump-endorsed Republican with a record of expressing affinity for Nazism, and a Democratic state attorney general with a long history of Jewish involvement.

Stein, 52, comes from a family that is well-known among North Carolina liberals. His father, Adam Stein, is a leading civil rights attorney whose firm successfully convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to order desegregation in Charlotte’s schools — and faced a steep backlash because of it. His mother, Jane Stein, is also a lifelong liberal activist.

Josh Stein is often described as a centrist Democrat in Democratic circles. He frequently references his parents’ activism, including in a campaign video.

“It was a couple of hours before dawn, a cold February morning in 1971 in Charlotte’s west end,” Stein says in the video. Naming famous Black civil rights heroes in the state, he adds, “Julius Chambers, James Ferguson, and my dad, Adam Stein, were leading the legal battle against discrimination and for equality when their office was firebombed and burned to the ground.”

The Chambers Ferguson Stein law firm was the first in North Carolina to be integrated. The Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education case was its biggest Supreme Court win, but the firm also made an impact by addressing voting rights, employment discrimination and death penalty defense cases, in coordination with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

LDF attorneys referred to Stein’s firm as “LDF South,” said Rich Rosen, professor of law emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former law clerk for the firm, who is Jewish. He added, “They really were the most significant locus of civil rights litigation in the country outside of the offices in New York.”

About half the firm’s white attorneys were Jewish. Rosen recalls beach trips where the white and Black attorneys’ kids played together. “That’s what Josh grew up in,” he said.

Raised in Charlotte and Chapel Hill, Stein graduated from Dartmouth College and taught high school English and economics in Zimbabwe for two years. He earned law and public policy degrees from Harvard. His legal career eventually took him to the North Carolina Department of Justice, where he served as senior deputy attorney general for consumer protection. Between 2009 and 2016, he was a state senator before assuming the attorney general’s role.

Stein’s campaign did not respond to JTA’s request for an interview. But people who know him say he has channeled the values with which he was raised.

Stein absorbed his father’s firm’s “values of justice and equity and fairness, but he pursued them from inside the government instead of being outside, trying to force the government to do the right thing,” as his father did, according to Leslie Winner, a Jewish former partner of the firm and former state senator.

Stein’s campaign commercials emphasize what he considers some of his top accomplishments. As part of a group of attorneys general, he negotiated billions in settlements to address the opioid crisis nationwide, including $26 billion from Johnson & Johnson and three prescription opioid distributors. He worked with legislators and officials across multiple jurisdictions to get a backlog of nearly 12,000 rape kits tested that had languished for years, with the hope of resolving cold cases.

Rep. Kathy Manning, a Democrat and the first Jew ever elected to Congress from North Carolina, points to a key Stein environmental victory.

“We had a huge problem with coal ash spill in this state,” she said. Stein “negotiated the largest coal ash cleanup in the country’s history.” Duke Energy agreed to pay for remediation in a settlement, rather than passing more than $1 billion in costs to electricity customers, Stein announced.

Stein has also been “very, very strong on defending women’s access to reproductive health care,” Manning said. North Carolina currently allows abortions up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. Robinson’s position on the issue has varied, but he was captured on tape at a September event saying he wants to bring that limit down to six weeks and, ideally, “zero” weeks.

Stein’s admirers describe him as warm, gregarious, kind and someone who exhibits his Jewish values in the way he lives.

“Almost every single time he mentions the fact that his faith is crucial to who he is,” said Steve Schewel, the Jewish former mayor of Durham who is involved in Stein’s campaign and has heard him speak frequently.

“I would say that his Judaism has definitely informed his values,” Schewel said. “Judaism is a religion where justice is at the forefront of everything that we do.”

Stein has not made Israel a centerpiece of his campaigning. Through the year since the war in Gaza began when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, he has hewed to the Biden administration’s positions, supporting Israel’s right to self-defense and an ultimate two-state solution while also expressing concern about Palestinian deaths and defending pro-Palestinians’ protesters’ right to nonviolent expression.

Stein, his wife Anna, and their three children have been members for years at Temple Beth Or, a Reform synagogue of about 500 families in Raleigh.

Rabbi Lucy Dinner remembers the Steins at “all of the religious school dinners and parent events and holiday events centered around their kids.” (When Anna Stein updated her Facebook profile to reflect her marriage, 18 years into it, Dinner commented with a joke: “Come to temple and we will set up a chuppah and give you guys a glass to stomp.”) The family joined a congregational trip to a Guatemalan village that the synagogue has supported so that more children there could attend school.

“In our congregation, we teach our families and our children that we’re not only responsible for creating this Jewish community that takes care of one another and worships and studies together, but that we’re responsible to live those values in the world,” Dinner said. Stein has spoken to seniors and other temple groups and participated as an usher and reader during the High Holy Days, she said.

Stein also maintains many friendships at Beth Meyer Synagogue, Raleigh’s Conservative synagogue, according to its rabbi, Eric Solomon, who like Dinner emphasized he was speaking for himself rather than on behalf of his congregation.

Stein has given talks at the synagogue, lit the public menorah at Hanukkah celebrations and been involved in numerous Jewish Federation events. “He’s part of the community in every way,” Solomon said. Stein even coached Solomon’s son on a JCC soccer team.

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For North Carolina Democrats, having Stein as governor would mean maintaining a lever of power. The current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, is a popular, term-limited executive who was for a time on Kamala Harris’ running-mate shortlist. He has been a bulwark against a conservative wave in the state: North Carolina has attracted national attention and lawsuits over gerrymandering, and Republicans currently hold a supermajority in the state legislature, though they may not after November.

An outsized win for Democrats in the state this November could be a major impediment for Trump and his supporters. Polls show the presidential race in a dead heat and analysts say winning North Carolina is almost essential for a national Trump win in the Electoral College. Increased enthusiasm among Democratic voters over the gubernatorial race or depressed turnout among Republicans could potentially tip the balance. Stein is newly touting his support among Republicans.

A new Democratic ad campaign linking Robinson to Trump has already been launched.

Trump, for his part, is distancing himself from Robinson, whom he once endorsed as “Martin Luther King on steroids.” While Robinson has appeared frequently at Trump’s rallies in the state, he has reportedly been dropped from the lineup for one scheduled for Saturday.

The Republican Jewish Coalition is staying out of the state. North Carolina is absent from a list of battleground states where the group says it will “be knocking on doors every Sunday” until Election Day, even though polls show it most deadlocked of all.

Jews in North Carolina could see a Stein victory as an important step for reasons other than state and national political implications.

“I’m hopeful that supporting and electing Josh Stein is an indication of acceptance by many of the Jewish community in North Carolina,” said Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer, who is Jewish.