I wrote a post soon after it became clear that Kamala Harris would be the aDemocratic party nominee that I thought that North Carolina governor Roy Cooper would be the best choice to be her running mate. He withdrew his name from contention a few days after that. The main reason Cooper gave for his decision is that he did not want to have the lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, an utterly extreme MAGA Republican, to act as governor while he was away campaigning.

In that state, the top two positions are voted on separately and do not run as a single ticket, which is why two very different people can end up in the two posts. But it is even worse than that, as Cooper explains in this interview that he gave explaining his decision to withdraw so quickly.

In North Carolina, we have in our constitution — back from the wagon wheel days — a provision that says when the governor leaves the state, the lieutenant governor becomes the acting governor. Many states across the country have this provision. You had no way to communicate. Back then, it made sense.

There have been a few cases across the country that have said, “Look, now with text and phone and email and Zoom and ways to communicate, this doesn’t make sense for this to be the case.” And courts have ruled that it doesn’t literally mean that. North Carolina courts have not ruled that, however, and fairly recently, Republicans have taken over the North Carolina Supreme Court. They have made some extremely partisan decisions here lately, particularly regarding voting and redistricting.

Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, is the most extreme statewide candidate in the country right now. I was on a recruiting trip to Japan. He did claim he was acting governor. He did a big proclamation and press conference while I was gone. It was something about support for the state of Israel. It was obviously to make up for all of his antisemitic comments that he’d made, his denial of the Holocaust that he’d made over the years. But it was a big distraction. We analyzed this.

Our concern was that in this race for governor, he likes attention. He likes to get extremist contributions from all over the country. If I were to be out of state at a campaign event, if I had been the vice presidential nominee, he could claim he was acting governor. The attention he would get would be times 10 and it would be a distraction to the presidential campaign. And plus, we don’t know for sure what the Republican Supreme Court would decide.

So we looked at this not as much as the issue itself, because we believe we’ve got good arguments on the issue, although that was part of it. It was more that he would use this as a real distraction, drawing attention to himself, drawing attention away from the presidential campaign and that was part of the calculation that I looked at in making the decision.

It was a good decision, and another sign that Democrats are trying not to let personal ambitions mess up any chance they have of winning in November. The interview also goes into interesting details about the events that led up to the Biden withdrawal. Cooper is friends with Biden and other top Democrats and so had an inside view of things as they went down

It turns out that the then-girl friend and now the wife of Robinson, a harsh critic of abortion, had an abortion.

In the ad, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and his wife talk directly to the camera, revealing few details about the procedure beyond his telling viewers, “Thirty years ago, my wife and I made a very difficult decision. We had an abortion.”

It’s not the first time Robinson has admitted that he paid for his then-girlfriend, now his wife, to have an abortion. He first mentioned the abortion on Facebook in 2012, according to WRAL.

Later in the ad, Robinson says he agrees with the current abortion restrictions in North Carolina, which limit the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother, and says “that’s why I stand by our current law.”

But the ad comes as news organizations and Democratic groups in the state have for months unearthed controversial comments Robinson has made about abortion, including in a Facebook Live stream in 2019, where he said, “Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers … It is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”
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During the GOP gubernatorial primary earlier this year, Robinson told voters at a campaign event, “We’ve got it down to 12 weeks, the next goal is to get it down to six, and then just keep moving from there,” referring to abortion, a local Fox News affiliate reported.

Robinson also referred to abortion as “murder” and “genocide” on his personal Facebook page in 2018.
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Democratic state Attorney General Josh Stein, who is running against Robinson in the race to succeed Gov. Roy Cooper, a term-limited Democrat, used the Facebook Live comments in an attack ad against the lieutenant governor in recent weeks. The ad shows Robinson appearing to say that if he were governor and had a “willing” state Legislature, he would sign legislation into law banning abortion “for any reason.”

To be clear, abortion is not the only issue where Robinson’s views are extreme. There is plenty to dislike about him.

Robinson has promoted various far-right conspiracy theories, engaged in Holocaust denial, denied sexual assault allegations against various prominent figures, and has often made inflammatory anti-LGBT, antisemitic, racist, anti-atheist, and Islamophobic statements.

So basically he is just your run-of-the-mill MAGA nutcase. It is quite extraordinary how the people of that state could elect two such opposites to the top two posts.