North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson secured the Republican nomination for governor on Tuesday, continuing his rapid political rise in a key battleground state.
Mr. Robinson, 55, is now set to face his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Josh Stein of North Carolina, in the November general election. Both men would be groundbreaking if elected: Mr. Robinson would be the first black governor, while Mr. Stein, 57, would be the first Jewish governor.
Mr. Robinson has built his reputation as a political firebrand and paved the way for the executive mansion in Raleigh in part through incendiary comments on social issues that have galvanized his Trump-aligned base and pushed back Democrats.
Here are five things you should know about Mr. Robinson.
His political career was fueled by online support.
On April 3, 2018, the City Council in Greensboro, NC, was considering canceling a gun show following public outcry following the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida that killed 17 people at a high school.
Mr. Robinson, who grew up in Greensboro, about 75 miles northwest of Raleigh, was outraged by the cancellation. She gave a speech at the council meeting that night, and her videos were widely circulated in conservative circles, garnering millions of views.
“We want our rights and we want to keep our rights,” Mr Robinson told the meeting. “And, by God, we’ll keep them, come hell or high water.”
He began to be invited to speak at gun rallies and then quit his job making furniture.
He made history as the first black lieutenant governor of North Carolina.
Bolstered by his image as a political outsider and gun rights advocate, Mr. Robinson ran for lieutenant governor in 2020. His victory made him the first black person in North Carolina to hold the office.
It was the first elected office he ever held, and the position raised his profile. But it had little effect on politics. Mr. Robinson and Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, have had a rocky relationship and have not worked closely together.
The lieutenant governor in North Carolina presides over the State Senate, but has no vote unless the Senate is equally divided, similar to the vice president of the United States.
His upbringing was difficult.
Mr. Robinson said growing up poor in Greensboro had shaped his political philosophy. He wrote in his autobiography “We Are The Majority!” that his father was an alcoholic and abusive to his mother and that his parents relied on government assistance to support their 10 children. Mr. Robinson was the second youngest.
“Even as a child, I felt the imbalance, the wrongness of it,” Mr. Robinson wrote of the abuse. “At a young age, I began to think of the world in terms of what is fair or unfair, right or wrong.”
Like former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Robinson also expressed anger over the North American Free Trade Agreement that caused manufacturing jobs to shift from North Carolina to countries with lower labor costs in the 1990s. Mr Robinson said the trade pact had caused him to lose two jobs.
His wife had an abortion decades ago and that has shaped his views on the matter.
Mr Robinson supports a so-called heartbeat law, which would ban abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, when many women are not yet aware they are pregnant.
Such a measure would roll back abortion rights in North Carolina: Republicans used their new supermajority in the legislature last year to ban most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy.
A spokesman for Mr Robinson’s campaign said Mr Robinson supported exemptions for rape, incest or when the mother’s life was in danger. But the spokesman did not specify how many weeks those protections would be in place.
Mr Robinson has publicly discussed how his wife, Yolanda Robinson, had an abortion in 1989, a year before they married. The couple later had two children.
Mr Robinson said in a Facebook video in 2022 that the couple’s decision to have an abortion was “wrong” and was the catalyst for the couple’s later anti-abortion views.
He has long held anti-LGBTQ views.
Since gaining a political platform, and even before that on his personal Facebook page, Mr. Robinson has hurled disparaging comments at the LGBTQ community, rooting his attacks on his Christian faith.
He has said it sickens him to see a church flying the rainbow flag, describing it as “spitting in the face of God”. He also told a congregation that “there’s no reason for anyone anywhere in America to tell any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that shit.”
In February, Mr. Robinson said trans women who use women’s restrooms “will be arrested,” echoing the so-called bathroom bill passed by state lawmakers in 2016. That measure proved unpopular because of its negative economic impact and Mr. Cooper signed legislation to repeal it in 2017.
