North Carolina Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has withdrawn from consideration of nominating Kamala Harris for vice president, in part because he feared his extremist Republican lieutenant governor would attempt to seize power in his absence — or at the very least seek the spotlight.
“Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, is the most extreme statewide candidate in the country right now,” Cooper told Politico in a story published Saturday, as Harris prepared to announce her pick to run against Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Harris’ decision is expected before a rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
“If I were out of state at a campaign rally, and I was the vice presidential nominee, he could claim he was acting governor,” Cooper said.
Related: North Carolina’s culture war plays out in the race for governor
Robinson is a polarizing figure who has used pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Semitic rhetoric, including quoting Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, a choice he has defended.
Robinson is the crucial state’s first black lieutenant governor. If he defeats Democratic nominee Josh Stein, he would become only the sixth black governor in the U.S.
Trump invoked the memory of the black civil rights leader and called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Relations between the governor and lieutenant governor are not surprisingly tense.
Robinson recently complained that Cooper “had several opportunities to congratulate me on the achievement of being the first black lieutenant governor, but he never took advantage of them.”
North Carolina is one of the states with constitutions that require that when the governor is absent, the lieutenant governor assumes power in an acting capacity. Furthermore, unlike presidential elections, the lieutenant governor is elected separately rather than on the same ticket as the governor.
As Cooper said, when North Carolina’s first constitution was adopted in 1776, “you had no way to communicate,” so such measures “made sense.”
The constitution was last revised in 1971, by which time telephones had been around for almost 100 years. But the provision for the acting governor remained.
Cooper told Politico: “There have been a few instances around the country where it’s been said, ‘Look, now with text and phone and email and Zoom and ways to communicate, this doesn’t make sense’ … and courts have ruled that it literally doesn’t.
“But the North Carolina courts haven’t done that, and fairly recently Republicans have taken over the North Carolina Supreme Court. They’ve made some extremely partisan decisions there recently, particularly around voting and redistricting.”
Cooper noted that Robinson has already taken advantage of the constitutional provision.
“I was on a recruiting trip to Japan,” Cooper said of the events last October. “He claimed to be acting governor. He had a big proclamation and press conference while I was gone. It was about support for the state of Israel. It was clearly to make up for all of his anti-Semitic remarks, his Holocaust denials that he had made over the years.
“… Our concern was that in this race for governor, he likes to get attention. He likes to get extremist contributions from all over the country. If I were out of the state … he could claim he was acting governor.
“The attention he would get would be 10 times greater, and it would be a distraction to the presidential campaign. And on top of that, we don’t know for sure what the Republican Supreme Court would decide.
“We believe we have good arguments on this issue,” Cooper said, but “it was more that he would use this as a real distraction, to draw attention to himself, to divert attention from the presidential campaign and that was part of the calculation that I looked at in making the decision” not to remain in consideration for the vice presidency.
