NY POST: How Mark Robinson beat Bloomberg’s billions to win NC’s second-highest office

RALEIGH – Many statewide races were too close to call on election night in North Carolina. The race for chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court would undergo two recounts before being certified as the closest in history. Republican Dan Forest came up short against incumbent Governor Roy Cooper.

But Mark Robinson, the Republican running for N.C. Lieutenant Governor, stood apart. The booming Second Amendment advocate ran a campaign fueled by grassroots enthusiasm for a convicted conservative unafraid to stand up for the principles and values that make this state and this country great. He did so while facing the same onslaught of PAC money and narrative spinning that hindered so many other Republican candidates.

So, how’d he do it? The New York Post‘s Salena Zito delivers some answers in this great piece on Robinson’s impressive victory. It also contains allusion to a rumor you may not have heard yet:

“As one of ten children growing up in extreme poverty in Greensboro, NC, Mark Robinson has defied a lot of odds in life: an alcoholic and abusive father, foster-care stints, and an overwhelmed single mother. 

After joining the Army Reserves right out of high school, he married and had two children while drifting through various jobs making furniture, a profession that kept evaporating as each plant he worked for relocated to Mexico. 

In 2018, he attended Greensboro’s city council meeting to voice his frustration over the town’s decision to ban a local gun show, and found himself giving an off-the-cuff yet deeply impassioned speech. Despite not owning a gun at the time, Robinson argued for four minutes in defense of the Second Amendment and ended up garnering national attention. This year, with few resources and no electoral experience, Robinson became the first black lieutenant governor-elect of North Carolina. 

“I didn’t expect the reaction that I received from that speech,” Robinson said. “I thought maybe a couple of friends would see it and that was about it. When it went viral … a lot of people encouraged me to get a radio show and things of that sort.” 

But he decided against courting fame, because “in order to affect real change, there’s no better place to do that than in the political arena.” 

So Robinson ran for lieutenant governor, and became the first black Republican to win a major seat in the state since the 1890s. He also earned more votes in his state than the two top Republicans on the ticket: President Trump and Sen. Thom Tillis, and nearly as many as Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who will now have a member of the GOP as his second-in-command. If Cooper is successful in his rumored run for US Senate in 2022, Robinson will ascend to the state’s highest office. 

Robinson’s win is astounding for any number of reasons, but especially because […][CONTINUE READING]