What the only battleground Democrat to do better than Trump says his party needs to learn

Asheville, North Carolina (CNN) — Josh Stein’s victory in this year’s North Carolina governor’s race was huge. And his opponent was widely seen as the weakest Republican in a major race this cycle.

That doesn’t mean Stein thinks Democrats should miss the lessons of what he did this year.

Unlike in the presidential race, a prosecutor with a 20-year record in politics and deep connections to the incumbent Democratic executive, running against an insurgent MAGA star, got the biggest margin of any candidate in any battleground state — despite being hit as an elitist who was soft on crime, immigration and trans rights.

Running by talking up law enforcement, jobs and making abortion an issue of respect for women, Stein ended up 15 points ahead of his scandal-ridden opponent Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, when Kamala Harris came in 3 points behind Donald Trump in a state she had thrown herself hard into winning. Just a few months ago, the race was more competitive, with national Republicans pouring millions of dollars into it, when Stein’s pollsters and advisers figured that with voters not knowing much about either, a Republican tilting state might be just as ready to write off Stein as another Democrat who was weak on crime and immigration as they would be to defect from Robinson for all his issues.

Ending up 171,000 votes ahead of Trump did more than just make Stein the governor-elect. Democrats on his coattails took every statewide race: for lieutenant governor, attorney general and school superintendent. They also won enough seats in the statehouse to break the GOP supermajority, as well as the only competitive House seat in the South. Amid this, Republicans continue to litigate to throw out 60,000 votes (including those of the Democratic candidate’s parents) to try to win an ultra-narrow state Supreme Court race. The history he made to be the state’s first Jewish governor barely registered in a year when Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s own faith appeared to scramble his running mate chances. The same went for the old “Extreme Harvard Radical” tag that Republicans spent millions hitting him with in his first attorney general race.

As he sets up his new administration, Stein keeps getting calls from Democrats across the country desperate to know how he ended up being what outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper called the Democrats’ “bright spot on a national stage of disappointment,” carrying a state the party will likely need to start flipping to have a chance in the next presidential race and beyond.

In an interview with CNN during a day trip to Asheville aimed at trying to drum up attention and tourist dollars for the stretch of western North Carolina still deep in recovery from Hurricane Helene, Stein said he tells them they’re overthinking it. His win wasn’t about brilliant tactics or a killer ad, he said, or fancy micro-targeting tactics touted by the party’s leading data-obsessed consultants. It’s not because he’s some searing orator or has magnetic presence — as he sat with local business leaders for an hour over lunch at a busy restaurant, no one else in the place seemed to clock he was there.

“Evidently it’s not a satisfying answer, because people continue to come back to me – ‘But how?’ ‘But how?’ ‘But how?’ And look, I worked very hard. The team around me is extremely strong. We ran a savvy campaign,” Stein said. “But I don’t think any of those things matter if voters don’t believe you are fighting for them.”

In many ways, North Carolina is an American microcosm, between the hundreds of miles of farms and multiple cities adding to their skylines, the racial divides, the new people pouring in and the people who have been around for a long time feeling priced out and not seeing the opportunities themselves.

Yet the problem Democrats have right now, Stein’s top advisers acknowledged in interviews with CNN, is how difficult replicating his win might be for other candidates who aren’t an eight-year state attorney general with a record of clearing a rape kit backlog and prosecuting fentanyl crimes.

Stein majored in history in college. He got a master’s in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy school while getting his law degree. But he says that’s not how Democrats need to be thinking as they plan their way out of the wreckage of 2024.

“I don’t have some big philosophical box to put that in,” Stein said. “It’s like, ‘Are you working to help people have a better life?’ And if you’ve done it and you’re talking about issues they care about, I think voters will reward you.”

Gaming out an opponent who initially looked stronger

The even simpler answer to many political observers is that Stein got lucky in having Robinson, who was already known for inflammatory comments long before CNN’s September investigation uncovered his many posts on a pornography site message board that included calling himself a “black Nazi” and graphic details about his sexual fantasies. (By then, the Stein campaign had dutifully collected photographs of Robinson with Republican leaders in the hopes that they’d get a moment outrageous enough to hold those over them.)

The fallout was devastating. National Republicans pulled their money. Trump stopped inviting him to rallies. But still, Stein’s campaign advisers worried, that could fade and Republicans could end up coming back to their candidate, just as they did in the last two elections in ways polls didn’t pick up, especially as attention quickly shifted to Hurricane Helene.

That this didn’t happen, Stein and his advisers argue, feeds a hindsight about the campaign which forgets how much of a drag national Democrats were and how much money Republicans put behind Robinson — upward of $20 million from the Republican Governors Association alone. It’s also forgetting how often before the scandal Trump appeared in the state with a candidate he at a March rally praised as “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

Many of the voters the Stein campaign drilled in on could have been at that rally: some early focus groups focused on Republican women who hated Democrats and certainly never voted for one, but were such big Trump fans that several said they want to see him on Mt. Rushmore. They knew Robinson wanted to support him — until they watched clips like an old Facebook Live video in which he said, “Abortion in this country isn’t about protecting the lives of mothers – it’s about killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”

Morgan Jackson, a top Stein consultant, recalled that one of the women who wants Trump’s face carved 60-feet high in South Dakota reacted angrily, saying, “I don’t care who he is, I wouldn’t vote for him.”

And with that, Stein had his first attack ad of the campaign. No ominous narrator or grainy black and white clips. No scary music or the other tricks high priced media consultants keep churning out even though they’ve become background noise to many voters. Just clips of Robinson talking: making the case against himself.

An AG record that helped blunt Republican attacks

From his launch video and constantly after, the main focus of the story Stein and his campaign told was grounded in his record clearing the state’s rape kit backlog and prosecuting fentanyl crimes.

Republicans, Stein said, “were saying people’s lives were at stake if I got elected. And I just don’t think it was believable because I had all these law enforcement validators who said, ‘I have been working with this guy for eight years and he is dogged in trying to combat the financial crisis. He’s working his tail off to help victims of sexual assault.’”

They were blunting what they knew would come: the attacks that Stein was weak on crime and immigration. They were talking about his bipartisan work, especially given that many North Carolina voters they knew tend to think Democrats don’t want to work with Republicans who are trying to govern. They hoped to use a good chunk of the eventual $80 million he raised to get voters to suspect the Robinson attacks on him when they came.

But Stein advisers were also aiming at deeper voter psychology, to build a sense of Stein as a guy who got things done, and in ways which could be easily visualized in numbers and charts and stories told by other people. They wanted him to give off the sense of being a different kind of Democrat, but also that he was competent and focused on real world impact.

Ideas that didn’t fit this frame were scrapped, like a prepared attack on Robinson for saying he wanted to refuse federal funds in a way that would have cut education funding, in contrast to Stein’s plan to raise teacher pay. Education was another one of those issues, advisers concluded, that in 2024 just didn’t rate much for voters feeling battered, scared and anxious.

It was also helpful, Stein added, that even the most devoted advocacy groups in the state long ago internalized how easy it would be to lose and what the stakes would be, in a state where Democrats have won eight out of nine of the last gubernatorial races but lost eight out of nine of the last presidential races.

“Do they want a Democrat to vote 100% on their scorecard? Yes, they do when they’re putting on their advocacy hat,” Stein said. “But on their wanting to have (a) political power hat, I think some of them are like, ‘If he’s at 70% or 80%, then I’m kind of glad because I want him to win.’”

On Stein’s plate: recovery and Republicans

Here in western North Carolina, the devastation from Helene is still blatant. It’s not just how many of the galleries along Asheville’s River Arts district have to be torn down to the studs or how much debris there still is to clear even to reopen a highway through a more rural area. The lost revenues are about to catch up, too. One brewery owner told CNN that in an average October, his business sent $10,000 in sales tax to the state; but last October after the storm, that was down to just $600, with Buncombe County overall expecting to report a 70% revenue loss in the final months of 2024.

Walking through one of Asheville’s main stretches that hasn’t suffered much damage, Stein listened intently as managers told him about how much revenues were down, at one point passing by a truck providing free hot food to people struggling through the recovery across the street from a local glassworks studio. He watched a speckled vase being made as he listened to the owner worry about what would happen if too few orders came in from the holiday rush to keep them afloat.

Stein’s victory coattails will help. Cooper limited his time out of the state because he was worried that Robinson might use legislative tricks to seize power as acting governor. That won’t be an issue for Stein, who said he is looking forward to trusting his Democratic lieutenant governor while he goes to Washington to push for assistance, and around the country and the world to recruit business investments in North Carolina. The one extra seat he helped Democrats win in the statehouse means he also won’t have Cooper’s worries about the Republican supermajority overruling and ignoring him.

Those Republicans, though, are the ones who responded to the election by using their last supermajority vote after the election to take powers away from a governor they didn’t vote for.

Stein said that after starting out in the state Senate and serving in government for a decade since, he’s not surprised. He pointed out that he worked with Republicans to pass laws on the opioid crisis and child sex abuse even after they made a similar move to strip his powers as attorney general when he won that office eight years ago. He says he’s getting ready to sue them for violating the state constitution with this latest move, but he still hopes they’ll find other common ground.

“You have to be able to compartmentalize,” Stein said.

Then there’s Trump.

Stein hasn’t yet spoken to the president-elect, nor to JD Vance, though he said he was pleased that the incoming vice president visited the state earlier in the month. Even before Elon Musk and Trump tanked other disaster relief in last week’s initial spending bill, Stein knew that getting them to sign off on hundreds of millions of dollars in aid would be a lot tougher than getting Trump to tour the damage during the campaign.

Politics may make that harder, especially with a US Senate seat up in 2026 that Stein is already openly rooting for Cooper to run for.

While other Democratic governors already in office are deep into prepping for how to weave through countering Trump, Stein said that hasn’t been part of his own transition planning.

He knows that probably won’t last.

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