Bishop, Jackson offer differing visions for North Carolina AG role

The two men running to be North Carolina’s next attorney general share several resume lines: Attended law school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, represented part of Mecklenburg County in the state Senate and are serving in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But that’s pretty much where the similarities end between Democrat Jeff Jackson and Republican Dan Bishop. Each offers a different vision for the state’s highest law enforcement post, one that has been a launching pad for higher office and has taken on elevated importance as states increasingly litigate federal issues.

They are running to replace two-term Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, who is running for governor. More than $30 million is expected to be spent on the race — which is, along with Pennsylvania, one of the few open AG seats in a presidential battleground state — with both campaigns and outside supporters airing seemingly endless television ads.

In-person early voting began Thursday in North Carolina. More than 353,000 ballots, a record, were cast on the first day of in-person early voting. Election Day is Nov. 5.

It’s the only state-level race involving two sitting congressmen. But AG seats have taken on an elevated role in recent years.

“In the past couple of decades, we've seen attorneys general really find their footing as political actors themselves,” Reid Wilson, founder of Pluribus News, an independent digital media outlet focused on state-level policy around the country, told WRAL previously.

Crime and safety

It’s been more than 125 years since North Carolina voters elected a Republican as the state’s attorney general.

Bishop, 60, has made crime and safety his top campaign pitch — among the top issues for North Carolina voters. One of his television ads opens with the candidate asking: “Do you and your family feel safer than you did a few years ago?”

“The most important issue is that crime is at or near sustained 10-year highs,” Bishop told WRAL in an interview, specifically highlighting murder and rape statistics.

According to an annual report from the State Bureau of Investigations, North Carolina’s rate of violent crime in 2023 was 412.8 per 100,000 people, up from 332.9 in 2014.

The state’s murder rate was 8.4 per 100,000 people in 2023, up from 5.5 in 2014. The state’s rape rate was 29 per 100,000 in 2023, up from 18.1 in 2014 — increases that Bishop ties to “unwise policy,” such as defunding the police and open borders which he describes as “woke.”

The 2023 numbers in those categories are down from recent highs in 2021. The report also shows sharp declines in robbery and some property crimes, including burglary and larceny, between 2014 and 2023.

The state’s attorney general doesn’t investigate or prosecute most crimes. Local law enforcement, district attorneys and prosecutors are responsible for that.

“It’s a question of leadership and projecting confidence and support for law enforcement across the state and the criminal justice infrastructure,” Bishop said. “I will, in all cases, take a firm stance in support of law enforcement and the tools that are available to them.”

The attorney general’s office does handle criminal appeals.

“You’re very much in the chair of prosecution, but you also get to advocate on behalf of law enforcement to the General Assembly,” Jackson said in an interview with WRAL.

Jackson said he would work to standardize pay across state law enforcement agencies.

“The most high-profile state law enforcement folks will have a stronger case to make when they want a raise, and other folks will be left behind,” he said. “So we’ve got this widely disparate and variable pay among state law enforcement.”

Bishop, too, has advocated for pay raises for law enforcement.

Jackson, 42, has highlighted emerging threats such as fentanyl and artificial intelligence as top priorities if elected.

“The fundamental job is keeping people safe, being a shield for vulnerable people and also being the attorney for the state, representing the state,” Jackson said. “I think the idea is that it should evolve to meet new and emerging threats.”

The state legislature passed an anti-money-laundering statute in June. When it goes into effect in December, Jackson said, it can be used to go after those who distribute fentanyl. More than 2,000 people were fentanyl-positive at the time of their deaths in the first six months of 2023, a record, according to the state’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Jackson says the new law could be used to help identify and break up distribution cells in the state.

He said he would work with the legislature to give law enforcement more tools to combat “more sophisticated” scams that use artificial intelligence to trick or defraud North Carolinians.

Jackson said he wants to help the public connect the dots between public education funding, which state Democrats have long said it lacking, and crime among juveniles. He said the illiteracy rate among juvenile offenders is sky high and there is a connection between kids who can’t read and the prison population.

“It makes a lot of sense as AG to remind the public, ‘Hey, we really want to be making as much of that investment on the front end as possible,’” he said.

Limits of the role

The candidates differ on how far the attorney general must go in defending laws passed by the state legislature. Republicans are almost certain to have a majority in both chambers, though the election will determine if they retain large veto-proof majorities in both which would allow them to override the governor’s objections — no matter who wins that race between Stein and Mark Robinson, the Republican gubernatorial candidate.

Stein declined to defend the state’s 12-week ban on abortion because it was too vague and, he said, many of the provisions were unconstitutional. State lawmakers passed a bill to clarify parts of the ban. In 2016, then-Attorney General Roy Cooper declined to defend a bill authored by Bishop that opponents viewed as discriminatory against transgender people.

Stein and Cooper each also refused to appeal a federal court ruling that found changes Republican lawmakers made to voting laws in 2013 were intentionally discriminatory against Black voters.

Republicans have sharply criticized Cooper and Stein over those refusals, turning it into a campaign issue in both men’s runs for governor. But the Democrats have stood by their position that the attorney general shouldn’t defend laws he believes to be unconstitutional — a stance Jackson agrees with.

“It’s not really about conscience,” Jackson said of defending state law. “I really am bound by the office to defend the state even when I personally disagree. And that is just part of the territory when you become attorney general. The outer limit is the constitution, if there is a clear constitutional violation. The oath that I take is to support the Constitution.”

Bishop said there’s some “lawyer trick” in that answer. He said the AG has a “duty of zealous representation to the state.” In his campaign kickoff video, Bishop criticized Stein as someone who picks and chooses which laws to enforce.

“Your obligation is to defend laws as long as there is a good faith, well-grounded argument that is constitutional,” Bishop said. “You can’t make up esoteric, far-fetched, extravagant arguments that there may be a constitutional basis to attack a statute that the peoples’ representatives in the legislature have passed.”

Bishop's background

Bishop spent 30 years in private practice and is partner in a commercial litigation firm in Charlotte. He said he has made more than 400 appearances before in trial, appellate and the North Carolina Supreme Court. He entered politics in 2004 as a Mecklenburg County commissioner and was elected to the state House of Representatives in 2015 and the state Senate in 2017.

Bishop rose to statewide prominence as the author of House Bill 2, a measure that became law in early 2016. The law required that people use the bathroom of their sex as assigned at birth and prohibited localities from passing their own anti-discrimination ordinances. Opponents said it unfairly targeted transgender residents.

It led to immense economic and political backlash — and, many believe, contributed to Republican Gov. Pat McCrory’s narrow reelection loss to Cooper in November 2016.

Eight years later, after a raft of legislation aimed at transgender people has passed in states across the country without the same intense backlash, the since-repealed North Carolina law can be seen as an early indicator of where the nation was headed.

“Things have gone way beyond HB2 and it’s been a national and global debate,” Bishop said. “I don’t believe men should participate in women’s sports and I don’t believe that men should have access to women’s and girls’ private spaces. And I think that’s probably an area where I think most Americans, most North Carolinians agree.”

Bishop was elected to Congress in a special election in 2019, ordered after the State Board of Elections found voter fraud occurred in Republican Mark Harris’ presumptive victory in 2018. Bishop joined the conservative House Freedom Caucus, where he was elected to leadership. He was among the holdouts in voting for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the start of the Congress.

He’s leaving a safe Republican district, one that Harris — the Republican linked to absentee ballot fraud in 2018 — is expected to win, in order to run for attorney general.

“If you want your family to be safe, if you want your children, your grandchildren to be safe, there is a way to do things differently,” Bishop said. “Woke crime policy is not the answer. The evidence is in. We can restore law and order in North Carolina. Make North Carolina a leader nationally of places where the law is respected and revered and it is enforced neutrally and apolitically.”

The job, however, comes with politics baked in. AGs from across the nation have inserted themselves into federal issues, often joining together with politically aligned AGs in other states to sue the feds to stop laws or regulations that they disagree with on a host of hot-button issues like abortion, immigration, the environment, investment strategies and diversity-and-inclusion policies.

“Whatever agency overreaches and tries to make law in a way that infringes on the rights of North Carolinians, I would oppose aggressively in litigation,” Bishop said. “I could see being involved. But I don’t think it depends on who the president is, it depends on what the agencies do.”

Jackson has tried to label Bishop as an extreme member of Congress, saying his opponent’s record reflects someone that wants to get entangled in partisan issues. He has worked to tie Bishop to scandal-ridden Robinson.

“This really shouldn’t be a job that’s done in a partisan way,” Jackson said. “It’s supposed to be done in an independent voice on part of the people, not on the part of a party.”

He added: “It is very clear of the two of us who wants to take this office in a basically nonpartisan direction versus who wants to use it in a more culture war sense. That would be a real departure from how we had traditionally seen this office used.”

Jackson's background

Jackson, now a major in the Army National Guard, enlisted in the U.S. Army after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He served in Afghanistan at a remote desert outpost with about two dozen Americans, he said, where as a “low-ranking soldier” he participated in “missions into pretty hostile parts of Afghanistan” in 2005 and 2006. Jackson said there was lots of civil service work, as well — drilling wells, building schools and passing out supplies.

He said that service has influenced his political career.

“Serving in the military is about working in small teams in order to accomplish a mission,” Jackson said. “And you get so much practice with that, that you become pretty good with being thrown into a team, figuring out what people’s strengths are and how to use those strengths and then being very mission focused after that.”

Jackson attended law school on the GI Bill and worked as an assistant district attorney in Gaston County from 2011 to 2014. Jackson said he started on speeding and drunk-driving cases but worked on murder, sex offense and drug trafficking cases before he left for the state Senate.

He was elected to Congress in 2022, but his Democratic district was recently redrawn by state lawmakers into a safe Republican seat, expected to be won by state House Speaker Tim Moore.

Jackson said the attorney general role is a natural next step for him.

“I don’t see it as an extension of my political career,” he said. “I see it as an extension of my legal career. I went to law school to become a prosecutor and really enjoyed that job. This is sort of going back to my roots.”

Jackson said Bishop has not prosecuted a single case in his career.

Bishop has countered that Jackson doesn’t have enough experience as a counsel of record and tried to paint Jackson, who has gained fame for his social media presence and regular TikTok videos from his kitchen, as a celebrity more interested in TV appearances. Jackson first gained acclaim when he "held" a solo session of the North Carolina Senate during a winter storm in 2015 and chronicled the fake happenings on social media.

“If you read a little bit about my record, how I've spent my life, soldier, prosecutor, I think you're going to see that I've got the qualifications, but also that I bring the temperament that we really want from an attorney general,” Jackson said. “If we send an extremist to Congress — we have 435 members of Congress — we can dilute the effect. We have one attorney general, and if we have an extremist in that role, it will be a nightmare for our state, and we should really avoid that.”

State of the race

History indicates that whoever wins this race could be positioned for higher office. The last five attorneys general have run for governor – some successfully (Roy Cooper, Mike Easley), some unsuccessfully (Lacy H. Thornburg and Rufus Edmisten lost in the Democratic primary) and one to be determined (Stein).

“AG” an old joke goes, stands for “aspiring governor.”

A poll from the Carolina Journal in October had leading Bishop 46.1% to 43.4% with leaners included. A WRAL News Poll released in September found Jackson leading Bishop 43% to 36%, with more than one in five voters undecided. An earlier WRAL News Poll in March found Jackson leading 41% to 40%.

In a tight race, nearly anything can be the difference. Bishop filed a defamation lawsuit against the Jackson campaign over a “push poll” question about work done on behalf of private clients. Bishop said it was a pre-emptive measure that needed to be taken because of similar moves late in the 2000 and 2016 campaigns by Democratic candidates.

Presidential and vice-presidential candidates and their surrogates are making regular stops in the state. Some Republicans have expressed concern that Robinson’s low polling numbers against Stein could indicate soft results for GOP candidates down the ballot, including Bishop.

Jackson said outside money that may have gone to Robinson has instead been moved to helping Bishop. The television ads are relentless on both sides.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has carried the state twice previously and his voters, Bishop said, should ensure that he has help if elected.

“They're frustrated with the cost of living that Biden and Harris have stuck them with,” Bishop said. “They’re concerned about a chaotic border, and they're anxious to go into the polls and vote for Donald Trump. But what I hope they'll reflect on is that unless Donald Trump has similarly common sense folks helping him down the ballot, it's going to be hard. It's going to be very lonely in the White House, and so I think people do need to give the rest of their ballot very careful attention.”