Dems will 'pull us back into an era of government overreach,' Robinson says in GOP State of the State response

Democrats can’t be trusted to run the state, Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson said Monday during a speech following Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s annual State of the State speech.

“If the Democrats have their way, they’ll pull us back into an era of government overreach, high taxes, and attacks on our personal freedoms,” Robinson said. “During the pandemic, we saw just how far they would go to control your lives. They shut down your businesses. They kept your children out of school. They told you you couldn’t go to church.”

On Monday night, just after Cooper’s speech ended, WRAL News asked Robinson if he’d like to make any further comments on what Cooper actually said. He declined, saying his video would speak for itself.

“Since Republicans were elected to the majority in the General Assembly, they have implemented common-sense economic policies to ensure that you can keep more of your hard-earned money,” he said.

In 2024, Cooper is term-limited and can’t run again. So far the only major candidate from either party to officially declare a campaign for governor is Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat.

In a speech Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a national gathering of conservative politicians closely tied to the Donald Trump wing of the GOP, Robinson hinted strongly that he’ll run for governor. He called rumors of his campaign one of the “most poorly kept secrets” in North Carolina politics.

On Monday he continued the hints that he’d like to be the one delivering the State of the State speech in 2025. His speech started with a lengthy autobiography, talking about his own personal hardships and how his mother inspired him — much like a campaign ad might begin — before then turning to praise of what Republicans have done for state government in the past decade.

“The Republican-led General Assembly turned a state that was billions of dollars in debt and struggling financially into an economic powerhouse,” Robinson said. “North Carolina is the number one state in the nation to do business.”

He also praised his own efforts as lieutenant governor to curtail what topics schools can teach: “They should be teaching our students how to think — not what to think — ensuring that personal or political ideologies stay out of the classroom,” Robinson said.

Democrats gave Cooper a standing ovation and Republicans shot him glares as he invoked a controversial 2016 law on transgender rights whose national fallout helped him become governor in the first place.

The state Democratic Party chair, Anderson Clayton, took that same criticism even further in her own remarks after Robinson’s speech aired.

"It’s pretty rich for [Robinson] to boast about North Carolina's ‘best in business’ status when his extreme policies are exactly the type of thing that would run business out of this state,” Clayton told WRAL News. “It's also rich that he would talk about government overreach when he's made clear that he wants to get in the middle of women's health care decisions.”

Cooper’s speech focused on two main topics. One was public education, and specifically his request that the Republican-led state legislature spend more money on schools, ranging from day care through grade school and up to community colleges and universities. The other was the economy, and specifically recent announcements of several new factories in high-tech manufacturing fields, particularly focused on the clean energy sector.

Those two are intertwined, Cooper said: “Because these new jobs require more skill, the education pipeline from early childhood all the way through community college and universities is more important than ever.”

Robinson’s speech also focused heavily on education. He didn’t explicitly call for teacher pay raises but did say: “Teachers have one of the most important jobs in our society. We must hold them to professional standards, and we must pay them as the professionals they are.”

Robinson also said the state needs better infrastructure, ranging from roads to broadband internet. Many of those projects are already underway, Cooper noted in his own speech, crediting Democrats in Washington for projects like the national infrastructure bill and the 2021 stimulus package.

Robinson criticized those federal programs, saying: “We can’t afford that.”

Cooper and Robinson each spoke about law enforcement and the need for more training around de-escalation.

Cooper used his speech to call for raises for cops. He also urged the legislature to pass more of the recommendations from a racial justice task force he created in 2020.

Robinson, on the other hand, called for politicians to be more publicly supportive of police officers: “We see our law enforcement officers demonized and vilified, and our communities are paying the price,” he said.