2024 North Carolina gubernatorial election
| |||||||||||||||||
| Turnout | 73.73% (1.62 pp) | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||||||||||
Stein: 40–50% 50–60% 60–70% 70–80% 80–90% >90% Robinson: 40–50% 50–60% 60–70% 70–80% 80–90% >90% No votes | |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
.jpg){kind=link}
.png){kind=link}
| Elections in North Carolina |
|---|
The 2024 North Carolina gubernatorial election was held on November 5, 2024, to elect the governor of North Carolina. It was held concurrently with the 2024 presidential election and other elections. Democratic state attorney general Josh Stein won his first term in office in a landslide victory, defeating Republican lieutenant governor Mark Robinson to succeed Democratic incumbent Roy Cooper, who was term-limited.
Primary elections took place on March 5, 2024. Stein won the Democratic nomination with 70% of the vote over former state Supreme Court justice Michael R. Morgan and Robinson won the Republican nomination with 65% of the vote over state treasurer Dale Folwell.
Initially a tight race, Robinson's history of controversial statements and revelations of comments he made on a pornographic website led to Stein gaining a significant polling advantage. Stein went on to win the election by 14.8 percentage points, the largest margin for a gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina since Jim Hunt in 1980, as well as winning counties that had not voted Democratic since 2008 (Franklin), 2004 (Alamance, Brunswick, and Transylvania), and 1980 (Cabarrus, Henderson, and Jackson). Stein was also the only Democrat in 2024 to win a gubernatorial race in a state Donald Trump won in the concurrent presidential race. Robinson became the first Republican gubernatorial candidate since 1976 to not flip a county in the state.
Stein received more than three million votes, the most of any candidate in the history of statewide elections in North Carolina. He is the first Jewish governor of the state. Analysts have credited Stein's large margin of victory with helping down-ballot Democrats in concurrent elections. According to exit polls, Stein won independent voters by a 23% margin, which further contributed to Robinson's defeat.