Oct. 30: This Election Might Not Be Close

Jew-shooter in Chicago benefitted from sanctuary city law; Jew-hater runs Chicago Board of Education; Chinese voters and burned ballots

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The Big Story

We’ll be including more election-related coverage than usual in The Scroll this week because, well, we’re less than a week out from the election. Normally we try to look for stories that either aren’t being covered elsewhere or aren’t receiving their due emphasis, but sometimes everyone is talking about a story for a reason—the reason being that the story is very important. 

We said on Monday and will say again that we are not pollsters, prognosticators, or analysts; we’re not even very good at math, which is why we’re in journalism. So don’t bet the kids’ college fund on what we’re telling you here. Still, we’ll try to give you our best sense of what we think is happening right now. And what we think is happening is that Donald Trump is doing far better than many of the polls, and the print and broadcast media coverage, are letting on. If we’re wrong, we’ll be the first to admit it, and you can feel free to come back here next week and heckle us in the comments. 

The first point to make is that despite some razor-thin poll margins and talk of a “coin-flip” election, the environment is extremely favorable to Republicans. For one thing, the GOP has made significant party registration gains since the last election cycle. In Pennsylvania, widely considered to be the key to the election, Republicans have cut the Democrats’ registration advantage from more than 685,000 in 2020 to less than 300,000 this year—a gain of more than 385,000 in a state that Biden took by only about 80,000 votes. And in late September, Gallup released the results of its survey on the 2024 election environment, concluding that “nearly all Gallup measures that have shown some relationship to past presidential outcomes … favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party.” You can look at the results here: 

So, that’s the background. We have also, for a couple of weeks now, been receiving early vote (EV) numbers in some of the major swing states. The conventional wisdom is that you can’t pay attention to EV numbers because EV totals have historically been misleading in predicting final results, not to mention that elections have changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We think some of that is being overstated, but sure—don’t take the EV numbers as gospel truth. Still, they give us a chance to look at real-life voter behavior and shouldn’t be ignored. 

What the EV numbers show right now is that Trump is doing much better than anyone anticipated. This is exactly what we might have expected if we’d tuned out every media story about Trump: Hitler II and looked at fundamentals like registration, party ID, and the electoral environment—which is another reason to take these numbers seriously. 

A few weeks ago, for instance, there was a consensus that Nevada—which was Biden +2.39 in 2020 and where the majority of the electorate votes early—was Harris’ strongest swing state. The expectation was that Democrats would amass a formidable “firewall” in Clark County (home of Las Vegas), which the GOP would attempt to scale by juicing rural turnout and beating the Democrats on Election Day. Here’s what’s happened instead:

And the issue isn’t, as many have claimed, that the GOP is “cannibalizing” its Election Day vote (i.e., getting voters who would’ve voted on Election Day to vote early, which has no effect on the total). Voter frequency data published by Michael Pruser shows that in Clark County, at least, Republicans have only mobilized slightly more of their “3/3” voters—those who have voted in three of the last three elections and thus are most likely to show up on Election Day—than the Democrats (70.59% to 66.62%). Instead, the GOP advantage is coming from greater success in mobilizing their low-propensity voters—i.e. those who have voted in zero or one of the last three elections, and who are least likely to show up on Election Day. In Clark County, the GOP has banked 28.19% of their 0/3 voters while the Democrats have mobilized only 20.09% of theirs. That suggests a big enthusiasm gap in the Republicans’ favor. 

In other words, a Harris victory in Nevada, while not completely impossible, is starting to look more and more implausible. To hold the state, Harris would need to win an unusually high percentage of the registered Republican vote (while disproportionately holding on to pro-Trump blue-collar Democrats) and/or run up blowout margins among Independents, despite the Independent vote generally mirroring the partisan vote (i.e., if Republicans are enthusiastic, Republican-leaning Independents also tend to be enthusiastic, and vice versa). And, according to FiveThirtyEight, which has reliably given Trump worse odds than other poll aggregators, Harris has only a 12% chance of winning the presidency if she loses Nevada. 

We won’t do the same in-depth rundown of every other state, but we can say, as we did on Monday, that the trends look similar in the rest of the Sun Belt, with the heavy asterisk that the other states are far harder to model or predict (at least according to the modelers we follow) due to a higher percentage of their ballots being cast on Election Day. We wrote on Monday that it appeared Harris would need to hold on to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to win, and everything we have seen since then confirms that judgment. At least some of the analysts who were calling Nevada for Trump last week—which seemed bold at the time, but now appears to have been vindicated—are seeing similar bull signals for the former president in Pennsylvania. Here’s X user and EV analyst @DataRepublican on the latest Pennsylvania EV numbers, which we’ve split up into two screenshots:

Again, anything could happen, so don’t bet the house. But as we read headline and X post after headline and X post this morning, suggesting the closest election of our lifetime, we thought it might be helpful to at least offer an opposing view: Trump is doing extremely well right now, and the final result may not even be that close. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: North Carolina is about to elect a progressive Jewish governor. Armin Rosen asks: Will Josh Stein be good for the Jews?

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The Rest

→From Fox immigration reporter Bill Melugin, here’s an update on the shooting of an Orthodox Jewish man in Chicago on Saturday, which he covered in Monday’s edition:

Around 29,000 Mauritanians have migrated to the United States since 2021, most of them illegally, including more than 3,000 who have settled in Lockland, Ohio—a Cincinnati suburb with a population of 3,500. As the writer Tiana Lowe Doescher points out on X, in Mauritania, an estimated 2% of the population is enslaved, 69% of women are subject to female genital mutilation, and male homosexuality is punishable by death. We don’t know Mauritanians’ feelings on Jews, but Saturday’s shooting in Chicago suggests that, on average, they probably aren’t great. 

→Quote of the Day: 

My Jewish colleagues appear drunk with the Israeli power and will live to see their payment.

That’s Rev. Ikenna Mitchell Johnson, a political ally of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson whom the mayor recently appointed to serve as president of the Chicago Board of Education, quoted in a Tuesday story in Jewish Insider. According to the report, the reverend made the comments on Facebook, where he has also written that the “Nazi Germans’ ideology has been adopted by the Zionist Jews” and (in reference to the Oct. 7 attacks) that “people have an absolute right to attack their oppressors by any means necessary!!” Mayor Johnson, of course, cast the tie-breaking vote for Chicago’s January resolution in favor of a cease-fire in Gaza and called Israel’s war there “genocidal” ahead of the Democratic National Convention in August. As for the Rev. Johnson, he previously served as the executive director of Developing Communities Project, an economic development organization formerly led by Barack Obama, and in August attended a White House event for “faith leaders convening on climate, clean energy, and environmental justice.” 

→Like many Americans, we sometimes forget about President Joe Biden. But Joe Biden, apparently, does not want to be forgotten. On Tuesday night, the president delivered an unexpected gift to the Trump campaign, telling CNN that “the only garbage I see floating out there is his [i.e., Trump’s] supporters”—this after Democrats had spent two days highlighting a comment from Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday where a comedian joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” Harris and other campaign surrogates have distanced themselves from the president’s comment, but this marks the second time in a week that Biden, who was officially “sharp as a tack” until overnight becoming too old and feeble to run for reelection, has accidentally thrown a bone to Republicans. At a campaign event in New Hampshire last Tuesday, Biden said of Trump, “We gotta lock him up.” Biden attempted to clarify that he’d meant “lock him up politically,” but that’s not the most convincing defense given that (a) that’s not a phrase anybody uses and (b) the Department of Justice is trying to throw Trump in jail.  

→The Houthis resumed their attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea this week, firing missiles at a Liberia-flagged tanker on Monday. In a Wednesday report, The Wall Street Journal details how the Iran-backed terror group has expanded its influence within the wider Axis of Resistance since Oct. 7, including by developing ties with al-Qaeda offshoots in the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia and by establishing “joint-operations centers” in Lebanon and Iraq to coordinate with other Iranian-backed groups, presumably under the direction of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Houthis—which are not so much an independent entity as they are the Yemeni branch of the IRGC—have also been stepping up their military cooperation with Russia. In April, a Russian warship evacuated the IRGC commander overseeing Iran’s drone and missile programs in Yemen, and the Russians have also been providing the Houthis with targeting data for their attacks on Red Sea shipping, according to a separate Journal report from last week. U.S. intelligence agencies warned in July that Moscow was seeking to sell anti-ship missiles to the Houthis, a step the Biden administration is reportedly working to block through “diplomacy.” 

→There are a lot of accusations flying around X.com right now about election fraud, malfeasance, cheating, etc. Some of these are fairly ludicrous, but here are two real stories worth mentioning:

• In Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, drop boxes full of mail-in ballots were set on fire early Monday morning. According to The New York Times, investigators discovered incendiary devices marked with “Free Gaza” and “Free Palestine” near the drop boxes. While neither state is competitive in the presidential election, Portland is holding a mayoral election, and Vancouver, where the arsonists successfully burned “hundreds” of ballots, is the site of an extremely competitive House race pitting Republican and friend of the Scroll Joe Kent against incumbent Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who defeated Kent by less than 3,000 votes in 2022. 

• A 19-year-old Chinese citizen and student at the University of Michigan has been arrested for illegally voting in Ann Arbor after asking the county clerk—after voting—if he could get his ballot back. According to The Detroit News, the unidentified student registered to vote on Sunday and was allowed to cast a ballot without any proof of citizenship other than a signed declaration. Officials say that although his ballot was cast illegally, it is expected to count because “there is no way for election officials to retrieve it once it’s been put through a tabulator.” One wonders what would have happened if the student hadn’t told on himself. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

A Streetwise Jewish Monster From Brooklyn, by Andrew Fox

The Thing is Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s perfect union of the golem and the dybbuk

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The Durham Dilemma

North Carolina is poised to elect a pragmatic progressive Jewish governor. Is that good for the Jews?

by Armin Rosen

On Nov. 5, 58-year-old North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein will likely win the governorship of his evenly divided state in a mid-single-digit landslide, instantly making him the most inconspicuous major politician in America. “It’s better to be inspiring than exciting. And Josh is inspiring,” said Adam Goldstein, a professor of family medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and sometimes-Democratic Party activist who is friendly with Stein.

One senior Democratic official based in Durham called Stein, who has led major national lawsuits against e-cigarette and social media companies, a “low-key mensch with an aggressive litigation strategy.” Even guarded criticism of Stein is couched in admiration for his ability not to attract the wrong kind of scrutiny. Based on his record in the legislature, Stein, a former state senator, will be perhaps the most liberal person ever elected governor in North Carolina’s history, noted Paul Shumaker, a leading Republican strategist. “The mark of a good politician is the ability to evolve on issues as needed,” said Shumaker. “He’s demonstrated that ability time and time again.”

Stein’s opponent is Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, a repellent hyper-Trumpist firebrand who once described himself as a “Black Nazi.” Robinson is exactly the kind of political arsonist incapable of winning a high-turnout election in North Carolina, where voters tend to reward pragmatism and moderation in state-level races. (Both the Stein and Robinson campaigns did not respond to multiple requests for an interview with the candidates.) In some states—New York, for instance—voters look askance at politicians who can’t comfortably grandstand or who lack an oily shimmer, as if they interpret the appearance of sobriety and honesty as the sign of a soft character, or of some brilliantly concealed grift. In contrast, a reporter who spends a few days in the ever-denser suburban promised land of the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle attempting to figure out who Josh Stein is comes across anecdotes about him arriving with his entire family at a nearly deserted synagogue to take shifts reading the names of Holocaust victims in the middle of a weekday Yom HaShoah. “Politicians usually show up for that sort of thing so that people can see them showing up for it. But he was just there,” observed Sara Fuerst, a former state House legislative aide and Democratic Party activist who was on name-reading duty before the Steins.

In a time when America’s leading politicians tend to be self-sabotaging attention entrepreneurs with only a vague set of fixed beliefs, Stein is disciplined, principled, and politically shrewd. In his March 5 acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for governor, Stein said he was running for the state’s highest office because of people like “Debbie in Cornelius who tragically lost her son Hunter to a fentanyl overdose, but is turning her pain into purpose to help others who are struggling with addiction.” Debbie’s heartache and activism are real. It is also worth noting that Cornelius, population 30,000, is a suburb on the fringes of the Charlotte metro area where the population is 80% white and Donald Trump improved on his slight majority of the local vote between 2016 and 2020.

North Carolina politics are evenly divided between rapidly growing cities and suburbs that vote heavily for Democrats, and stagnant or shrinking outlying towns that are becoming monolithically Republican. “We are the most purple state in the nation, but the reality is there are very few purple areas,” said Morgan Jackson, a leading Raleigh-based Democratic strategist and adviser to the Stein campaign. “We’re one part northern Virginia, one part rural Alabama.” The tiny sliver of contested terrain is in midsize towns where some small yet potentially decisive number of persuadable voters can be found—places like Cornelius, which is at the edge of the countryside but well within the cultural and economic pull of a liberal metro area.

Democrats win elections in North Carolina by appealing to an apolitical desire for order and competence, allowing them to shave off tiny margins of votes in the suburban fringe or in rural areas. And they don’t have to shave very many: Roy Cooper was first elected governor in 2016 by 11,200 votes out of over 5.5 million cast. The current chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court beat the Democratic incumbent by a mere 401 voters out of 5.3 million cast in 2020. Stein won his 2016 and 2020 races for attorney general by 20,200 and 13,600 votes, respectively.

In an advertisement which is now repeating endlessly on North Carolina radio and television, Debbie, who has become one of the faces of Stein’s campaign for governor, admits that she usually votes for Republicans. But Stein “worked to cross party lines to tackle the fentanyl crisis,” Debbie said in a grave yet musically drawn-out country accent. “He cares about families like mine. I’ve seen it. He does not back down. He will not back down.”

“Now that's understanding North Carolina,” Mac McCorkle, a Duke political scientist who has long been active in Democratic politics in the state, said of the campaign spot. “These are the people that decide elections here.”

***

Northeastern North Carolina is what a successful region looks like in 21st-century America. It is a business-friendly knowledge economy powerhouse, with three massive universities, a bustling tech and pharmaceutical sector, and a number of large hospital systems that attract high-earning and educated newcomers from across the country. Meanwhile retirees have flocked to places like the beach town of St. James, which several state political watchers likened to a mid-Atlantic version of The Villages, the famously pro-Trump senior enclave in Florida. Shumaker noted that people born and raised in North Carolina now account for only 40% of the electorate in the state, which has added over a half-million voters to its rolls since the 2020 election. A whopping 440,000 of them opted not to register with either major political party, while whatever gains Democrats have gotten from in-migration have been partially offset by an ongoing hemorrhage of the country vote in a state whose rural population is second only to that of Texas.

Because North Carolinians are so decentralized—McCorkle noted that only about 10,000 people live in downtown Raleigh—the flood of new arrivals has not effaced the state’s recognizably Southern character, and the Research Triangle’s proliferation of office parks, strip malls, and pop-up condos haven’t been enough to make a visitor forget where they are. North Carolina has just 2,000 tobacco farmers left, as compared with 60,000 pharmaceutical industry employees, but the Chesterfield billboard atop the Liggett and Myers tobacco company’s old red-brick headquarters still looms over Durham, and a 1948 plaque “dedicated to the millions who smoke the cigarette that satisfies” remains affixed to the building’s entrance.

Like America as a whole, North Carolina’s success exists in some hard-to-define relationship with its bizarre political outcomes. Democrats have won seven of the past eight gubernatorial elections and eight of the past elections for both attorney general and secretary of state, a record on par with solid-blue states like Delaware and Washington. Meanwhile a Republican has won the presidential race an Indiana-like seven out of the last eight elections, with the only exception being Barack Obama’s triumph in 2008, a victory that “nationalized the Democratic Party in North Carolina,” according to Shumaker. Republicans hold both seats in the U.S. Senate and have supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, largely as the result of political gerrymandering. (The governor of North Carolina does not have the power to veto bills that change the state’s legislative districts).

North Carolina is the optimistic case for America, a place that works well in spite of its schizophrenic politics, or perhaps because of them. As Shumaker noted, Roy Cooper, the popular Democratic governor, “kept his right-of-center image in part because of the Republican legislature.” The Republican supermajority, however allegedly ill-gotten, imposes sensible political behavior on Democrats, while the long Democratic winning streak in statewide races forces Republicans to cut deals with the state’s highest office holders. Cooper reached compromises on Medicaid expansion, energy regulation, and repeal of an allegedly transphobic and business-killing “bathroom bill” with a heavily Republican legislature. Some of this took years to achieve. “Politics is a game of endurance,” said Morgan Jackson. “It’s a marathon and not a sprint to get things done in North Carolina.” Successful North Carolina Democrats, including genuinely left-wing ones, generally do not talk about the party having plans for some rapid, sweeping progressive transformation of the state.

***

As attorney general, Josh Stein mastered the procedures of government in order to produce tangible results along whatever narrow points of pseudo-consensus he could discern within a sharply divided state political system. He ended the embarrassment of North Carolina’s worst-in-the-country backlog of rape kits and led a national lawsuit against the e-cigarette producer Juul over its alleged marketing to minors. He spearheaded another major lawsuit against TikTok—a target agreeable to both liberals and conservatives, given the company’s slot machine-like addictiveness to the young and its ties to the Chinese communist regime. He became very good at appearing to uphold one of the most vital and least controversial purposes of government, which is keeping children safe.

Stein is now running for governor as a law-and-order moderate who features cops and Republicans in his ads and doesn’t talk about the Green New Deal, de-growth, Medicare for All, sanctuary cities, redistributive racial “justice,” or the inherent evils of America. He is instead a believer in progress through funding public services, expanding legal abortion, placing checks on corporate power, and protecting North Carolina's attractive business climate from the ravages of the culture wars.

Stein belongs to the optimistic tradition in American liberalism—one reason Jews continue to vote for Democrats in large numbers is that they imagine the party’s leadership to consist largely of people like Stein, ones who share his commitments, his motivations, his good sense, and something of his personal history. There are darker aspects to his revealed belief in social progress under the enlightened guidance of a liberal government, an outlook which trusts society to a class of virtuous and ostensibly apolitical experts and insiders. But in our own hyperpolarized and ideologically inflamed era, this philosophy is a viable compromise between the progressive activists and the left-of-center professional managers who form the Democratic Party’s mutually dependent yet warring poles.

Stein offers a version of the activist-managerial synthesis that can win over leftists in Durham and Trump voters in Cornelius. His Jewishness serves him well in defining a workable political persona: He is from a reliable Democratic constituency that was often seen as a partner to African American communities, and while he admires Israel he has also had fruitful relationships with anti-Israel voices. He discusses his Judaism on the campaign trail and was an usher at recent Rosh Hashanah services at Raleigh’s Temple Beth Or, making time for the high holidays amid the governor’s race and the state’s response to Hurricane Helene. He is the kind of person that a party with major hang-ups over Jews would never elect or admire. But if Chuck Schumer was the ideal of one generation’s Jewish politics on the center-left mainstream, with the aesthetics of a full-bore commitment to Israel masking the messier realities of intraparty messaging and deal-making, the future of Jewish Democrats probably looks more like Stein, who is simultaneously boring and shrewd enough to appear to make the contradictions vanish even as they get worse.

Stein was raised in Charlotte and Chapel Hill. His father, Adam Stein, co-founded the first integrated law firm in North Carolina’s history. While in New York after law school in the mid-1960s, Stein met Julius Chambers, a young associate of Thurgood Marshall and Jack Goldsmith at the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Chambers became living proof that people from the bottom of American society could improve the country through sheer determination and brain power. As a child in the small North Carolina town of Mount Gilead, Chambers watched a white man stiff his auto mechanic father on a bill and realized that his race meant he had no legal recourse. Chambers decided he’d become a lawyer who would represent Black people. He was the first Black editor-in-chief of the law review at the University of North Carolina law school, where he finished first in the class of 1962.

“Julius Chambers was, without a doubt, the most brilliant lawyer I’ve ever known,” said Leslie Winner, a former state senator who worked at Chambers Ferguson, Stein and Chambers’ law firm, throughout the 1980s. Chambers could plot out a multiyear litigation with the vision of a talented field general and solve highly complex legal conundrums in his head in a matter of seconds. Stein and Ferguson argued for the plaintiffs in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which became the major post-Brown v. Board benchmark for the racial integration of public schools—in return, pro-segregationists firebombed the firm’s offices in downtown Charlotte in 1971, when Josh Stein was 5 years old. Chambers had an eight-for-eight record arguing before the Supreme Court, including in trailblazing employment and voting rights suits carried out during his partnership with Stein, and helped free the Wilmington 10.

Chambers Ferguson always had an equal number of Black and white lawyers—if there was an odd number on staff, the Black lawyers would hold a slim majority. Even into the early 1990s, it was the only firm in the state to have both white and Black partners. The firm held an annual beach vacation in which white and Black families would share houses together, Winner recalled, which was unique in the North Carolina of the 1980s, and would be unusual in most of America even today. “Josh grew up in that environment,” said Winner. “It wasn't just integration—it was radical racial equity.”

Stein’s father, who is now 87 years old, is somewhat less outgoing a personality than his son, a change-maker but never an office-seeker. Adam Stein was “a great-at-arguing-to-judges-about-the-law-type lawyer,” Winner recalled. Both father and son are “really great strategic thinkers. They both have a very high level of integrity. I’d trust either of them with my bank account.”

Adam Stein pursued his sense of social purpose through partnering with a historically significant Black lawyer to successfully sue governments and large businesses. His son Josh went the insider’s route, graduating from Harvard Law School and serving as the head of consumer protection at the North Carolina Attorney General's Office and as a top deputy to Attorney General Roy Cooper in the 2000s. Cooper, the state’s current governor, was a product of the political machine of Jim Hunt, the shrewd centrist Democrat and Bill Clinton precursor who served as governor for two nonconsecutive blocks of eight years between 1975 and 2001.

In Hunt’s day, the North Carolina Democratic Party still depended on a prewar coalition of farmers and business owners and was notably center right, a legacy of the social and economic populism that cemented the party’s hold on national power for much of the 20th century. “The Democrats’ winning formula at state level is small town boy or girl done well at university, usually UNC, who becomes a bridge between city and country,” said McCorkle, the Duke political scientist. This describes Hunt and Cooper, but it doesn’t describe Stein, a product of suburban Charlotte and Chapel Hill who was educated out of state, and whose speech has only a subtle local twang.

A Harvard-trained quasi-progressive lawyer with a strong belief in the world-improving powers of regulatory agencies, Josh Stein once fit the profile of someone who might be perfectly content serving as an increasingly senior bureaucrat in Raleigh or Washington. But in 2008, he correctly bet on his own electoral appeal, his knowledge of his home state, and his stomach for hardball politics, winning an open state Senate seat in the Raleigh suburbs. In 2016 Stein became the only Democratic attorney general to win a state that Donald Trump won, a feat he repeated four years later.

***

Steve Schewel, a left-wing former mayor of Durham who has fundraised for Stein’s campaign, said “Josh is squarely within the North Carolina Democratic gubernatorial tradition of being progressive but at the same time eminently practical about what’s achievable.” If Stein is a poster boy for pragmatic progressivism, Schewel represents the more ideologically driven wing of the party. The Democrats’ progressive ideologues have views on key issues like abortion and the welfare state that align with much of the liberal mainstream, but they have also taken positions that the pro-Israel majority of American Jews believe are wrong, ones which often have the effect of targeting Jews for opprobrium and exclusion on campuses, within institutions, and inside the party itself. If Stein’s politics are a testament to the political magic of understated pragmatism, Schewel’s stances model a different kind of path by which Jews can attain power within the Democratic Party.

Schewel earned a Ph.D. from Duke, where he is now a visiting professor, and founded Durham’s left-wing weekly alternative newspaper and its downtown music festival—he became one of the leaders of the city’s progressive establishment, an activist-minded academic with proven business and political acumen. Schewel told me he has known Stein’s parents for decades, and has been friendly with Josh since the late 90s. In 2018, when Schewel was mayor of Durham, he led a divisive and inevitably successful attempt to ban any future contact between the Israeli government and the city’s police department, even though there had been no such contacts in the past and none were under consideration for the future. The resolution echoed the demands of activists from the Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group, founded by Durham-based activists, to which Schewel had occasionally donated. Tom Stern, a former law partner of Stein’s, was one of the leaders of JVP’s campaign for an anti-Israel resolution in the City Council.

The governor of North Carolina has zero authority over U.S. foreign policy. But in North Carolina, as in much of the country, the left uses Israel-related issues to feel out its actual degree of influence and control over the local Democratic Party. In a state as evenly split as North Carolina, there is strong reason to squelch any conflict. “In Massachusetts or California, you fight amongst yourselves because you know there’s nobody else to fight against,” said McCorkle. “Here that would be suicide.” This dynamic creates perverse incentives for more ideologically motivated actors, who can use the threat of any public appearance of internal disarray to extract concessions from the establishment.

That’s exactly what has happened within the North Carolina Democratic Party, which has become the site of recurring Israel-related controversies in which the Jewish state serves as a wedge issue around which intraparty power struggles are fought. Stein’s general absence from these controversies could be an example of his political good sense and his ability to remain above any infighting. Maybe relative public silence on divisive issues one personally cares about is the price of effectively leading a swing state Democratic Party consisting of progressives and moderates who both need and distrust one another. But such a stance could also signify a certain tolerance for Jews being used as a proving ground for warring wings of the party, with results that would surely be unacceptable to him if the people being made to feel unwelcome in America’s liberal party were gay or African American instead of Jewish.

In 2022, the party’s influential progressive caucus pulled its endorsement of incumbent Durham Congresswoman Valerie Foushee over her acceptance of AIPAC-linked donations in a bitterly fought primary campaign against Nida Allam, a pro-Palestinian member of the Durham County Board of Commissioners. Allam lost, but in February of 2023, Anderson Clayton, a 25-year-old Democratic organizer from the Durham-area rural-suburban fringe community of Roxboro, was elected state party chair on the strength of support from rural activists and the progressive caucus. Clayton defeated Bobbie Richardson, a 74-year-old former state legislator and the first Black woman ever to head the North Carolina Democratic Party in the wake of the party’s weaker-than-expected performance during the 2022 election.

In 2022, the state party adopted three lopsided anti-Israel resolutions at its annual convention. Progressives introduced and then passed the measures at a relatively low-turnout event, with little warning or debate. The following year, the first convention with Clayton in charge, a supposed compromise on a replacement for the resolutions wound up including language about “the cutting off of water and electricity to civilians” and “the carpet bombing of Palestinian civilians,” as well as a call for an “immediate cease-fire” and the “immediate release of Palestinian hostages taken by Israel.”

The resolution was tabled due to a technical glitch that delayed earlier votes at the convention. Stein had no discernible role in the resolution controversies, just as he had no involvement in the state’s anti-BDS law, which Cooper signed this past June, or in the Republican-majority legislature’s endorsement of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which passed the state legislature in May—both of which are now anathema to the left.

The fracas over the anti-Israel resolutions, along with lingering bad feelings over the Foushee-Allam race and concerns about the progressives’ growing influence, convinced Jewish Democratic activists to organize themselves. In November of 2023, the party’s executive committee narrowly rejected an attempt to form an officially recognized Jewish caucus within the state Democratic Party, ostensibly because the organizers, whose group had won provisional approval over the summer, had committed a number of procedural errors. Nazim Uddin, the Charlotte-area activist and former Bernie Sanders delegate responsible for the success of the 2022 anti-Israel resolutions, was one of the three members of the party’s Affiliated Organizations Review Committee charged with reviewing the caucus’ proposed bylaws and developing a set of conditions for its future approval. In a video of a meeting where the committee debated the caucus’ status, committee Chair Edward Binanay argued that by allegedly limiting its membership to those who supported the DNC platform on the Middle East, the organizers were introducing a “litmus test” that would be “very divisive within the North Carolina Jewish Democratic community” and violated the state party’s internal nondiscrimination rules. Later in the meeting, two members of the Jewish section of the party’s interfaith caucus denounced the proposed new organization, with the sub-group’s treasurer accusing it of banning all opponents of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and a second speaker railing against the caucus referring to the “Jewish state of Israel” in its its founding materials.

The interfaith caucus is headed by Paul McAllister, a reverend and co-director of Voices for Justice in Palestine who described the Oct. 7 attacks as “retaliation from Gaza linked to the presence of a growing number of Jewish visitors at al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.” On Nov. 30, McAllister spoke on a virtual panel titled “Understanding Global Solidarity: The Genocide in Palestine” whose poster included an image of the terrorist Leila Khaled. McAllister opposed the creation of the Jewish caucus, and in the video of the meeting he can barely restrain his fury when discussing the group holding a public event with the progressive Congressman Jamie Raskin before its official approval. But McAllister was, at that moment, the representative of the only party-sanctioned group of North Carolina Jewish Democratic activists, who had to organize themselves under the aegis of an anti-Zionist non-Jew and alongside Jews who openly opposed both the majority of their co-religionists and the national Democratic Party’s own platform. That the caucus was voted down only confirmed McAllister’s official responsibility for party Jewish activism, while making some Jews wonder if the party viewed them as expendable, or even wanted them around. “We always have to go hat in hand to people who hate us to negotiate space with them,” said Deborah Friedman, a leading Research Triangle pro-Israel activist.

Stein, the state’s highest-ranking Jewish elected official, expressed his public “disappointment” with the caucus’ rejection only when Jewish Insider asked him to comment on the incident. The party approved the caucus’ formation in December of 2023, but only after the organizers agreed to drop language from their bylaws requiring that members support the Biden administration’s positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The caucus has some sensitive work ahead. Anderson has personally endorsed a cease-fire in Gaza, and the North Carolina Democrats were one of only three state parties that called for the inclusion of a Palestinian speaker at this summer’s DNC. On Oct. 10, 2023, 11 of the 48 Democratic members of the state House of Representatives were deliberately absent during a vote condemning that weekend’s Hamas slaughter.

Stein remained aloof from these battles during a time when it seemed as if his race against Mark Robinson would be much more closely fought. “He knew he couldn’t afford to lose anyone in the coalition,” one North Carolina Democratic activist pointed out. Stein’s distance “was a little calculated, but understandable.” Sara Fuerst, who was on the steering committee that founded the caucus, said she did not feel Stein abandoned the organization's founders, even if he didn’t speak up publicly for them. “The Jewish Caucus doesn’t want to cause problems,” Fuerst noted. “We want to elect Democrats.” When I met her, she had spent the previous three hours canvassing for Democratic candidates in Raleigh, Stein included.

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Josh Stein has been to Israel three times, once in his youth and then twice since the COVID-19 pandemic. In the summer of 2023, well after he had made the decision to enter the governor’s race, Stein joined a group of state attorneys general that traveled to the country at the height of antijudicial reform demonstrations that paralyzed the Israeli political system, along with many of the country's major cities. Adam Goldstein, the UNC medical school professor, said he discussed the trip with Stein, who admired the country’s vibrant culture of protest. “I think that was a transformative thing for Josh, to see a thriving democracy that presents a model of how to struggle and how to do it peacefully,” Goldstein recalled. “It’s not just seeing and witnessing—it’s respecting it. Josh respected it.”

Stein is apparently capable of admiring both Israel and the Jewish state’s harsher public critics. According to Lucy Dinner, Stein’s rabbi at Temple Beth Or in Raleigh, Stein approved of the congregation’s relationship with William Barber, a leading progressive Black pastor and founder of the Poor People’s Campaign, which has drawn the participation of the more tikkun olam-oriented wing of the Reform movement. Barber accused Israel of perpetrating a “state crucifixion” of the Palestinian people in 2018 and called for a cease-fire in Israel’s war against Hamas on November 22nd, 2023, before a single hostage had been freed. Barber held a number of rallies near the State House in Raleigh in which Dinner and others from Temple Beth Or participated. “Stein worked downtown but wasn’t in a position to come to the rallies” because of his role in state government, Dinner said. “But he was really supportive of us … he wasn’t directly involved, but we would talk about it and say, ‘I‘m really glad you're here, it’s good for our state.’”

Stein is an active member of Beth Or, and his wife has served as president of the synagogue’s preschool. The Steins were a regular presence at communitywide family Shabbat dinners, while Stein has frequently spoken from the bimah and at adult education events, “usually about a social justice issue our community is deeply engaged in that has Jewish roots,” Dinner said, like “voting rights and immigration.” The entire family, including Stein’s young daughter, once joined a synagogue “mitzvah trip” to volunteer at an orphanage in Guatemala. “These were the values Josh and Ann were building in their children as their children grew up,” said Dinner. “He’s introspective. He’s incredibly intelligent. He puts all the pieces together. And his mind is flowing and taking it all in, and then analyzing it to create that better world.”

Stein could not personally attend the synagogue’s Oct. 7 anniversary commemoration—Hurricane Helene had left a path of unprecedented destruction through the mountainous western third of North Carolina, a crisis that required the attorney general’s full attention. But he sent a statement which was read out at the memorial, in which Stein discussed “the pain of this last year, support for Israel and its right to defend itself, and support for innocent people on both sides—he used the word ‘Palestinian.’ He said to pray for peace, and that we will get to a better time,” Dinner recalled. He has not advocated for any form of a cease-fire since the Oct. 7 attacks.

On March 24, Joe Biden, still the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, was in the midst of defending the Affordable Care Act during a speech in Raleigh when three pro-Palestinian hecklers interrupted him. “What about the health care in Gaza?” shrieked the loudest of the group. “They have a point,” Biden said moments later when the uproar subsided. “We need to get a lot more care into Gaza.” This was a remarkable moment: In real time, the president of the United States had partially acknowledged the demands of his party’s progressive activists—people who didn’t seem to respect him very much, and who he clearly couldn’t satisfy or control—and implied he would pressure a U.S. ally that those activists loathed into allowing greater quantities of dual-use materials into jihadist-held territory in the midst of an existential war. The crowd slowly rose to applaud this moment of left-wing protesters extracting meaningful statements out of the most powerful person on Earth. Stein clapped politely from the front row. He glanced behind him while still seated, saw the momentum building as the room rose to its feet, and was one of the very last to join a near-unanimous standing ovation.

Israel is not an issue of any special relevance to how North Carolina is governed or should be governed. But it is becoming a nationwide test of how a given politician balances the demands of real-world leadership with the countervailing realities of coalition management. In Stein’s case, the answer is to remain friendly with everyone and to keep up a good-natured opacity. He represents the hope that an unexciting standard-bearer with relationships in every major Democratic camp and a broadly agreeable set of principles can keep politics rational and functioning for the great majority of citizens, even as they accuse each other of supporting and promoting genocide.

I asked Steve Schewel if his own strong anti-Israel stances as mayor of Durham suggested an internal split in the party between its progressive and establishment wings. “I think the party divisions tend to surface when we’re losing,” Schewel said. “I think we’re gonna win.” But North Carolina, like America as a whole, is a place where winners don’t stay in power for long.