Tuesday night’s vote totals set the stage for North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper to compete against the state’s lieutenant governor, Dan Forest, in November’s gubernatorial election.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Cooper secured the Democratic party’s nomination with 87 percent of the vote against retired Army officer Ernest Reeves.
Lt. Gov. Forest toppled his opponent, state Rep. Holly Grange, with 89 percent of the Republican vote.
“These primaries are about over, and it is time for us to come together and to win,” Cooper said Tuesday night.
Before being elected to his first term as governor in 2016, Cooper served as the state’s attorney general for 15 years. He also worked in the North Carolina General Assembly as a state representative and senator.
Cooper’s veto of the state’s 2019-2020 fiscal budget has left him open to months of criticism from Republican lawmakers.
At the top of Cooper’s agenda has been a full expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The governor proposed the expansion as a spending item in North Carolina’s $24 billion budget. However, with a Republican majority in both chambers of the General Assembly, the $2 billion Medicaid allocation did not make the final cut.
The final bill has yet to get final approval by way of a Senate override, leaving some of the state’s funds on ice.
“We broke that supermajority in the state Legislature, and now my vetoes of bad laws are working,” Cooper told supports Tuesday.
Cooper’s GOP opponent, Forest, was a political novice when he was elected lieutenant governor in 2012. Together, Forest and Republican Gov. Pat McCory flipped the state executive offices from blue to red.
Forest was the second Republican to be elected to the position since 1897. McCory was the first Republican governor since 1993.
Part of Forests’s campaign platform is anti-identity politics, which the candidate said seeks “to divide people and inflame public discourse.” His other campaign priorities are education freedom, economic opportunity through capitalism and innovation.
“We have some great people in the state and really creative, innovative minds,” Forest said Tuesday night at GOP headquarters. “And we need to bring those people together. Cast a vision. Put together a plan. Put together a great team, and figure out how to go tackle those things that our state faces, and in so many ways.”
Constitution Party candidate Al Pisano and Libertarian Party candidate Steven DiFiore also are on the ballot in the Nov. 3 general election.
