NC Attorney General Josh Stein is a top GOP target in 2020. Meet his opponents
North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein is a top target for national Republicans, who see the first-term Democrat in this swing state as potentially vulnerable in 2020.
In 2020, Stein won’t face a challenger in the Democratic primary. But on the Republican side, three challengers — including one with national name recognition among advocates for criminal justice reform — are seeking to challenge him.
The attorney general’s office comes with numerous duties and powers — including oversight of the state crime lab, responsibility for consumer protection and fraud investigations, and the ability to file lawsuits on behalf of the state.
Stein narrowly won election in 2016, by a margin of 50.3% to 49.7% — although his win was notable since he was a Democrat who won a statewide race in the same election that saw North Carolinians support Republican President Donald Trump by nearly 4 percentage points.
“I love serving as Attorney General because it’s my job to protect people,” Stein said in a written statement to the News & Observer. “We’re fighting the opioid epidemic, ending the backlog of untested sexual assault kits, protecting kids from sex abusers, holding corporate bad actors and polluters accountable, and taking on robocallers and other fraudsters. But there’s always more work to do. So I’m asking voters to hire me again for another four years.”
The Republican challengers are:
- Sam Hayes, who until recently was the top lawyer for the N.C. Treasurer’s Office under Treasurer Dale Folwell, a Republican. Hayes also previously worked for North Carolina’s environmental regulation agency, under former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, where he oversaw coal ash clean-up programs.
- Christine Mumma, the News & Observer’s 2007 Tar Heel of the Year, has been executive director of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence. In that role she has proven the innocence of multiple wrongfully convicted people and gotten them released from prison. She also helped create the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, which was the nation’s first state-run agency dedicated to investigating prisoners’ claims of wrongful convictions.
- Jim O’Neill, the Forsyth County district attorney. As the top prosecutor in one of North Carolina’s biggest counties since 2009, O’Neill has overseen many criminal trials. He also unsuccessfully ran for attorney general in 2016, losing in the Republican primary to Buck Newton, who went on to lose to Stein in the general election.
Mumma is the most well-known of the three Republican challengers. Her work investigating the claims of prisoners who say they were wrongfully convicted has been successful, winning freedom — and millions of dollars in restitution — for people who had been sent to prison based on faulty evidence.
Greg Taylor, her first and perhaps most famous client, was convicted in 1993 of murdering a woman in Raleigh. He spent 17 years in prison, until 2010 when Mumma and her staff were able to provide proof that prosecutors had hidden evidence from Taylor’s lawyers, and that a key piece of evidence they used to convict him of the murder — blood found on his car — wasn’t even human blood, let alone the victim’s blood.
Mumma said in an interview Friday that she decided to run because she thinks Stein hasn’t done a good enough job reforming the state crime lab or focusing on other issues to ensure justice is always accurate.
“I’ve personally spoken to Josh about ongoing concerns regarding the state crime lab and the post-conviction process, the appellate process,” Mumma said.
She said North Carolina has a long history of the attorney general’s office being little more than “the place where people go when they want to be governor” — Gov. Roy Cooper was previously the attorney general, as was former Gov. Mike Easley — and Mumma said she wants to turn it back into a less politicized office.
And while she has previously been lauded by liberal groups like the N.C. Justice Center, and has sometimes sparred with Republican politicians — like in 2014 when the legislature tried to cut her group’s funding — Mumma said in her campaign announcement that she’s a true conservative.
“I’m the only candidate who will stand up for the rule of law and enforce President Trump’s policies on immigration, defend the sanctity of life, and safeguard the 2nd amendment,” she wrote in announcing her candidacy Friday.
Hayes and O’Neill had already announced their candidacies.
Hayes touted his work in Folwell’s office fighting against the idea that transgender people on the State Health Plan should be able to use it to pay for sex reassignment surgeries and other treatment related to gender dysphoria, the medical term for when someone identifies as a gender different from their physical sex.
Hayes also wrote on his campaign website that he worked to oppose “lifetime premium-free healthcare for state government retirees” while at the Treasurer’s Office.
O’Neill has touted his background as a career prosecutor, saying he would focus on issues like opioids and immigration enforcement if elected.
“We need to support our ICE agents and the important work they do in our communities,” he tweeted earlier this month.
Two of the main issues that Hayes and O’Neill have said they would focus on — addressing the opioid epidemic and the state’s backlog of untested evidence in rape investigations — are also issues that Stein has focused heavily on in his time in office.
For more state government news, listen to Domecast, the politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Megaphone, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published December 20, 2019 at 2:05 PM with the headline "NC Attorney General Josh Stein is a top GOP target in 2020. Meet his opponents."
