8 things to know about Dan Bishop, the Republican candidate for NC attorney general

As Republican Dan Bishop campaigns to be North Carolina’s next attorney general, we looked at his voting record and public remarks as a county commissioner, state legislator, and congressman. If elected, he will be the state’s top law enforcement official.

Dan Bishop started his career as a Mecklenburg county commissioner, served as a state legislator for four years, and since 2019, has been a member of Congress. Now, he’s seeking to be North Carolina’s next attorney general.

If he’s elected attorney general, Bishop would be the top law enforcement official in the state, tasked with representing and defending entities of state government in court, working with local law enforcement agencies, and initiating legal action when necessary. 

In a video posted to his campaign website, Bishop says that “North Carolinians deserve a constitutional conservative who will enforce our laws consistently,” but his record, actions, and rhetoric undermine that philosophy and provide a clear idea of how he might govern, if elected.

Here are eight things to know about Dan Bishop.

1. Bishop has long opposed reproductive rights

As both a state legislator and congressman, Bishop has consistently opposed abortion rights and reproductive healthcare in general.

When Bishop was a member of the North Carolina Senate and running for Congress, he expressed opposition to abortion rights and made favorable comments towards extreme abortion bans such as an Alabama law that was among the most restrictive in the country, outlawing abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. 

“I think it’s wrong to have an abortion in the case of rape or incest, just as it would be wrong to take the life of a child born to incest,” he said at the time. Bishop did note, however, that he would still support the legislation if it provided an exception for abortion in cases of rape or incest.

Bishop also said he would support a bill like it in North Carolina as well.

During his run for Congress in 2019, Bishop was endorsed by the National Right to Life, and as a member of Congress, he’s received an A+ rating from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an organization fully opposed to reproductive rights, including IVF.

2. He celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade

When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, ending the constitutional right for women to have an abortion, Bishop celebrated the ruling.

“Every human life is sacred, including the unborn. Thankfully, today’s Supreme Court decision underscores that,” he wrote in a statement following the decision.

Bishop also has a history of comparing the Roe ruling to the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, in which the court ruled that enslaved people were not citizens of the US and, therefore, could not expect any protection from the federal government or the courts. That ruling is now considered among the worst, if not the worst, Supreme Court decisions of all time, and yet Bishop has argued that Roe is comparable — and continued making this comparison even after Roe was overturned.

“Now, Roe v. Wade will finally be joining Dredd Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson where it belongs, in the ash heap of history,” Bishop said in his statement about the end of Roe.

3. Bishop refused to certify the 2020 presidential election and pushed Trump’s ‘Big Lie’

When Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 US Presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies began immediately to sow doubt about the legitimacy of Biden’s victory. Dan Bishop was one of these allies.

Bishop falsely claimed there were irregularities with the voting process in his own district, which he and Trump both won handily. And as the results of the election were in the process of being certified at the state level, Bishop and other North Carolina Republicans joined a lawsuit to contest Biden’s victories in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada.

Bishop continued his embrace of election conspiracies into 2021, and just hours after a violent mob of Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6 in a deadly attempt to stop Congress from certifying the election results, Bishop still voted against certifying the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

While Bishop condemned those who attacked the capitol, he has downplayed the fact that the insurrection was indeed an insurrection. 

“If it was an insurrection, it was the worst example of an insurrection in the history of mankind,” he said in May 2021.

4. He was behind North Carolina’s ‘bathroom bill’

In March 2016, Bishop, then a member of the North Carolina House, filed House Bill 2, which became known as the ‘bathroom bill.’

HB 2 required transgender people to use the restroom listed on their birth certificate instead of the one that matched their gender identity. The bill alsodefined a person’s gender as what was listed on their birth certificate.

Bishop’s filing of HB2 was in response to a local ordinance in his home county of Mecklenburg, where the county commission voted in favor of a nondiscrimination ordinance that sought to include LGBTQ people and allow them to use the restroom that matched their gender identity.

Bishop strongly defended his bill, even as it cost the state billions of dollars, led companies to cancel new projects and jobs in the state, and prompted the NBA to move its 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte.

In 2017, when legislators were attempting to repeal parts of the bill, Bishop continued to support it and attempted to preserve parts of the bill providing exceptions to local non-discrimination ordinances that would allow, for example, a baker to refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex couple. 

Bishop even compared these efforts to those of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman and member of the Nazi Party, who saved the lives of over a thousand Jewish people during the Holocaust by employing them at his factory in Kraków, Poland.

“As Oscar Schindler said, as many as we can,” Bishop said in response to a question from an anti-LGBTQ activist about who the exemption would apply to.

5. He opposes same-sex marriage

In 2005, Bishop, then a member of the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners, opposed a nondiscrimination ordinance that protected gay people. Bishop remarked at the time that the measure was “either a political stunt or a serious dagger at the heart of marriage.”

Seven years later, in 2012, the legislature put a constitutional amendment on the primary ballot allowing voters to decide whether the state should define marriage as being between a man and a woman or not. Bishop publicly supported the amendment, which passed but was ultimately overturned in federal court.

6. Bishop co-sponsored a bill that could impact IVF access

In January 2023, Bishop co-sponsored the Life At Conception Act. The bill sought to establish “equal protection under the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution for the right to life of each born and preborn human person.”

In other words, the bill would give a fetus the same rights as a person, which would almost certainly lead to legal challenges to abortion. For example, if a fetus is legally a person, under the law, having an abortion could be viewed as murder.

The bill did not include a protection for In-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, which could also open the door to legal challenges to fertility care. 

The future of IVF has come into question in recent months, after Alabama’s Supreme Court issued a ruling in February declaring embryos had the same rights as children, a move that threatened to limit or eliminate access to IVF treatments in the state.

While additional legislation was passed to protect Alabama IVF clinics and patients from criminal charges for damaging or destroying unused embryos—a common occurrence during the IVF process, as embryos are screened for viability—the initial ruling emphasized broader concerns about how anti-abortion lawmakers like Bishop might take aim at the fertility industry.

7. Bishop ‘invested’ in a social media site partly geared towards white supremacists

In 2017, Bishop donated $500 to Gab, a social media website that is advertised as an alternative to sites like Facebook or X (formerly Twitter). 

The Daily Mail first reported Bishop’s contribution to Gab, and noted that the site was being used to push far-right, anti-semetic conspiracy theories, including those embraced by Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed 11 Jewish worshipers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.

“I’m about done with SF thought police tech giants’ Big Brother routine, and so … I just invested in a free-speech social network startup mentioned in a Washington Post article today, Gab.ai,” Bishop said in a Facebook post on August 17, 2017.

The Charlotte Observer noted that Bishop’s post about supporting Gab came just days after a violent mob of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia started a conflict which saw one of them drive a car into a crowd of  counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. . 

When media outlets began to cover his donation to Gab, Bishop claimed he wasn’t aware of racism or anti-semitism being promoted on the platform.

“I don’t use Gab, but if its management allows its users to promote violence, anti-Semitism, and racism on the platform they have misled investors and they will be gone quickly, and rightly so,” he said.

Gab remains active today.

8. He responded to Donald Trump’s guilty verdict by attacking the justice system

On May 30, 2024, a New York jury found former president Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts as part of an investigation into a hush money scandal involving adult film star Stormy Daniels.

In response, Bishop released a statement in which he attacked the justice system and government: “Lawfare has reached its Waterloo. A reckoning is coming for gangster government.”

Bishop also compared the Trump verdict to the persecution that African-Americans faced in the South before the Civil Rights Movement.

“They go into a place where they know the fight is unfair. It’s as bad as it was in Alabama in 1950 if a person happened to be Black in order to get justice, and that’s what they did in New York,” he said in a radio appearance after the verdict.