The campaign website of Hal Weatherman, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, lists his top five priorities as: “Donald Trump, building the wall, deporting illegals, Second Amendment and pro-life laws.”

But on the Republican Party’s statewide ticket, Weatherman is a relative moderate.

Driven by MAGA fever, the North Carolina Republican Party is offering voters in a purplish state the most extreme lineup of statewide candidates in modern North Carolina history.

On a ticket that will be headed by Trump, now a convicted felon, the Republican candidates include: For governor, current Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a candidate known for his inflammatory statements on race and LGBT people and a background that includes multiple bankruptcies and failure to pay taxes; for attorney general, Rep. Dan Bishop, a Freedom Caucus warrior who as a state lawmaker sponsored the notorious “bathroom bill” that targeted transgender people and triggered national boycotts of North Carolina; and for superintendent of public instruction, Michele Morrow, an activist who thinks public schools indoctrinate children and has called online for the execution of prominent Democrats.

Rob Christensen, a former longtime News & Observer political columnist who has written a book on the history of North Carolina politics, “The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics,” said the Republican Party has shifted far to the right under Trump and is now nominating “fringe candidates.”

“What’s going on here is what’s going on nationally. If you look around the country, there are really right-wing people that have been put forward by the Republican Party,” he said. “I don’t know that you would call them conservative. It’s anti-establishment, it’s populist, it has a strong racial edge to it, it’s anti-gay, its really anti-modern.”

Such nominees invite defeat, he said, but the party is so in the thrall of Trump that it can’t do otherwise. “It’s almost like a spell has been cast on the Republican Party,” he said.

A state that sent Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate for 30 years has a strong conservative streak, but Christensen said North Carolina voters have preferred more moderate candidates for governor.

“We’ve had a fair number of conservatives elected in this state — Helms being the most prominent example – but when it comes to governor, North Carolinians have tended to want a centrist, somebody who was going to build the roads, fund the schools and try to get businesses to come to the state,” he said. “We have no history of electing really right-wingers to be governor.”

Simon Rosenberg, a national Democratic strategist known for accurately predicting that there would be no red wave in the 2022 midterm elections, said Republicans choosing extreme candidates have led to Democratic victories.

“We saw in 2022 that the extremist candidates that Republicans ran across battleground states all lost and Democrats dramatically outperformed expectations,” he said. “I think that Republicans are in danger of replicating that same losing strategy in both North Carolina and Arizona in particular, where you have candidates that are far out of the mainstream.”

Rosenberg said “fear and opposition to MAGA has been the driving force” behind Democratic victories in recent cycles and North Carolina’s Republican ticket will add to that force.

“The Republican Party of North Carolina is presenting itself as one of the most extremist parties in the country,” he said. “I don’t think many moderate voters in North Carolina are going to go for that in the election.”

Republican Party staffers did not respond to my calls to Republican state headquarters.

Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said offering voters an extreme ticket is self-defeating: “People are looking for common sense, not crazy.”

Whatever Republicans have done wrong in choosing their statewide ticket, they’ve done one thing right: They’ve given voters a clear choice.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com

It’s graduation season and in school after school you hear “Pomp and Circumstance” being played. Most of us can’t remember who delivered our commencement address, much less anything said, but you and I might benefit from some current commencement messages.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld spoke at the Duke Commencement. He shared his “three real keys to life.” They are: “Bust your ass. Pay attention. And fall in love.”

Astronaut Zena Cardman spoke at UNC, saying “It can be tricky to stay present while also looking forward to an imminent future, but I’d encourage graduating seniors to think about what’s right in front of them, here and now. Who will you carry with you into this next stage? What do you value? What do you want to improve for others? The answers to these questions can be found in the present and will carry through a lifetime.”

Nobel prize winner, chemist David MacMillan, gave NC State grads three admonitions. “Learn from others, but always follow your own path. Failure is just another word for experience. Laugh every day; you don’t always have to take yourself too seriously.”

Mandy Cohen, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, admonished Wake Forest Grads to embrace the school’s motto, “Pro Humanitate,” (For Humanity).” “In this increasingly complex world that makes it too easy to believe the illusion that we live in a binary world of us and them, I hope you will see people, all people. Listen. Seek understanding, and not just with those who think like you.”

Ronnie Barnes, ECU alumni and head athletic trainer of the New York Football Giants, spoke at the Greenville commencement. “Resilience is not is not reserved solely for the gridiron or the playing field,” Barnes said. “It’s what enables us to pick ourselves up when we stumble, to push through the pain when it seems insurmountable and emerge stronger and more resilient on the other side.”

Graduates of North Carolina’s Institute of Political Leadership heard former Senator Richard Burr and former Congressman David Price.

Price told the group to think of themselves as part of something greater than the sum of its parts. “It’s one thing to win an election,” Price said. “It’s quite another to another thing to make institutions work. That’s the real test of democracy.”

“Politics has always been a contact sport,” Burr said. “When elections were over David and I put the gloves in a drawer. We didn’t bring them out until the next election time came. Today, the gloves stay out. It’s hard to find consensus when it’s a perpetual fight.”

Burr continued, “Imagine you go to class. A professor every day has to say to the class, and ask by unanimous consent, that we actually do something today. And one student says, ‘Nahh, I don’t think so.’ That’s the United States Senate. We’re taught the rules are 60 votes to get something done. No, the rule is nobody objects.”

But the address attracting the most attention came from filmmaker Ken Burns, who spoke at the Brandeis University graduation.

Burns told the audience that we have inherited a nation that is great and good, but in recent years we have incubated, “habits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to money and guns and conspiracies, our certainty about everything, our stubborn insistence on our own exceptionalism blinding us to that which needs repair, especially with regard to race and ethnicity. Our preoccupation with always making the other wrong at an individual as well as a global level.

“Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway. Everywhere we are trapped by these old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties.

“I have had the privilege for nearly half a century of making films about the US, but I have also made films about us. That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of “us” and also “we” and “our” and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And if I have learned anything over those years, it’s that there’s only us. There is no them.”

Burns violated the tradition that commencement addresses should be apolitical, saying, “There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route.

“The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems…. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.”

Let those who have ears listen.

Tom Campbell is a Hall of Fame North Carolina broadcaster and columnist who has covered North Carolina public policy issues since 1965. Contact him at tomcamp@carolinabroadcasting.com.