North Carolina elects Roy Cooper, its first Democratic US senator in a decade
Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s former governor, has been elected to the US Senate, the first Democrat the state’s voters have sent to the upper chamber in ten years. He defeated Michael Whatley, former chair of the Republican National Committee, for the seat being vacated by outgoing senator Thom Tillis. Cooper’s “Make Stuff Cost Less” campaign focused on food, energy and housing costs and on his record as governor on Medicaid expansion and teacher pay. Whatley and Republicans tried to tie him to violent crime in Charlotte and to conservative anxieties about transgender athletes and immigration.
A politically moderate Democrat, Cooper has been a fixture in state politics for a generation as attorney general and then two-term governor, and has long been North Carolina’s most popular political figure. He raised about three times as much money as Whatley and never trailed in a poll against an opponent more associated with national politics than with local “Tar Heel” issues. The Senate Leadership Fund, which directs money from Republican Senate leader John Thune’s fundraising, wrote Whatley off and redirected spending to Kansas.
The Senate flip came as Republicans running for Congress faced national headwinds. North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature redrew congressional maps in a national push by Donald Trump for mid-decade redistricting, yet Republicans still turned over a House seat in western North Carolina. Chuck Edwards announced in August that he would not seek re-election after a House ethics committee censure recommendation following an investigation into inappropriate conduct toward two female congressional staffers. Jamie Ager, a fifth-generation farmer whose farm was damaged by Hurricane Helene in 2024, highlighted federal relief failures and capitalized on Edwards’s withdrawal and resentment toward the Trump administration.
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