Former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democratic Senate candidate, speaks at a campaign event in Concord, North Carolina, on Sunday.
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Democrat Roy Cooper won North Carolina’s open U.S. Senate seat, according to an Associated Press race call, giving the party a watershed in the Senate.
The former governor becomes the first Democrat elected to the North Carolina Senate since 2008.
Cooper defeated Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chairman whom President Trump chose to replace incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis.
Cooper and the national Democratic Party groups have vastly outspent Whatley and the Republicans. Weeks before the election, national GOP organizations pulled television ads from North Carolina and redirected their money to other battlegrounds like Kansas.
Cooper, who served as governor from 2017 to 2024, focused his campaign on affordability issues. Every campaign stop he made across the state was promoted as the “Make Stuff Cost Less” tour.
Meanwhile, Whatley’s campaign focused on issues of crime and immigration. He criticized Cooper for a COVID-era legal settlement that released state prison inmates to combat overcrowding during the pandemic. But polls indicated that the economy — not crime — was the top concern among North Carolina voters this year.
The race was Whatley’s first bid for elected office, and Cooper’s campaign portrayed him as a lobbyist for big oil companies who would become a rubber stamp for Trump in the Senate.
Patrick Sebastian, a Republican strategist who did not work on the Whatley campaign, said his party’s nominee should have paid more attention to the economy.
“Really, it’s the economy that’s problem A, and then problem B is probably government corruption, which people follow the most,” Sebastian said. “So when we don’t talk about these issues, it’s going to be difficult to connect with people who go to Walmart to shop and can only get 80% of what they used to buy because the prices have gone up.”
North Carolina’s Senate race was initially expected to be one of the most competitive — and expensive — in the country, but Whatley never led in the polls and Cooper’s lead widened over the course of the race.
Even though the pro-Whatley television ads largely disappeared in October, Trump and Vice President Vance came to North Carolina for several rallies in the final weeks of the campaign. Sebastian says those visits likely helped improve turnout among GOP voters, but weren’t enough to save Whatley’s campaign.
Tillis announced in 2025 that he would not run for re-election, after Trump threatened him with a primary challenger for not supporting the president’s tax cut and spending bill. Rather than campaigning for Whatley, he is promoting his new book criticizing his fellow Republicans.
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