Roy Cooper Jumps Into Hotly Contested Race To Replace Thom Tillis

This story is published as part of our partnership with NOTUS.

Roy Cooper is the kind of gold-plated candidate Democrats are desperate to recruit for next year’s Senate races: He’s a popular two-term governor with a record of winning over Republican voters and running disciplined campaigns.

In this election cycle for Senate Democrats, however, even getting the best recruits doesn’t guarantee victory.

Cooper ended months of speculation about his future Monday when he announced that he would run for North Carolina’s open Senate seat, extending a political career that has seen him hold statewide office almost every year this century. He’ll seek the seat held by the retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who was expected to face Cooper in a general election until suddenly announcing in June that he would not seek re-election.

“I never really wanted to go to Washington,” Cooper said in his announcement video. “I just wanted to serve the people of North Carolina right here, where I’ve lived all my life. But these are not ordinary times.”

Cooper will instead likely face Michael Whatley, the Republican National Committee chair who has emerged as the GOP’s consensus candidate in what might be the country’s most competitive—and expensive—Senate race.

The former governor will try to be the first Democratic candidate since 2008 to win a Senate race in North Carolina, a state that has proven frustratingly out of reach for the party at the federal level in recent years. Even as Democrats like Cooper have won state-level races, GOP candidates have won four consecutive GOP presidential contests and five consecutive Senate campaigns in North Carolina.

“Traditionally, Democrats have a tough time running Senate races in North Carolina,” said Gary Pearce, a veteran strategist in the state. “When voters here elect a senator, they’re talking about federal issues, they generally hate the federal government, hate big government, hate Washington.”

Pearce and other Democrats expressed confidence that Cooper starts the race in as strong a position as is possible for a Democratic candidate, citing his ability to win two gubernatorial races in the same years Trump won the state.

But the race, in the view of strategists from both parties, is likely to come down to just a couple of percentage points—a contest even many Democrats acknowledge will be the toughest race of Cooper’s career.

“It’s going to be a knife fight in a telephone booth,” Tillis told NOTUS last week, when asked how he assessed a race between Cooper and Whatley.

Tillis, who said it would have been a difficult campaign even if an incumbent like him had run, added that he hoped Whatley was up for the challenge.

Democrats consider the North Carolina seat their best pickup opportunity in the midterm elections, especially following Cooper’s entrance. But that assessment is at least partially a reflection of the fact that the Senate map in 2026 is heavily titled against their party.

Only one Republican incumbent, Susan Collins in Maine, represents a state won last year by Kamala Harris. Democrats, meanwhile, must defend seats in two states, Michigan and Georgia, that Trump won last year.

Senate Democrats, in addition to North Carolina, are otherwise trying to win races in red states like Iowa, Ohio and Texas that Trump won by more than 10 points.

Republicans hold a 53-47 edge in the Senate. Because the GOP also benefits from Vice President J.D. Vance’s tie-breaking vote in the chamber, Democrats would need to win a net of four seats in 2026 to gain a majority.

Still, Cooper—who is widely expected to avoid a serious Democratic primary challenge next year—was arguably the party’s top Senate recruitment target of the election cycle. And Democrats are also growing more optimistic that another potential top-tier recruit, Maine Gov. Janet Mills, is increasingly thinking about a bid against Collins.

The governor has signaled a greater openness to a bid in recent conversations with people in the state, according to a Maine Democratic operative granted anonymity to speak about sensitive party matters. Democrats in Washington are similarly growing more optimistic that Mills will run for Senate.

Mills would face the Republican incumbent Collins, in what would be another major 2026 clash.

Senate Democrats are also waiting to see whether former Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who has said he is considering whether to step back from public office or run for either Senate or governor, decides whether to launch a campaign.

Cooper’s campaign will hinge on whether his success in two gubernatorial races will translate to a Senate race, where voters consider a different set of issues and can be more partisan in their choice.

In 2016 and 2020, Cooper won gubernatorial races in North Carolina at the same time Trump also won the state. The victories were a product, at least in part, of the Democrats’ ability to convince Republican-leaning Trump voters to also support him, despite his party affiliation.

Even if winning them over again in a federal race is more difficult, Democratic strategists say they hope that Cooper’s most-well known achievement as governor, signing a Medicaid expansion in 2023, positions him well for the campaign next year, where the party is already expected to be focused on Republicans’ massive tax-and-spending-cut law that tightened eligibility requirements for the health insurance program.

“This is stuff that’s going to affect people’s daily lives,” Pearce said. “And that’s something Cooper is really good at. That’s what he did as governor, he focused on that, on how to make people’s daily lives better.”

Cooper’s arguments were bolstered by the outgoing Tillis, who has said that the reconciliation bill passed into law in July will bring deep Medicaid cuts to North Carolina.

Democrats also expect that Cooper will campaign for the seat by touting his ability to bring bipartisan common sense to Washington, taking the lessons he learned as governor and applying them to a national government most voters view as deeply dysfunctional. He’ll contrast that approach, they say, with Whatley’s long history as a partisan political operative for the North Carolina Republican Party and RNC.

Republican strategists in North Carolina say that Whatley’s campaign will directly attack Cooper’s image as a common-sense dealmaker, acknowledging that, at least for now, many of them do see the former governor that way.

“The trick is for them to convince voters that Roy Cooper is not who they think he is,” said a Republican strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

In a possible preview of the GOP’s attacks on Cooper, the National Republican Senatorial Committee released a digital ad last week criticizing him as a big believer in the liberal policy agenda, including on subjects like transgender athletes in scholastic sports and raising taxes.

The attacks will have to make inroads with voters, including those who backed Cooper in his gubernatorial campaigns, if the GOP is going to win next year, said the GOP strategist. In a tight race, they added, every vote will matter.

“No one should have any expectation that just because it’s a Cooper-Whatley race now that the playing field has been tilted to one side or the other,” the Republican said. “It’s going to be a slugfest.”

Correction: This story previously stated that Michael Whatley is the former RNC chair. He is still the chair.

Alex Roarty is a reporter at NOTUS. He was previously a reporter for McClatchy newspapers, Roll Call, and National Journal.