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In January, Gov. Roy Cooper went to the Nash County elementary school he’d attended in the 1960s to declare 2024 the “Year of Public Schools.” He denounced the Republican-led General Assembly’s “10-year neglect” of public education and urged lawmakers to pay teachers more and stop funding private school vouchers.
On a damp, gray Tuesday morning last week, Cooper took the stage of the colorful auditorium in a brand-new Greensboro elementary school and conceded that he hadn’t persuaded most legislators.
“I came into office eight years ago hoping to reach consensus with them about the importance of public education, and we have made some progress,” he told the small, friendly audience. Cooper took credit for pushing Republicans to raise teacher pay by 19 percent over that period. But he said he couldn’t counter a “false narrative that our public schools are failing.”
As a result, he said, school funding hasn’t kept pace with other states. Too many teacher positions were left unfilled. There weren’t enough counselors and nurses. School construction lagged, too, because the legislature refused to consider a statewide bond referendum.
The biggest “missed opportunity,” according to Cooper: “Just last month, the legislature gave $463 million of your tax dollars to higher-income people” in the form of vouchers.
The Greensboro event kicked off a weeklong series of speeches designed to frame Cooper’s legacy for posterity, culminating in a farewell address today in Nash County. In recent weeks, his office also invited reporters from outlets across the state—including The Assembly—for interviews.
“These last eight years have been the best of my life,” Cooper told me last Thursday in the Executive Mansion library. “We’ve made a lot of progress toward my CEO mission, which I established from day one, and that’s to make a North Carolina where people are better educated, where they’re healthier, where they have more money in their pockets, and they have opportunities to have lives of purpose and abundance.
“Everything we’ve done has been toward that goal, and I think that we have made real progress toward it.”
Cooper notched significant victories. He signed laws that repealed HB 2, the controversial “bathroom bill,” and put North Carolina’s utilities on a path toward carbon neutrality. Last year, Republican lawmakers agreed to expand Medicaid to 600,000 low-income residents, a goal Cooper pursued from his first days in office.
But for all his accomplishments, his governorship might be remembered as much for what he tried to stop. Since taking office in 2017, Cooper has vetoed 104 bills—almost three times the total of all other governors combined since North Carolina created the veto in 1997. Republicans, who had legislative supermajorities for four of Cooper’s eight years, have overridden 52 of his vetoes, another record.
No governor in modern state history has faced a legislature so bent on thwarting his every move—or seen his role so often reduced to trying to thwart his adversaries.
“‘Things could have been much worse’ is not exactly the most exciting legacy, but it’s an extremely important legacy,” said Asher Hildebrand, a former Democratic operative who now teaches politics at Duke University.
Throughout his nearly 40 years in public life, Cooper, 67, has ranked among the state’s most popular and consequential leaders. He’s never lost an election, and many Democrats hope he’s not done yet. But even if the congenial, soft-spoken governor fades into the sunset, his shadow will loom over North Carolina politics for decades to come.
Coop Rising
The political career of Roy Asberry Cooper III—“Coop,” he was called then—launched on Halloween 1985, when the Rocky Mount Telegram reported that the 28-year-old lawyer planned to challenge state Rep. Allen Barbee in the Democratic primary (at the time, the only election that mattered there).
Barbee had served 11 terms in the House and held a top leadership position. While Cooper came from a connected family—his father co-chaired Gov. Jim Hunt’s 1976 campaign—unseating him was an audacious gambit.
“We needed someone who was going to be aggressive in representing Eastern North Carolina in really pushing public schools,” Cooper said. “I knew that I could lose. In fact, I had a number of people who told me that you can’t beat an incumbent like that.”
Cooper didn’t just beat him; he won 76 percent of the vote.
“‘Things could have been much worse’ is not exactly the most exciting legacy, but it’s an extremely important legacy.”
Asher Hildebrand, former Democratic operative and Duke professor
In Cooper’s first term, the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research ranked him the House’s most effective freshman. In his second, he joined a bipartisan coalition to topple Speaker Liston Ramsey, one of the state’s most powerful Democrats. The group believed Ramsey and his lieutenants had been in power too long and were quashing dissent.
Cooper was appointed to the state Senate in 1991 and rose through his party’s ranks, eventually becoming the majority leader. In 1996, he spearheaded a constitutional amendment to give the governor a veto, albeit—fatefully for Cooper—one the legislature could override with a three-fifths majority instead of the more standard two-thirds.
He also led the Senate’s redistricting effort after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a congressional district as a racial gerrymander in 1996. The Supreme Court ultimately permitted the Democrats’ revision—which the liberal Justice Paul Stephens described as a “bizarre configuration”—as an acceptable political, rather than racial, gerrymander. At the time, according to a 1997 editorial in the Greensboro News and Record, Cooper rejected calls to create an independent redistricting commission.
Cooper was elected attorney general in 2000, defeating his Republican opponent by five points. He was easily re-elected three times, even as the state shifted rightward. Republicans claimed control of the legislature in 2010, the governor’s office in 2012, and both U.S. Senate seats by 2014.
Deliberative by nature, Cooper passed on multiple opportunities to run for higher office. He finally made his move in 2016, challenging Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.
No incumbent governor had ever lost in North Carolina. But McCrory, an establishment conservative from Charlotte, had a strained relationship with both his party’s base and Republican legislative leaders. As the contest took shape, he was also battered by the fallout over HB 2, which had generated national boycotts.
The General Assembly passed a law that forbade municipalities from enacting nondiscrimination ordinances and required people to use public bathrooms associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. In response, film companies halted production in North Carolina, musicians canceled concerts, the NBA moved its All-Star Game, and the NCAA and ACC relocated tournaments.
Still, Cooper’s campaign was risky.
“Defeating an incumbent governor is the hardest thing to do in electoral politics,” said Morgan Jackson, the consultant behind Cooper’s political machine. “I don’t care what state you’re in, what party you’re in, defeating an incumbent governor is hard because the governor has the bully pulpit.”
Republicans made a strong showing in 2016. They claimed legislative supermajorities (thanks in part to an aggressive gerrymander) and all five Court of Appeals races. President Donald Trump won the state, and U.S. Sen. Richard Burr was re-elected.
The governor’s race was the tightest in modern history—and the closest shave of Cooper’s career. He prevailed by just 10,277 votes, or 0.22 percentage points.
Republicans immediately set out to show the governor-elect who was in charge. Before Cooper was sworn in, they held a special session to seize control of the state elections board and give themselves a say in his cabinet. North Carolina’s governor was already one the weakest executives in the country; Republicans wanted to make him weaker.
Though the state Supreme Court later blocked the elections-board overhaul, the special session set the tone for the next eight years.
“To all of a sudden see this power grab was deeply concerning and disappointing,” Cooper said. “But I’ll tell you what. A good, strong governor who’s a leader can overcome those roadblocks that the legislature puts in place. Because people pay attention to the governor.”
Power Struggles
Cooper was sworn in just after midnight on January 1, 2017, “standing amidst the rubble of the broad, sweeping, discriminatory House Bill 2,” as he described it.
HB 2 was gone two months later, replaced by a bipartisan compromise that angered many of Cooper’s progressive allies but cauterized the economic wound. It wasn’t a kumbaya moment, however. Republicans accused Cooper of sabotaging previous attempts to repeal HB 2 for political gain. Cooper accused Republicans of moving the goalposts.
By then, other fights were brewing.
After he took office, Cooper tried to unilaterally expand Medicaid access, but Republicans successfully sued to block him. Cooper and Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein—now the governor-elect—also dropped legal efforts to revive a voter-ID law, which Senate leader Phil Berger called an “unethical stunt.”
Cooper vetoed 28 bills in his first two years, including budgets and election changes. The legislature overrode 23 of them.
The blue wave of 2018 ended the supermajorities. Over the next four years, Democrats sustained all 47 of Cooper’s vetoes, blocking Republican attempts to force sheriffs to assist immigration officials, limit Cooper’s emergency COVID powers, and loosen gun laws.
They also sustained Cooper’s veto of the Republicans’ 2019-20 budget, which Cooper argued lacked sufficient raises for teachers and failed to expand Medicaid. A rancorous stalemate ensued.
“I was surprised that there weren’t more attempts at grand bargains and bipartisan legislation,” said John Hood, president of the conservative John William Pope Foundation, recalling Cooper’s record of working with Republicans as a legislator.
Cooper blames polarization and gerrymandering. “When there were deep-blue districts and deep-red districts, without political incentive for them to try to find consensus, that’s made it harder,” he said.
Representatives for Senate leader Phil Berger and outgoing House Speaker Tim Moore did not respond to requests for comment.
Cooper coasted to re-election in 2020, but his leverage evaporated in early 2023. Republican gains in the 2022 midterms, as well as state Rep. Tricia Cotham’s defection, restored the GOP supermajorities. They overrode 29 consecutive vetoes, restricting abortion, banning diversity initiatives, prohibiting transgender minors from obtaining puberty blockers, and (on their third attempt) compelling sheriffs to cooperate with immigration agents.
Republicans also vastly expanded the state’s school voucher program. Originally intended for low-income and disabled students, the legislature made funds for private schools available to anyone, allotting nearly $5 billion over the next decade. Republicans said vouchers gave parents the freedom to direct their children’s education. Cooper vehemently objected, to no use.
After Democrats won races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and schools superintendent last month, Republicans used a hurricane relief bill to curtail their powers—one last time, over Cooper’s veto.
“You’ve always had wars between the legislators and the governor,” said Carter Wrenn, a longtime Republican operative. “Since you’ve got Republicans in charge of the legislature, and Democrats in charge of the governor, it’s really gotten more brutal. It’s always been a bit of a plague, but it’s certainly more so now.”
Stein, the incoming governor, will head into 2025 with Republicans one House seat shy of veto-proof supermajorities. Because the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court greenlit partisan gerrymandering last year, Democrats will struggle to escape deep minority status during his administration.
Cooper now believes the state needs to rethink how it draws legislative and congressional districts.
“Independent redistricting commissions in other states work,” Cooper said. “We have to try to find a way to do that. … We need more purple districts. We need more people with the political incentive to find consensus.”
I pointed out that Democrats sang a different tune when they controlled redistricting.
“Sure,” Cooper replied. “But now, redistricting is so technologically diabolical. They can predict so much better how areas are going to vote, and they have used it to the utmost. And I’m not sure that any state legislature in the country has been as diabolical as North Carolina’s.”
‘Bleeds for the State’
Two-term Republican Gov. Jim Martin completed Interstate 40 and pushed for tax hikes to fund schools. His successor, Democrat Jim Hunt, left office in 2001 as the “education governor.” Mike Easley, the Democratic governor from 2001 to 2009, created the state education lottery and a pre-kindergarten program for at-risk kids.
Cooper said that a generation from now, he hopes he’s remembered for “the working families’ bill of the decade.”
Last year, North Carolina became the 40th state to expand Medicaid, making the federal insurance program available to almost 600,000 low-income residents. Cooper was the driving force.
Republicans had fought the expansion for a decade. They passed a law in 2013 forbidding governors from expanding the program, then sued Cooper in 2017 when he tried to do so anyway. Budget negotiations deadlocked over the expansion in 2019.
But by the early 2020s, opposition cooled. Congressional Republicans’ attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act—which funded 90 percent of the expansion—fizzled. The state shifted its Medicaid program to a managed-care system, which Republicans found more palatable. Struggling rural hospitals grew increasingly desperate for Medicaid funds.
Cooper kept pushing. Republicans acquiesced.
“It was him constantly emphasizing, constantly arguing the case for Medicaid expansion, and the Republican leaders changing their minds,” Hood said. “Whoever’s going to write his biography will certainly describe Medicaid expansion as by far the most important policy accomplishment of the Cooper administration.”
Cooper said he’s “done that a lot with this legislature that really doesn’t get much attention because the focus is always on where we disagree and always on the conflict.”
Besides Medicaid expansion, there’s the energy bill that unanimously passed both chambers in 2021. The law encourages utilities to reduce carbon emissions by 70 percent by 2030 and eliminate them by 2050.
“When there were deep-blue districts and deep-red districts, without political incentive for them to try to find consensus, that’s made it harder.”
Gov. Roy Cooper
The legislature also funded grants Cooper started to help students attend and finish community college. Lawmakers extended an executive order that gave paid parental leave to cabinet agency employees to public school teachers as well. The two branches used federal pandemic funds to refurbish racetracks and improve broadband internet access.
Cooper says the General Assembly also gave him room to cut economic development deals that lured businesses to the state.
“I think I was the first governor they gave performance-based incentives, and trusted us to use it,” he said. “They didn’t give Gov. McCrory that much.”
The result, Cooper says, is that North Carolina has added 640,000 jobs in the last eight years, is the country’s fifth-fastest-growing state, and is consistently ranked among the best states to do business.
It’s hard to pinpoint how much credit belongs to the governor. After all, the legislature crafts the tax, regulatory, and incentive policies companies use to make decisions.
“I just don’t see a whole lot of evidence that has to do with the personal salesmanship,” Hood said.
But it doesn’t hurt that Cooper is a good salesman—a small-town guy who “just bleeds for the state,” said Pope “Mac” McCorkle, a Duke University professor of the practice who used to be a Democratic consultant.
Cooper also projects moderation, McCorkle said. “You’re not going to have to be dealing with the culture wars. And I think that’s very, very reassuring to businesses.”
‘Should Be a Scandal’
I asked Cooper, if he could go back in time, what he would tell himself before he was sworn in. He leaned toward me and whispered, “There’s a pandemic coming.” He added, “That was not on my checklist of challenges.”
Cooper responded assertively to the coronavirus in early 2020, closing schools, issuing stay-at-home orders, restricting bars and restaurants, limiting public gatherings, and requiring masks. Businesses said the restrictions were harming them, and Republicans accused Cooper of abusing emergency powers.
“We had some of the lowest numbers of COVID deaths and job losses per capita,” Cooper said. “North Carolina emerged early from the pandemic in a strong economic position, so I think we did it in the right, even-handed way.”
In 2020, North Carolina had the 13th-lowest rate of COVID deaths—similar to Florida, which lifted its pandemic restrictions relatively early. A year later, North Carolina slipped to the 29th-lowest COVID death rate, although it was better than Florida and most other anti-masking states.
Cooper’s political standing never suffered. That year, he won re-election by 4.5 points, defeating a Republican who promised to repeal mask mandates.
Criticisms of the Cooper administration’s disaster response similarly failed to stick, though Republicans appear to have pushed out the woman in charge of rebuilding after hurricanes Matthew and Florence.
ReBuild NC, the agency in charge of the response, has amassed a $221 million deficit, even as 1,600 hurricane victims continue to wait for help. Last week, a state audit found that the Hurricane Florence relief effort lacked proper oversight.
Cooper said federal money took years to come and was “covered in red tape.” He also said his team insisted that the new homes be built in “a more resilient way. That took a little longer.”
“Overall, we repaired or rebuilt more than 13,000 houses, and hundreds of roads and bridges and public buildings,” Cooper said. “They are building more than 100 houses a month. They are working very hard to get people back into their homes. And a lot of lessons are learned from this that I believe can be carried on to the Hurricane Helene recovery.”
Republicans believe Cooper should have paid a steep price for the problems.
“It’s a disgrace what’s happened in the eastern part of the state,” incoming House Speaker Destin Hall told reporters last week. “It should be a national scandal. In my opinion, if the governor were a Republican, it would be a national scandal.”
Next month, Cooper will leave office with something almost no other North Carolina politician can claim.
“He’s managed to be more favorable than unfavorable in an age when that doesn’t happen a lot,” said Wrenn, the GOP operative.
What Cooper Knows
The secret to Cooper’s popularity—and the reason punches that might have felled other politicians haven’t landed—isn’t complicated. People like him, even if they don’t like his policies.
“He’s the last of the old-school Democrat governors,” Wrenn said. “Roy is one of those fellows that if you don’t agree with him, you don’t automatically dislike him. And that you don’t see much anymore.”
Jackson, Cooper’s political consultant, said he saw that dynamic in focus groups.
“He’s managed to be more favorable than unfavorable in an age when that doesn’t happen a lot.”
Carter Wrenn, GOP operative
“We would talk to people all the time who would say, ‘I don’t agree with him on this issue or that issue,’” he said. “‘But I think he cares deeply about North Carolina, and he’s doing the best he can, and he is trying to do the best for everyone.’”
Cooper’s popularity might itself be one of his most enduring legacies. He’s been a bridge between the Hunt-era Democrats who once ruled the state and the party’s more urban, liberal incarnation, and he proved that statewide Democrats can still win here.
As other Southern states turned dark red, North Carolina remained purple. Cooper is a reason why.
“Governors are very important to political parties,” Hood said. “That’s one of the reasons why Republicans, as successful as they’ve been, they’ve been having some challenges in North Carolina sort of becoming the next Florida or whatever, because they just haven’t held a governorship long enough.”
The question is whether future Democrats can replicate his success. Cooper is, in a sense, idiosyncratic. He was the product of a political machine with roots in tobacco country, a small-town guy who navigated progressive politics with a Southern drawl.
“I’ve continued to hold on to my core values, but I’ve adapted to changes that have occurred,” Cooper said. “I mean, technology has changed everything, and having to deal with a more extreme partisanship has been difficult because I’ve spent much of my public life working to find consensus and moving the ball forward.”
Cooper said he’s not sure what’s next. He passed on being considered for Kamala Harris’ vice presidential nominee earlier this year—“I think it was the right thing for me to do at the time,” he said—and he doesn’t think he would have helped her win.
Many Democrats hope he’ll challenge two-term Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis in 2026. Cooper said that’s “certainly an option that’s on the table.” But for now, he’s noncommittal.
“I’ve got as much energy as I ever have had,” he said. “But I have promised myself, my wife, and my family that I’m going to take a couple of months after I leave office to clear my mind and think about what I want to do.”
If he runs, Jackson said, Cooper will have “favorable numbers and a relationship with voters that any politician in the state would kill to have. And his ability to connect with voters, to talk to them, his built-up relationship with them over time, is real.”
Cooper said the key to that relationship—and his advice to the next generation of aspiring North Carolina leaders—is listening.
“I spend time talking with everyday people and hearing what they have to say,” he said, “and even If I don’t necessarily agree with it, being able to reflect on what they are feeling and telling me helps guide my actions.”
Jeffrey Billman reports on politics and the law for The Assembly. Email him at jeffrey@theassemblync.com.