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On Sunday, President Joe Biden abandoned his reelection campaign, yielding to mounting pressure from Democrats in the aftermath of his disastrous June 27 debate performance. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him, which raises the question: Who might replace her?
Among the top contenders is North Carolina’s twice-elected Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, who is term-limited and will leave office in January.
Earlier this month, at a campaign event with Harris in Greensboro, Cooper said he’d had no conversations about joining the ticket. “That’s the kind of speculation we do not need right now,” he told reporters.
But that was then. With Biden out, Cooper, a 67-year-old lawyer with sharp political instincts and a well-honed moderate image, could soon ascend the national stage.
“If the president decides not to run, I see Kamala Harris and I would hope Roy Cooper,” former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean told CNN on July 18. “I think we would pick up North Carolina as a result.”
Here are 10 things to know about Cooper.
1. Cooper’s never lost an election.
Cooper, then 28, first ran for office in 1986, challenging a 12-term incumbent in the Democratic primary to represent his native Nash County in the state House. He won by a 3-1 margin. The North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research ranked him the House’s most effective freshman.
He was appointed to the state Senate in 1991 after the incumbent died in a car crash, and was re-elected four times. He was elected attorney general in 2000, defeating his Republican opponent 51 percent to 46 percent even as Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush won the state 56 percent to 43 percent. He cruised to re-election in 2004 and 2008 and ran unopposed in 2012.
Cooper rebuffed national Democrats’ invitation to run for U.S. Senate and passed on several chances to run for governor. But in 2016, he finally sought higher office, narrowly defeating Republican incumbent Gov. Pat McCrory by about 10,000 votes. He’s the only challenger to beat an incumbent governor in North Carolina’s history. In 2020, he was re-elected with 51.5 percent of the vote.
Both years, Donald Trump won North Carolina. In 2020, Cooper was the only Democratic governor to win a Trump state.
2. Cooper and Harris are friends.
Harris served as California’s attorney general from 2011 until she joined the U.S. Senate in 2017, overlapping Cooper’s tenure as AG in North Carolina. They got to know each other, and Cooper has made several campaign appearances with Harris this year.
“As governor of this state, you have been courageous, you have been fearless, you always do your work with incredible conviction, you believe in the foundational principles upon which we stand as a country, and you’ve been a dear friend to the president and me,” Harris said of Cooper at an event in March.
3. Cooper repealed HB 2 and expanded Medicaid.
Cooper’s election in 2016 owed in no small part to pushback over HB 2, the so-called “bathroom bill” McCrory signed into law that year. HB 2, which required people to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate, provoked nationwide condemnation and boycotts, costing North Carolina about $500 million in economic activity.
Soon after taking office, Cooper signed HB 142, which repealed some of HB 2’s controversial elements and eventually allowed cities to extend antidiscrimination protections to LGBTQ people. Critics said Cooper had compromised too much with the Republican legislature, but North Carolina’s moment in the culture war spotlight quickly passed.
It took Cooper nearly his entire tenure to notch his other legacy achievement.
For more than a decade, the General Assembly refused to expand Medicaid—a key component of the Affordable Care Act—though the federal government picked up 90 percent of the price tag. But Cooper persisted, and last year, North Carolina became the 41st state to expand Medicaid.
The legislation benefits about 600,000 low-income adults and the state’s struggling rural hospitals.
4. Cooper mostly played defense as governor.
Republicans have controlled the General Assembly the entire time Cooper has been governor. For his first two years and last two years, they had supermajorities that could override his vetoes. And they did.
In 2017 and 2018, Cooper vetoed 28 bills; Republicans overrode 23 of them. In 2023, after state Rep. Tricia Cotham’s party switch secured another GOP supermajority, Republicans overrode all 19 Cooper vetoes. In the middle four years, Democrats sustained 47 vetoes. So far in 2024, Cooper has vetoed five bills; Republicans will likely attempt to override them in a lame-duck session.
Throughout his tenure, Cooper has vetoed more bills—99—than all other North Carolina governors combined. (North Carolina governors didn’t have the veto until 1997; the state was the last to grant its governors that power.) He’s vetoed budgets, gun-rights legislation, energy policies, immigration crackdowns, and efforts to curtail his executive authority, among other things.
His one-man blockade had limits, and Republicans achieved most of their goals regardless. But in one key area, Cooper forced Republicans to moderate their position.
Last year, Cooper vetoed SB 20, which banned abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy. Republicans overrode that veto. But Cooper’s veto prevented them from enacting more restrictions.
As a result, abortion is more accessible in North Carolina than any other Southern state but Virginia.
5. Cooper is not an ideologue.
Throughout his nearly 40 years in North Carolina politics, Cooper has fashioned himself as a moderate, mainstream Southern Democrat. Republicans say that image is a facade: Cooper talks like a centrist but governs like a liberal.
And, indeed, Cooper has moved left with his party, more forcefully embracing issues like abortion rights and criminal justice reform. In his last years as attorney general, he also challenged the General Assembly on conservative priorities like same-sex marriage, voter ID, and HB 2.
But above all, Cooper has stressed public education and creating a thriving business environment. He was re-elected in 2020 by projecting calm confidence amid the COVID pandemic. In that sense, he’s the same Jim Hunt-style Democrat that Nash County voters sent to the legislature in 1986.
6. Cooper can play hardball.
In 2022, Cooper sent a message about party discipline to Democratic legislators by endorsing a primary challenger to state Sen. Kirk deViere.
DeViere, a moderate Democrat from Fayetteville who had narrowly won the swing seat in 2018, had voted with Republicans more than any other Democratic state senator. “Many times I stood shoulder to shoulder with the governor and leaders of my caucus, but yet I was made an example of,” deViere told The Assembly earlier this year.
Cooper’s candidate, Val Applewhite, defeated deViere in the primary and won in the fall—but only after the party spent $1.6 million defending her seat. Meanwhile, several underfunded House candidates lost razor-thin elections.
Since McCrory’s election in 2012, Cooper has been the state’s most prominent Democrat, and the party’s machinery has often served his political interests—to the chagrin of some party activists. Cooper and his heir apparent, Attorney General Josh Stein, have been elected and reelected, but the party has lost critical legislative and judicial races in recent years.
7. Cooper backed reformers over his party’s machine.
Cooper now embodies the state’s Democratic establishment. But as a young state representative in 1989, he was one of 20 Democrats who partnered with Republicans to topple four-term Democratic House Speaker Liston Ramsey, one of the state’s most powerful officials.
The bipartisan coalition forged an innovative power-sharing agreement. Like the Republicans, who were then in the minority, the Democratic faction was tired of being cut out of important legislation. The deal they made installed a different Democratic speaker, with promises that Republican bills would get hearings and Republicans would get better representation on committees.
That session, the General Assembly closed a $2 billion budget gap through a compromise of revenue increases and budget cuts. Two years later, Democrats elected a new speaker without Republicans’ help.
8. Cooper declared the accused Duke lacrosse players innocent.
In January 2007, Cooper’s office took over the prosecution of three Duke University lacrosse players who had been accused of sexually assaulting an exotic dancer who had performed at a team party.
The case had inflamed racial tensions in Durham. The lacrosse team, including the three accused players, was nearly all white. The accuser was Black. The district attorney had leveraged the case in his 2006 reelection bid, but soon faced ethics complaints.
Cooper took the prosecution amid an intense national spotlight. Three months later, he dismissed all charges against all three players.
“We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations,” Cooper said at a news conference. “Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness, we believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges.”
He added, “We have good district attorneys in North Carolina who are both tough and fair, and we need these forceful, independent prosecutors to put criminals away and protect the public, but we also need checks and balances to protect the innocent. This case shows the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor.”
60 Minutes said Cooper’s comments were “almost unheard of. He publicly and harshly rebuked a fellow law enforcement official.”
9. Cooper has deep roots in Eastern North Carolina.
Cooper grew up in rural Nash County and has the drawl to prove it. He spent summers working on his family’s tobacco farm—though, to be clear, his father was also a lawyer and Democratic Party operative who co-chaired Gov. Jim Hunt’s 1976 campaign.
In high school, Cooper played quarterback on the football team and played basketball against—and once blocked a shot by—future University of North Carolina star Phil Ford. Cooper was a prestigious Morehead Scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill and became chief justice of the student supreme court. He graduated in 1979, then earned his law degree three years later.
Around that time, Hunt appointed Cooper to two state boards and the Commission on the Future of North Carolina, which was chaired by esteemed UNC System President William Friday. He practiced law at his father’s firm for several years before running for office.
Cooper married Kristin Bernhardt, a staff attorney with the General Assembly, in 1992. They have three adult daughters.
10. Cooper is … kinda boring.
At least, that’s how the national media sees him. Cooper is a “middle aged white guy with two first names” (The New Republic); “the living, breathing antonym of controversy” (also The New Republic); “an earnest, low-key character closer to Andy Griffith” (The New York Times); and “what it would look like if a sweater designed a human” (Slate).
They’re not wrong. Cooper’s not given to soaring oratory or impassioned stemwinders. He’ll never win the Internet. He’s a self-professed “diet soda sommelier” who is obsessed with Raleigh’s professional hockey team, the Carolina Hurricanes.
Should Harris choose him to be her veep, Roy Asberry Cooper III would probably not be introduced at the Democratic National Convention by a shirt-ripping professional wrestler. Maybe, for Democrats eager to draw a contrast with the frenetic Trump show, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Jeffrey Billman reports on politics and the law for The Assembly. Email him at jeffrey@theassemblync.com.