Whatley, Cooper campaigns for US Senate hit ground running

If North Carolinians hoped for a respite from political ads for a few months, they will be sorely disappointed by the US Senate contest. After early victories on primary Election Night, former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley got right to work Wednesday.

Cooper and Whatley were always the presumptive nominees for the US Senate seat, from which Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is retiring after high-profile disagreements with President Donald Trump, including over Medicaid funding cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Cooper garnered 92% of the Democratic vote and Whatley won 65% of the Republican vote in their six-person primaries. Republican Don Brown was the only other candidate to put up a semblance of a fight Tuesday night, earning 16% of the primary vote.

During the next eight months, each of the two primary winners will face a different series of challenges.

While Whatley, a Watauga County native who previously chaired both the Republican National Committee and the North Carolina Republican Party, may be extremely powerful in Republican circles, he isn’t a household name. According to a Republican-sponsored January poll, 43% of surveyed voters have no opinion on Whatley. Only 15% said the same about Cooper.

To win, Whatley will have to define himself to voters, particularly North Carolina’s unaffiliated voters, who make up 39% of the electorate.

Cooper, on the other hand, is a familiar name. As a 14-year state legislator, four-term attorney general and two-term governor, the Nash County native has had plenty of opportunities to introduce himself to voters. However, he also has a lengthy track record to defend against his opponents’ criticisms.

Already, powerful state and national donors have poured money into the race. Political watchers predict the race to be the most expensive US Senate race in history, with upwards of a billion dollars in spending by the time Nov. 3 rolls around.

Whatley campaign puts crime at forefront

Before taking the podium, Whatley made the rounds chatting with members of law enforcement at the North Carolina Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #9 in Charlotte.

The day after clenching his party’s nomination, Whatley previewed the next eight months for reporters. During the next stage of his campaign, he said he will be everywhere: in every county and every town, making sure voters know him and his message.

The race will be one of contrasts between him and Cooper on tax policy, regulatory policy and affordability, Whatley said. But first, he will talk about Cooper’s track record on crime.

“The fact is, the highest, most important function of any government, whether it’s a state government, a local government or the federal government, is protecting its citizens,” Whatley said.

Wednesday, Whatley positioned Cooper as a “soft-on-crime” Democrat who has and will promote policies that keep criminals out of prison and on the streets.

“Roy Cooper, as the governor of North Carolina, is the one who marched with (Black Lives Matter) and Antifa while our cities were burning down,” he said. “He is the one who signed an executive order to create a task force which recommended cashless bail and pretrial release and pushed those policies onto every judge and every magistrate and to every court across this state, and set up a revolving door that put criminals — violent criminals — back on the streets again and again and again.”

The Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice, formed after Black Lives Matter protests happened across the country, did recommend cashless bail for those charged with Class I, II and III misdemeanors who were not deemed threats to public safety. However, the recommendation was never implemented by the legislature and Cooper has said he never supported cashless bail.

In September 2025, as part of the lead-up to the state legislature’s crime omnibus bill, Iryna’s Law, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger told reporters that while many of those task force recommendations were never enacted, they “reflect an attitude on policing, on an attitude on criminal justice, an attitude on how things ought to be taking place.”

“And those attitudes, in many respects, are the things that inform the kinds of decisions that were made by the magistrate in this case and by other magistrates that are of the same political will,” he continued.

Whatley also referred to a settlement Cooper made in 2021 after being sued by civil rights groups over the spread of COVID-19 in the state’s prisons. In the settlement, Cooper was instructed by the courts to give early release to 3,500 prisoners.

In campaign advertisements and in speeches, Whatley and his supporters have repeatedly blamed Cooper for the fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on the Charlotte transit system last August.

They’ve claimed that Zarutska’s killer, DeCarlos Brown Jr., was one of the prisoners Cooper released early. But that is not true.

While Brown Jr.’s prisoner number was listed in settlement documents, he was actually released five months before Cooper agreed to the settlement. According to a North Carolina PolitiFact fact check, he was listed in the court-ordered settlement as a way for Cooper to avoid actually releasing 3,500 prisoners, and instead count some already-released prisoners toward that total.

Regardless, Whatley plans to push for a federal version of North Carolina’s Iryna’s Law as one of his first acts in Congress.

“I will back the blue, and I will support them, and I will make sure that they have the resources that they need to carry out their missions across the state,” he said, referring to police. “And I will make sure that we have federal sentencing guidelines that are going to put criminals behind bars.”

Whatley has the backing of aspects of the law enforcement community, including an endorsement from the North Carolina Troopers’ Association. At the press conference, Charlotte-Mecklenburg FOP Lodge #9 President Daniel Redford, State FOP President Chet Effler, Iredell County Sheriff Darren Campbell, Cabarrus County Sheriff Dan Shaw, Cleveland County Sheriff Alan Norman and retired state trooper Richard May stood behind Whatley and offered their support.

Shaw said they need better policies that support community safety.

“We need the leadership that is going to put the families of our state first, their safety first,” he said. “We have battled the early release of prisoners from state prisons. We’ve battled very lax pre-trial detention policies that put criminals back on the street where law enforcement officers are faced with a revolving door of arresting and re-arresting the same offenders.”

Cooper wants to ‘make stuff cost less’

If Whatley’s strategy is redefining Cooper’s record in a negative light, part of Cooper’s strategy is connecting Whatley to President Donald Trump’s policies, especially his response to natural disasters.

Trump has endorsed Whatley in the race, and named him “recovery czar” after Hurricane Helene struck Western North Carolina.

At a Raleigh Brewing campaign event Wednesday morning, Cooper launched a statewide tour focusing on his plans to “make stuff cost less” if elected to the US Senate.

“Fixing this problem of food and grocery prices starts at the source,” Cooper said. “Our farmers, we’ve got to do more to support them and to stop these chaotic tariffs that are making their jobs so much harder.”

He would fight to reduce the cost of health care, just like he fought for Medicaid expansion in North Carolina in 2023, he said. Rising utilities, housing and childcare expenses are also on his mind, but the first agenda item Wednesday was food and grocery costs.

Gov signs sexual assault reforms into law — Gov. Roy Cooper signs a package of reforms to NC sexual assault laws in November 2019, during a visit to a domestic violence shelter in Greensboro. Kate Martin / Carolina Public Press

Cooper invited Wilson County farmer Pender Sharp to the Raleigh event. Sharp said the current federal economic policy is making it harder for farmers like him to make a profit and feed the world. While there have always been ups and downs in farming, he said this time is different.

“Just like all farmers have, we’ve had good prices, bad prices, droughts, floods and good weather years,” Sharp said. “But never in my history as a farmer have I seen so many wrong decisions coming out of Washington — tariffs, trade wars, things that are destroying American agriculture, and especially right here in North Carolina.”

Another element of the fight against high grocery bills will be to limit grocery store mergers that give already-powerful corporations a monopoly over prices, Cooper said. He also plans to ensure corporations aren’t using consumers’ personal data against them to charge higher prices.

Wake County educator and mother Stephanie Walker said her family’s purse strings have tightened since Trump took office.

“I’m an educator, and I love what I do,” she said. “Every single day, I get to wake up and I know that I’m going to make a difference. But right now, rising prices from childcare to groceries are causing my paycheck to shrink.”

Democrats turned out in large numbers for North Carolina’s primary election. Nearly 42% of registered Democrats showed up to the polls, while just 28% of Republicans and 30% of unaffiliated voters did the same.

That proves to Christyna Thompson, press secretary for the Democratic Senate Majority PAC, that connecting the dots between Trump’s policies and Republican candidates is working.

“The cost and chaos message cuts through with exactly the voters we’re trying to win,” she said.

Thompson is confident that Cooper’s record speaks for itself. So is he.

Wednesday, Cooper spoke of his ability to work across the aisle to lower costs, recruit good-paying jobs to North Carolina and hold criminals accountable as a former attorney general.

“I’ve taken on child predators and drug dealers and worked to keep our community safe,” Cooper said. “And I took on the big corporations that are ripping off North Carolina families. I took on Medicaid fraud and brought many people to justice.”

But his supporters aren’t taking any chances, Thompson said.

“We’re leaving no stone unturned, and we’re not going to act as if North Carolina is sure-footed territory,” she said. “It’s a competitive state. It always is. And Whatley, he’s going to have the money behind him. He’s going to have the national Republican apparatus behind him.”

Big spending

Cooper and Whatley have massive funding forces in their respective corners.

According to FEC data, Whatley raised $6.27 million from July 2025 to mid-February. He’s spent $3.75 million during the primary, leaving him with about $2.52 million heading into the general election cycle.

On the other hand, Cooper has raised more than $21 million, and spent $6.8 million of it so far. Since none of his primary opponents mounted serious campaigns, nearly all of that money has gone toward defending his record and negatively defining Whatley.

Cooper’s war chest is the fourth-highest of all Senate candidates this cycle, per the FEC. As Thompson put it, Cooper has “more money than God at this point.”

Both candidates’ donors include a laundry list of political action committees, party support and thousands of individual donors. That is sure to continue throughout the spring, summer and fall as political stakeholders fight for one of the few truly competitive US Senate races this cycle.

For voters, that means more ads, starting now.