North Carolina’s competitive Senate race came into shape on Tuesday, with former Democratic governor Roy Cooper and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley winning their respective primaries.
Cooper, a former two-term governor, is widely seen among North Carolina’s Democrats as their best chance at flipping a Republican-controlled seat, held by retiring US senator Thom Tillis, a conservative who has turned hard against the Trump administration on its handling of healthcare, defense and the Epstein file disclosures.
For Republicans, Michael Whatley, who is also a former state GOP chairman and was endorsed by Donald Trump, led the field in polling, with his closest competitor, representative Don Brown, in the single digits.
Polling for a head-to-head matchup between Cooper and Whatley shows Cooper with a 10-point lead. That reflects Cooper’s long relationship with North Carolina voters and a sharply negative turn against the president among those voters.
A poll commissioned last month from Change Research shows 50% of North Carolina voters strongly disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, while about 60% believe their income is falling behind the cost of living and three-quarters saying that inflation and rising costs make them feel stressed.
In Beaufort county on Tuesday, North Carolina voters repeatedly brought up affordability and the economy. While her husband raised concerns about immigration and LGBTQ+ issues, Lisa Grubbs, a registered Republican, said her biggest concerns are healthcare and affordability.
“I think they [the federal government] could have done something a little bit different with some of the things they cut, like Medicaid,” she said. “There are people who are on fixed incomes. There are people just getting by. The price of living goes up, but their income is not going up.”
Kelly Burke, an unaffiliated voter who voted in the Democratic primary, said the economy was his chief concern.
“The economic issues become very severe because we’re dealing with a fixed income. That’s the biggest thing to me,” he said. “Second is the instability and vulnerability that we have in this divided political climate. The unpredictability of the current situation is untenable. We can’t wait for the midterms and can’t wait for the next three years [of Trump’s term] to pass.”
A Democrat hasn’t won a Senate race in usually competitive North Carolina since 2008, but national GOP campaign strategists said Cooper makes the seat more difficult to hold.
Cooper hasn’t lost a North Carolina election going back to first running for the state House in the mid-1980s. But Democrats haven’t always translated their state government success to winning federal offices in the closely divided state.
Some on the right expressed concerns with Trump’s endorsement of Whatley.
“The president made a horrible mistake forcing Whatley on us,” said Brant Clifton, who publishes the Daily Haymaker, a conservative news site in North Carolina.
Whatley has been closely connected to Tillis over the years, which sullies him among voters for whom Tillis has become unpopular, Clifton said.
He said: “Trump spends a lot of time talking about how bad Tillis sucks and expressing his anger at Tillis, but here he is. He’s got the RNC working to shove Mike Whatley down our throats, but Tom Tillis and his wife are responsible for elevating Whatley out of obscurity to the state Republican party chairmanship.”
In other elections being held in the state on Tuesday, the choices for many North Carolina voters have been constrained by mid-decade redistricting, which widened the partisan advantage in several House seats to reduce the likelihood of Democratic gains.
Incumbent Democratic representative Don Davis, first elected in 2022, represents a district that had been majority-Black and safely Democratic for decades. Legislators redrew the district in 2025 to include significantly more Republican voters. Analysts believe the district now leans Republican based on historical voting patterns. Five Republican candidates are running in the primary Tuesday.
North Carolina’s fourth district in the Research Triangle area is overwhelmingly Democratic; the primary will likely determine the winner in November. That seat has become a nationalized primary battle between the incumbent, Valerie Foushee, and Durham county commissioner Nida Allam, who has framed herself as the more progressive choice.
Outside groups have spent more than $4m in the contest, making it one of the most expensive primaries this year. The American Priorities Super Pac has spent more than half a million dollars to highlight Allam’s opposition to military aid to Israel, while the Article One Pac – whose donors are associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) – has spent about $600,000 in support of Foushee. Political groups tied to the AI industry have also backed Foushee, messaging about “sensible AI regulation”.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
