Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper won Tuesday’s Senate race, defeating Republican Michael Whatley and succeeding retiring Sen. Thom Tillis.
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Democrat Roy Cooper won North Carolina’s U.S. Senate seat on Tuesday, defeating Republican Michael Whatley to flip a key GOP-held position in the battle for Senate control.
Cooper’s victory marks his seventh statewide electoral win and his first Democratic Senate election since 2008. He will succeed Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who opted not to seek a third term after clashing with President Donald Trump over Tillis’s “big beautiful bill.”
In the closing stretch of the campaign, Cooper, 69, told voters: “I saw this administration take root, and I’d see two or three things happening almost every single day that reached a new level of chaos, any one of which we could talk about for hours,” adding, “And I said, ‘Man, I’ve got to do something about this.’” Whatley, meanwhile, tied his campaign closely to Trump, saying ahead of a metro Charlotte rally with Trump days after mail ballots were distributed: “I am honored that we are going to have the greatest president of our lifetime, Donald J. Trump, here.”
The race reflected an election map Cooper has navigated before: North Carolina backed Trump in the last three presidential elections, yet Cooper won the governorship in 2016 and 2020 in the same election cycle. The account of the campaign also pointed to Cooper’s strategy of drawing support from Black voters, younger voters and more liberal white voters while still attracting independents and some conservative rural and small-town voters.
On policy, Whatley embraced the “big beautiful bill,” including tax breaks on overtime pay, tip income and Social Security benefits, while Cooper argued to voters that people were feeling the effects at gas pumps, grocery stores and in access to healthcare and affordable housing. Cooper said the Medicaid expansion achieved while he was governor was a demonstration of his priorities, and he also focused on maintaining a more moderate identity while responding to Republican attacks, including claims he was weak on crime and disagreements over Hurricane Helene’s impact in western North Carolina.
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