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- Former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s Senate race against Republican Michael Whatley is one of Democrats’ best chances to flip a GOP-held seat in 2026.
- Democrats have not won a presidential or U.S. Senate race in North Carolina since 2008, even as they have won the governor’s race in each of the past three presidential election years.
- The race will test whether North Carolina’s split-ticket tradition can survive national attention on Senate races that will determine control of Washington.
Roy Cooper, left, former governor of North Carolina and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate for North Carolina, and Michael Whatley, former chair of the Republican National Committee and Republican U.S. Senate candidate for North Carolina.Al Drago | Shelby Tauber | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Every few years, North Carolina offers Democrats the same bargain: spend here with election dollars, organize campaigns here and believe this time will be different.
The state gives them reasons to hope. Growth is reshaping its suburbs. Urban centers like Raleigh, Charlotte and the Research Triangle are producing more Democratic votes. Statewide races remain close.
Then, in the contests that decide power in Washington, North Carolina usually turns Democrats down.
That contradiction is now central to the fight for Senate control in 2026 when every competitive seat could matter in deciding the next congressional majority.
Democrats’ narrow path back to a majority runs through a handful of Republican-held seats, and few are more consequential than the one in the Tar Heel State. Former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is facing Republican Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chair and a close ally of President Donald Trump, for the open seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Thom Tillis.
Democrats have not won a presidential or U.S. Senate race in North Carolina since 2008. Republicans have held the line through competitive election cycles, expensive campaigns and repeated predictions that demographic change was about to tip the state left.
And yet Democrats have won the governor’s races in each of the past three presidential cycles.
The same electorate that handed Trump a 3.2 percentage point win in 2024 gave Democrat Josh Stein, who was running against Republican nominee Mark Robinson, a 14-point win in the governor’s race that same day. Robinson had faced calls to take himself out of the race after controversial statements he’d made about topics including civil and women’s rights surfaced. The state’s 10 elected executive offices, known as the Council of State, are split evenly between five Democrats and five Republicans.
“It is in North Carolina’s DNA, just split tickets in a way it isn’t the same in other states,” said Christopher Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University who is not related to Roy Cooper. “Where the rest of the South went from overwhelmingly Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican — and then some states, like Virginia and Georgia, came back — North Carolina was never as Democratic as its Southern neighbors.”
“Senate control could come down to North Carolina,” Christopher Cooper said.
Roy Cooper, former governor of North Carolina and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate for North Carolina, during a “Make Things Cost Less” campaign kickoff event at Clouds Brewing on March 4, 2026, in Raleigh, North Carolina.Al Drago | Getty Images
Nationalization’s impact
North Carolina’s history of split tickets goes back generations. In 1972, while Democrats still dominated much of the South, the state elected its first Republican governor in decades. It has long judged Raleigh and Washington by different rules.
“North Carolina Democrats have won federal elections when they’ve made the race about North Carolina. Republicans win when they make it about national Democrats,” said Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College. “That tension is the whole ballgame in 2026.”
Voters still judge Democrats differently in races for governor, attorney general and other state offices, where campaigns can focus on competence, schools, storms, Medicaid, jobs and local roots, Christopher Cooper said.
A Senate race is harder to localize. The office is inherently national: The winner helps decide which party controls the chamber, which judges get confirmed, how much power the president has and which agenda reaches the floor.
“A Senate race becomes about party control almost immediately,” Christopher Cooper said. “Even in North Carolina, a Senate candidate cannot fully escape Washington because Washington is the job.”
Republicans have understood that dynamic for years, said Eric Heberlig, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
“The question Republicans will frame this as is not whether voters liked Roy Cooper as governor,” Heberlig said. “It is whether they want another Democrat helping Chuck Schumer control the Senate.”
That argument turns Cooper’s biggest strength — his distinct statewide brand — into a secondary issue. If the race is about Washington control, Republicans are on stronger ground.
“North Carolinians may have voted for Roy Cooper as governor, but they have rejected Democrats running for president and the Senate because they often are not as wanting of the national Democratic agenda,” Heberlig said.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley gestures as he speaks during the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena, in Washington, Jan. 20, 2025.Angela Weiss | Afp | Getty Images
Demographic shifts
Democrats have also spent more than a decade betting North Carolina’s growth would make it look more like Virginia: increasingly suburban, diverse, college-educated and Democratic.
Parts of that theory have come true. But not enough to overcome Republican strength elsewhere in the state.
North Carolina’s population reached 11.2 million in 2025, making it the nation’s ninth-largest state, according to the Census Bureau. Since April 2020, the state has added roughly 757,000 residents — about 395 people a day, according to the Office of State Budget and Management. From July 2024 to July 2025, it ranked first nationally for domestic migration, with a net gain of about 84,000 residents from other states, according to the OSBM.
That growth has strengthened Democrats in Wake, Mecklenburg and Durham counties, while once-Republican-friendly suburbs have grown more competitive, especially among college-educated voters and younger professionals.
The 2024 presidential race showed the limits of that growth. Former Vice President Kamala Harris ran up large margins in Democratic strongholds including Wake, Mecklenburg and Buncombe counties. Trump still won the state by more than 180,000 votes.
That’s partly because North Carolina’s urban shift runs into its rural scale.
As of the 2020 Census, North Carolina had nearly 3.5 million rural residents — second only to Texas — making up 33% of the state’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“For Democrats to have a chance statewide, especially in federal elections, they have to stop the bleeding,” Bitzer said. “They do not need to win Republican rural areas, but they have to mitigate their losses there.”
The challenge for Democrats is not just older rural conservatives. In many rural communities, younger voters replacing them remain culturally and politically conservative.
Simultaneously, younger voters are less likely to register with a party. Unaffiliated, or independent, voters are now the largest registration bloc in North Carolina, according to the state board of elections. But many are not true moderates, Heberlig said; they lean consistently toward one party while rejecting the label.
“It’s not that there are a ton of moderates in the state,” Heberlig said. “It’s more a decision for voters of both parties whether to vote at all, not who to vote for.”
In essence, North Carolina stays close because two large coalitions are fighting over turnout and margins, where small shifts can decide the outcome.
Roy Cooper’s past strength has been his ability to reduce Democratic losses in rural areas, a skill that may matter more in North Carolina than in almost any other battleground state.
“[Roy Cooper] is of rural North Carolina and communicates in an authentic way to rural voters and doesn’t come across as patronizing,” Christopher Cooper said.
Political headwinds
Other challenges for Democrats and their North Carolina white whale have come down to timing.
In 2010, Democrats ran into a national Republican wave driven by the tea party movement. In 2014, the national environment again favored the GOP. In 2020, Cal Cunningham’s competitive campaign against Tillis was damaged late by a personal scandal. In 2022, Cheri Beasley lost to Ted Budd in a midterm shaped by inflation, Biden’s approval ratings and GOP attacks on crime and the economy.
“It’s been the subject of some bad luck,” Christopher Cooper said. “Pretty consistently, the Democrats have gotten North Carolina Senate elections coming up when the Democrats have had the wind to their face instead of to their back.”
Former President Barack Obama won North Carolina by just over than 14,000 votes in 2008, his narrowest margin in any state he carried. Mitt Romney won it by about 2 percentage points in 2012. Trump won it by 3.7 points in 2016, just over 1 point in 2020 and about 3 points again in 2024.
Cooper has advantages Democrats have often lacked in North Carolina: name recognition, statewide wins, credibility beyond the big cities and a potentially friendlier national environment. A Carolina Journal/Harper Polling survey of 600 likely voters conducted May 10-11 and released in May showed Cooper leading Whatley by 11 percentage points.
But Democrats have seen early promise in North Carolina before. The state has repeatedly looked close enough to win, only to slip away once Senate races became national referendums.
“The race still has a lot more to run,” Bitzer said. “The question for 2026 is whether that kind of rural credibility can survive the nationalization of a Senate race.”
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