Former two-term Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper sailed to victory Tuesday, appearing to defeat his Trump-backed Republican opponent by double digits to flip a GOP-held Senate seat in a state the president won three times.
Cooper, who was term-limited after leading the battleground state from 2017 to 2025, is projected to have defeated former Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Michael Whatley in the race to succeed two-term Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who opted to retire after President Donald Trump threatened to field a primary challenger against him. The Democrat won 66.8% of the vote to Whatley’s 31.6%, with 50% of ballots counted, according to The Associated Press.
Like many Democratic candidates who emerged victorious in elections held during Trump’s second term, Cooper campaigned heavily on the issue of affordability, prominently employing the campaign slogan “Make Stuff Cost Less.” He has specifically vowed to lower costs for groceries, healthcare, energy, childcare, and housing — all of which have skyrocketed during the Trump administration’s unpopular war with Iran.
Whatley, meanwhile, campaigned as a close Trump ally and expressed support for the war as a means to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Despite having won the state in 2016, 2020, and 2024, the president’s October approval rating in North Carolina was 37 percent, according to a High Point University poll of 620 likely voters in the Tar Heel State.
Cooper’s win marks the first upper chamber seat to flip in the 2026 midterm elections; however, both polling and financial moves by the campaigns and allied groups ahead of Election Day telegraphed that the race was effectively over weeks earlier.
Cooper enjoyed a consistent lead in polls throughout the campaign — 10.7 percentage points in RealClearPolling’s average, an aggregate of surveys conducted between Sept. 27 and Oct. 25. Some individual polls from October, however, saw him leading by as many as 14 points.
Both parties notably divested from the race to focus on other contests amid the apparent polling mismatch between the two contenders. A super PAC linked to Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer removed just over $1 million in ad buys for the North Carolina race in early October as polling showed Cooper comfortably ahead.
Around the same time, Whatley’s campaign did not have any planned television ads booked while Cooper’s campaign still had $7.4 million reserved for such ads, according to AdImpact. A week earlier, a local North Carolina news outlet reported the Whatley camp was temporarily pulling TV ads while rethinking its strategy to save the then-lagging Republican candidate. The Senate Leadership Fund, the primary GOP-linked super PAC for upper chamber candidates, had also halted ad spending in the state after having already poured $30 million into the race.
Widely considered a top Democratic recruit, Cooper scored electoral wins in 2016 and 2020 even as Trump carried the state in all three of his presidential runs. As such, North Carolina is the first state which went Republican in the last presidential election to elect a Democrat to the Senate.
Before serving as governor, Cooper was elected to four terms as North Carolina’s attorney general after he served in both houses of the state legislature.
On the other hand, Whatley, who has never held public office, rose to national prominence in 2024 after the RNC elected him, having received Trump’s endorsement, to be its chairman. He spent just under a year and a half at its helm helping to achieve a GOP trifecta in November 2024 before stepping down to seek Tillis’s seat with Trump’s backing.
A win by Cooper puts Democrats one seat closer to the four net gains they need to wrest back control of the Senate.
BREAKING: The Fox News Decision Desk can project that former Governor Roy Cooper will flip North Carolina’s open Senate seat to the Democrats.
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