Roy Cooper wins North Carolina Senate seat for Democrats

Democratic groups outspent Republicans as Cooper’s lead widened

Roy Cooper won North Carolina’s open U.S. Senate seat in the 2026 midterms, according to an Associated Press race call, giving Democrats a key Senate flip. Cooper defeated Michael Whatley and became the first Democrat elected to the Senate from North Carolina since 2008.

President Trump chose Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chair, to replace retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis. Tillis announced in 2025 that he would not seek reelection after Trump threatened him with a primary challenger for failing to support the president’s tax cut and spending bill. Rather than campaign for Whatley, Tillis has been promoting a new book criticizing fellow Republicans.

Cooper, who served as governor from 2017 to 2024, built his campaign around affordability. Each campaign stop across the state was promoted as the “Make Stuff Cost Less” tour. Whatley’s campaign centered on crime and immigration.

Whatley was making his first run for elected office. Cooper’s campaign painted him as a lobbyist for Big Oil who would become a rubber stamp for Trump in the Senate. Whatley criticized Cooper over a COVID-era legal settlement that released inmates from state prisons to address overcrowding during the pandemic.

Polls indicated that the economy — not crime — was the top concern for North Carolina voters this year. Patrick Sebastian, a Republican strategist who did not work on the Whatley campaign, said the party’s candidate should have made the economy a bigger focus. “Really it’s the economy is Issue A and then Issue B is probably government corruption, that people are following the most,” Sebastian said. “So when we’re not talking about those issues, it’s going to be hard to connect with people that go to Walmart for their groceries and can only get 80% of what they used to buy because the prices have gone up.”

Cooper and national Democratic Party groups significantly outspent Whatley and Republicans. A few weeks before the election, national GOP organizations pulled television ads from North Carolina and redirected the money to other battlegrounds, including Kansas. Pro-Whatley television ads largely disappeared in October.

The North Carolina Senate race was initially expected to be among the most competitive and most expensive in the country. Whatley never led in polling, and Cooper’s lead widened over the course of the race.

Separate results in the live coverage showed Jon Ossoff winning reelection in Georgia, easily defeating Republican Mike Collins.

President Trump and Vice President Vance made multiple rallies in North Carolina during the final weeks of the campaign. Sebastian said those visits likely helped improve base turnout for Republican voters, but they were not enough to save Whatley’s campaign.