Roy Cooper North Carolina race could help decide control of the next Senate

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.