Democrat Roy Cooper flips North Carolina Senate seat, defeating Michael Whatley in a key win for his party

Democrat Roy Cooper has won North Carolina's open US Senate seat. According to a race call from the Associated Press, the former governor's victory provides his party with a key Senate flip.

Cooper defeated Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chair. President Trump had picked Whatley to replace retiring Republican Senator Thom Tillis.

With the win, Cooper becomes the first Democrat elected to the Senate from North Carolina since 2008.

Cooper has been a fixture in North Carolina politics for a generation, first as the state's attorney general, then while serving two terms as governor from 2017 to 2024. The politically moderate Democrat has long been the most popular political figure in the state.

Cooper and national Democratic Party groups significantly outspent Whatley and Republicans. Whatley never led in a poll against Cooper, and Cooper's lead widened over the course of the race.

Cooper's campaign focused on affordability issues. Each campaign stop he made across the state was promoted as the 'Make Stuff Cost Less' tour, highlighting lower costs for food, energy and housing alongside his record on Medicaid expansion and teacher pay while governor.

Whatley's campaign, meanwhile, centered around crime and immigration issues. He criticized Cooper over a COVID-era legal settlement that released inmates from state prisons to address overcrowding during the pandemic. But polls indicated that the economy — not crime — was the top concern for North Carolina voters this year.

The race was Whatley's 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.

Patrick Sebastian, a Republican strategist who did not work on the Whatley campaign, said his 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,' he said. He added that without talking about those issues, it is hard to connect with people who go to Walmart for groceries and can only get 80% of what they used to buy because prices have gone up.

The Senate Leadership Fund, which directs money from Republican Senate leader John Thune's fundraising to US Senate campaigns, wrote Whatley off and redirected its spending to the contest in Kansas. National Republican organizations also pulled TV ads from North Carolina in October and redirected their money to other battlegrounds like Kansas.

Even as pro-Whatley TV ads largely disappeared in October, Trump and Vice President Vance came to North Carolina for multiple rallies in the final weeks of the campaign. Sebastian says those visits likely helped improve base turnout for GOP voters, but were not enough to save Whatley's campaign.

The North Carolina Senate race was initially expected to be one of the most competitive — and most expensive — in the country. Tillis announced in 2025 he wouldn't 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 his new book criticizing fellow Republicans.