Live by Trump, Die by Trump

It’s difficult to pinpoint when the S.S. Whatley began taking on water. 

Michael Whatley’s U.S. Senate campaign was sinking long before the networks called the race for former Gov. Roy Cooper last night, marking the first time North Carolina has sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2009. It was listing in early October, when GOP groups, staring down double-digit polling deficits, yanked their funding and Whatley paused his television ads—an “abandon ship” cry heard clearly across the political world. 

But did failed strategy run it aground, like going all-in on ads accusing Cooper of being soft on crime? Or was it something more trivial, like when Whatley couldn’t name a single Carolina Hurricanes player during their Stanley Cup run? 

Or was the ship simply doomed at launch, as it tried to navigate the most hostile seas Republicans have faced in decades? 

In hindsight, Republicans never stood a chance. Not against Cooper, who’s spent 40 years cultivating a brand of moderate, steady leadership. Not this year, with President Donald Trump’s approval ratings circling the drain and Democrats willing to crawl over hot coals to rebuke him. 

And definitely not with Whatley, a fossil fuel lobbyist turned GOP operative who’d never run for public office, had no name recognition or charisma, inspired little enthusiasm, and couldn’t keep pace with Cooper’s fundraising. 

Whatley’s ignominious defeat—he lost by 20 points—had major down-ballot consequences. After Republicans effectively ceded the Senate race, state legislative and congressional polls shifted toward Democrats, putting seats in play that no one imagined Democrats could win a year ago and paving the way for Democrats to win the state House. 

While Whatley will shoulder the blame, the disaster ultimately wasn’t his doing. It was Trump’s. 

After all, Whatley only became a candidate at Trump’s behest, after the president drove incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis into retirement. And voters’ antipathy toward Trump and his administration made it impossible for a candidate irrevocably tethered to him to gain traction. 

“In a different election year, he could have been elected to something,” said David McLennan, a retired Meredith College political scientist. “But this was just the wrong time with the wrong circumstances. It was the perfect storm for not doing well.”

Mistakes Were Made

Tillis, a two-term senator, never fit comfortably into Trump’s Republican Party. He spent Trump’s first term in a delicate dance, occasionally opposing the president while trying to avoid his social-media wrath. 

That dance continued after Trump’s election in 2024. With Trump threatening to field a primary opponent, Tillis cast the decisive vote to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after signaling that he wouldn’t, which he said he later regretted. 

But Tillis’ relationship with Trump finally fractured over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included sweeping Medicaid cuts that Tillis argued would cost North Carolina billions of dollars while gutting benefits for more than 600,000 people. “I can’t fucking do that,” he told Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

“Thom Tillis is making a BIG MISTAKE for America and the Wonderful People of North Carolina,” Trump posted on Truth Social in June 2025. Tillis promptly announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection. 

Republicans first turned to Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, to run. But after she declined, the GOP quickly coalesced behind Whatley, the chair of the Republican National Committee and former head of the N.C. Republican Party. 

Until then, Cooper had been noncommittal about running. But with Tillis gone, Cooper got off the sidelines. 

“With Tillis dropping out, Cooper obviously saw that there was no Republican bench and thought, well, he’s just going to be able to waltz into a Senate seat,” said Andrew Dunn, a former GOP operative who writes the blog Longleaf Politics. 

Cooper left the Executive Mansion at the end of 2024 with near-universal name recognition and a 51% approval rating. Still, many strategists initially expected the race to be the toughest of Cooper’s career. Even though midterms typically favor opposition parties and Trump’s approval ratings have steadily declined, North Carolina Democrats have struggled in federal elections. 

And because the national map looked difficult for Democrats, North Carolina was seen as their best chance to flip a Senate seat. Experts expected the campaigns and their supporting PACs to pump more than $1 billion into the race. 

Cooper focused his campaign on the slogan “Make Stuff Cost Less.” Whatley, meanwhile, tried to convince voters they liked Cooper less than they thought. 

In September 2025, Republican legislative leaders had Whatley speak at a press conference announcing a crackdown on crime following the brutal slaying of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail. Whatley—who played no role in crafting the legislation—blamed Cooper for releasing Zarutska’s killer from prison, along with 3,500 other inmates, as part of a COVID-era legal settlement. 

“He let 3,500 criminals free, and the killer who killed young Iryna, he was released just three months after one of Cooper’s soft-on-crime executive orders,” Whatley said. 

But the killer, DeCarlos Brown, was released because he completed his sentence, not due to anything Cooper did. (Contrary to Trump’s State of the Union claim, Brown wasn’t an undocumented immigrant, either.) But that didn’t stop Whatley from making the settlement a centerpiece of his campaign, sometimes based on misleading assertions. 

The attacks didn’t dent Cooper’s popularity. 

“Whatley thought the COVID prisoner list was a legit scandal, and I agree,” a Republican operative told The Assembly. “But Cooper successfully blew that up through a combination of message discipline, Whatley overreach, and media cover.”

Whatley also criticized Cooper’s handling of disaster recovery. ReBuild NC, the agency responsible for renovating or rebuilding homes destroyed in hurricanes Florence and Matthew, ran a deficit of more than $150 million and left thousands without homes for years. 

But Whatley was an imperfect messenger. Trump had designated him the administration’s Hurricane Helene “recovery czar,” and Western N.C. residents were largely dissatisfied with the administration’s efforts. Whatley also backed Trump’s plans to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency and give states control of disaster response. 

Dunn argued that it was a mistake to relitigate Cooper’s tenure as governor. 

“The better line of attack would be to do what [Sen.] Jesse Helms did against [former Gov.] Jim Hunt and focus on national issues that Cooper hasn’t discussed publicly,” Dunn said. “Like, talk about packing the Supreme Court, talk about D.C. statehood, talk about support for Israel. None of these things have come up in the campaign.”

Though Whatley started the race behind, most observers assumed he’d close the gap as he became better known. That didn’t happen. Throughout the summer, Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran drove prices up and consumer sentiment down, while his administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement and his fixations on the Reflecting Pool and White House ballroom turned off many voters. 

“It’s become an economy kind of election,” McLennan said. “The cultural issues, they tried that for a while. The trans issue and things like that didn’t seem to go anywhere. It’s just a misalignment between the issues Republicans could talk about and what voters care about.”

By September, Republican operatives were rolling their eyes when asked about Whatley’s chances. By October, they had written Whatley off. 

Focus on the Fundamentals

The question isn’t whether Whatley could have beaten Cooper. Fundamentals, not candidates, usually determine elections. And this year’s fundamentals—the country’s economic performance, the president’s popularity, and voters’ tendency to turn against the president’s party during a midterm—dictated that Whatley would lose. 

Catawba College political scientist Michael Bitzer pointed out that the president’s party has gained congressional seats in only two of the 20 midterms since World War II. Both had special circumstances: 1998 followed President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and 2002 followed 9/11. 

“The other 18, the president’s party has lost net seats in Congress,” he said. “That’s just the rhythm of midterms.”

This year’s fundamentals appeared especially difficult for Republicans. “There are some elections—1994, 2010, I’m thinking 2026 is going to be in that league—where the fundamentals are so stacked against the president’s party that no matter what they try to do, the seawalls are just not going to be built high enough to withstand the wave,” Bitzer told The Assembly earlier this week.

“If Michael Whatley had run for the Senate in 2022, he would have won,” said Tom Jensen, who runs the Raleigh-based Democratic-leaning firm Public Policy Polling. Ted Budd ran that year as a generic Republican, riding Trump’s endorsement and dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden to a narrow victory.  

Whatley “is the most generic Republican you could run in the entire state of North Carolina,” Jensen said. “And that was not going to cut it this year.”

The real question is how much better another candidate—Tillis, for example—would have fared, and whether that would have helped other Republicans. Candidates matter at the margins. Good candidates shift the electorate a few points in their favor. Bad candidates turn close races into blowouts. Cooper was a good candidate. Whatley proved to be a bad one. 

Whatley “had three big strikes against him,” McLennan said, citing the national political environment, Whatley’s limited name recognition, and his lackluster fundraising. Tillis wouldn’t have to worry about the latter two. 

“Tillis could have run a more competitive campaign,” McLennan said. “But the environment is so bad that Tillis could have run, raised a lot of money, differentiated himself more from Trump, and still could have lost.”

But he likely wouldn’t have lost by as much, and Republicans wouldn’t have effectively ceded the contest a month ago. That might have spared other Republican candidates last night. 

In 2024, when scandals imploded Mark Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign, Trump remained at the top of the ticket, giving Republicans a reason to turn out. This year, there was no Trump, Whatley was a lost cause, and the next highest-profile statewide Republican was an N.C. Supreme Court candidate who didn’t seem interested in campaigning. 

Depressed Republican turnout meant fewer votes for congressional and legislative candidates across the state—and put seats in play that Democrats didn’t think were competitive. Two months ago, Democrats hoped to gain one U.S. House district; now, they could flip as many as seven. Reclaiming the majority in the state House was a pipe dream. But Democrats did just that—and came close to winning the state Senate. 

“If this crazy stuff happens with the legislature, it’s really going to be because Whatley was so weak that they abandoned him,” Jensen said on Monday. “This has opened up possibilities that I’m not sure existed six weeks ago.” 

In September, Jensen’s polling suggested an electorate that was two or three points to the left of 2024 voters. “Now it looks like the electorate’s going to be more like six or seven points to the left of 2024,” he said. Even that proved to be an understatement. 

For that, Democrats shouldn’t thank Whatley. They should thank Trump, who both anointed Whatley and ensured his humiliation.