The Billion-Dollar Election That Hasn’t Happened

The U.S. Senate race between Democrat Roy Cooper and Republican Michael Whatley was supposed to be a record-breaking barnburner. Ali-Frazier comes to North Carolina. Or, for a more local comparison, Coach K v. Dean Smith.

Longtime Republican political consultant Paul Shumaker predicted that spending on the race could reach a billion dollars. Bloomberg and Politico also cited the billion-dollar figure—a sum that would be more than five times as expensive as North Carolina’s last U.S. Senate race and make it the costliest campaign in the 112-year history of U.S. Senate elections.

At least thus far, these predictions are not coming true.

In the first half of 2026, Whatley raised $5.8 million to Cooper’s $16.1 million. Candidates in the U.S. Senate race in Texas raised 2.7 times as much as Cooper and Whatley’s combined haul during that period. Georgia candidates raised 1.7 times as much, and Ohio candidates 1.4 times.

Cooper has raised considerably more than Whatley, but he ranked further behind his party’s national fundraising leader, James Talarico. The Texas Democrat has brought in 3.4 times as much as Cooper, while the leader among Republican Senate candidates, Susan Collins of Maine, raised 1.4 times as much as Whatley. 

In other words, Cooper may have an advantage over Whatley, but he isn’t setting the national fundraising pace.

In a post-Citizens United world, money raised by the candidates makes up a shrinking share of spending on campaigns. There’s no way to know how much is being raised and spent by so-called “dark money” groups, political nonprofits that don’t have to disclose their donors. But the Federal Election Commission does report independent expenditures from groups like super PACs, both for and against a candidate. Here, too, North Carolina trails Texas by more than a 2:1 margin ($12.9 million in Texas versus $4.9 million here). 

There were still more than four months between the June 30 end of the second quarter and Election Day, but comparisons with previous elections suggest that the 2026 contest—while obscenely expensive by any reasonable metric—may not even set a North Carolina record.  

Our 2020 U.S. Senate election, for example, saw $164.8 million raised by Democrat Cal Cunningham’s campaign or spent by outside groups either supporting him or opposing Republican Thom Tillis. Tillis’s campaign and allied outside groups accounted for another $124.1 million. To match that total, the two sides in 2026 would have to spend roughly $238 million between July 1 and Election Day—and that calculation does not account for inflation. 

It’s possible that will happen; Cooper has outraised Cunningham in individual donations through a comparable period in 2020. But it’s far from guaranteed.

The billion-dollar predictions were not unreasonable earlier this year. So why do they seem so far off the mark now?

It could be because North Carolina’s Senate primaries didn’t matter that much. In Texas,  Talarico had to first beat U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Republican Ken Paxton had to raise money in not one, but two primaries thanks to Texas’s runoff laws. As the assumed primary winners, Cooper and Whatley could keep their fundraising asks to a minimum until the general election campaign picked up in earnest. 

But while that might explain Texas, it can’t explain the full discrepancy. Georgia’s Jon Ossoff and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown have both outraised Cooper, and neither had a contentious primary. 

The answer is more likely baked into the changing Senate map. In January, North Carolina looked like the most competitive Senate election in the country. States like Texas, Alaska, Ohio, and Iowa weren’t considered in play. Now they’re all considered “crucial.”

One sign of that vibe shift is outside spending. In 2020, independent expenditures accounted for 68% of the money spent on Cunningham’s side of the race. In 2022, they made up more than 80% of the funds behind Republican Ted Budd. Most of these groups allocate money across states based on where a Senate majority is most likely to be won or lost, and in the last two cycles they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into North Carolina. This year, through June 30, they had spent $4.9 million.

That comparison comes with an important caveat: Outside groups tend to spend heavily in the final months of a campaign. The relatively paltry total through June does not mean that they have written off North Carolina; they are still likely to make significant investments in the Tar Heel State before Election Day. But the spending surge would have to dwarf what we’ve seen so far to reach the billion-dollar mark.

This was always expected to be a good year for Democrats—midterm elections almost always cost the president’s party seats. But Donald Trump’s declining popularity, an unpopular war in Iran, and an economy that most Americans don’t believe is working for them have shifted the art of the possible further in the Democratic direction. The number of potentially competitive Senate races has grown. At the same time, public polling has consistently shown Cooper ahead of Whatley. The closest poll had the Democrat up by 4 percentage points, but other polls have shown the former governor with a double-digit lead.

The money on both sides of the aisle might be headed to places where donors believe—rightly or wrongly—it is more likely to sway the outcome.

Perhaps the simplest explanation, though, is that the race has not been all that interesting. Neither candidate carries the scandals of Mark Robinson or Graham Platner. Neither has the attention-grabbing style of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Nancy Mace. Cooper and Whatley are, for the most part, disciplined candidates who have offered few surprises. 

That could change. The Whatley campaign has announced the first installment of what it claims will be a seven-figure ad buy on streaming services. The spending spigot may open and the intrigue may follow.

But through the second quarter of this year, predictions of record-setting fundraising and spending appear premature.

At least thus far, the most interesting thing that’s happened to this race is that Whatley and Cooper have normalized the idea that men can wear suits without ties.