Thomas Tillis

US President Donald Trump interacts with Michael Whatley, Republican candidate for North Carolina's US Senate seat, during a campaign rally at Pitt-Greenville Airport in Greenville, North Carolina, US, October 20, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci

Jordan Green is an investigative correspondent based in Greensboro, N.C., who covers right-wing extremism for Raw Story. His work has been featured in a host of publications, including the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Nation, In These Times and Sojourners.

Prior to joining the staff of Raw Story in March 2021, Green spent 16 years covering housing, policing, nonprofits and music as a reporter and editor at Triad City Beat in North Carolina and Yes Weekly. Green’s exposé on Medicaid fraud by a bogus drug-treatment program placed third for the Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s David Carr Investigative Reporting Award in 2020, while his reporting on how tax revaluations discriminated against Black homeowners in Winston-Salem won the N.C. Press Association’s second-place award for investigative reporting in 2013.

North Carolina was supposed to be the Republicans’ backstop. What happened?

Among seven swing states in the 2020 presidential election, North Carolina was the one that remained in President Donald Trump’s column, while Democrat Joe Biden narrowly carried Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada.

The chairman of the North Carolina GOP that year was Michael Whatley, and he earned Trump’s eternal gratitude.

“What a lot of people don’t know is we got screwed in 2020 — we did great,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Greenville, N.C. last week, while airing his false claim that the election was stolen from him. “But you know who didn’t allow it to happen was Michael Whatley.”

After 2020, Trump vowed that if he ran for president again, he would get Whatley to lead the Republican National Committee — which he did. And after Trump won the 2024 election, he recruited Whatley to run for Senate from North Carolina.

Now, recent polling shows Whatley trailing his Democratic opponent by double digits weeks after Republicans pulled money out of the North Carolina race to shore up candidates in states like Kansas that no one expected to be contested.

The 11th Congressional District in the western part of the state that was ravaged by Hurricane Helene two years ago, and was once considered a GOP stronghold, is now rated as leaning Democrat by the Cook Political Report.

Even the 1st Congressional District, which the Republican-controlled legislature redrew at Trump’s direction to make it more friendly to the GOP, is still considered a toss-up.

No state perhaps better exemplifies the collapse of Republicans’ midterm prospects for holding onto control of Congress than North Carolina.

Whatley’s entrance in the Senate race came, in part, as a result of Sen. Thom Tillis, the Republican incumbent, breaking with his party over the 2025 “Big Beautiful Bill.” Tillis refused to support the legislation over his objection that it would cost the state $40 billion in Medicaid funding over 10 years, including $10 billion in lost hospital receipts imperiling rural healthcare.

The day before Tillis announced his retirement, Trump had posted on Truth Social that he would be meeting with potential primary challengers. Whatley instantly became the Republican primary frontrunner the following month, with Trump’s post offering his “Complete and Total Endorsement.”

The post cemented both Whatley’s campaign platform and his link to Trump.

“He is STRONG on the Border, stopping Crime, supporting our Military/Veterans, cutting Taxes, and saving our always under siege Second Amendment,” Trump wrote. “I need him in Washington, and I need him representing YOU!”

Whatley, who started the race with little name recognition, has stuck with a traditional Republican law-and-order message since the beginning of the campaign by hammering his Democratic opponent for supposedly being soft on crime.

That opponent is Roy Cooper, a popular former two-term governor, who previously served four terms as the state’s attorney general. Cooper enjoys unparalleled name recognition, having appeared on statewide ballots six times in the past 26 years. And in both of his gubernatorial races, in 2016 and 2020, he won in presidential election years in which Trump carried the state, demonstrating crossover appeal.

During repeated campaign stops in North Carolina, Trump has attempted to challenge Cooper’s reputation as a “moderate,” deriding him during an Oct. 20 rally in Greenville as “a radical, left-wing lunatic,” while Whatley charged that his opponent “has stood with the woke mob and the radical Democrats instead of North Carolina families.”

Not only are the national political winds unfavorable to Republicans this year, but Whatley has the misfortune of facing an opponent who is “an excellent candidate,” Christopher Cooper (no relation to the candidate), a political science professor at West Carolina University, told Raw Story.

“He’s a trusted commodity,” Christopher Cooper said of the Democratic candidate. “He’s a hard person to attack. He has won statewide races every year he’s run for office since 2000. It’s hard to remake someone who North Carolinians feel they know so well. He’s won statewide races for attorney general so many times it’s hard to portray him as a radical.”

Whatley’s other challenge is that he hasn’t introduced himself to voters in a way that makes him a credible messenger for the attacks.

“People tend to trust Republicans more on crime,” Christopher Cooper said. “In that sense, he’s going along with the grain. The problem is he never defined himself as a candidate before he started doing that. Voters never got to know who he is.”

Whatley and Trump’s attacks on Cooper center on a trifecta of decisions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and protests against the police murder of George Floyd in the latter part of his first term as governor and early in his second term.

Following a night of unrest in which rioters broke windows at a police precinct and set fire to stores in Raleigh in May 2020, Cooper briefly marched with protesters outside the Governor’s Mansion. He issued an executive order establishing a Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice that called for addressing policies “that disproportionately affect communities of color and developing solutions to ensure racial equity in North Carolina’s criminal justice system.”

But the biggest target of attacks by Whatley and Trump is Cooper’s agreement to settle a lawsuit after previously resisting calls to release North Carolina prisoners with underlying health conditions to protect them from COVID-19. Under the terms of the agreement, the state released 3,500 inmates.

Whatley and Trump have repeatedly claimed that 25 of the inmates released through the settlement went on to commit murders, including DeCarlos Brown Jr., a mentally ill man who stabbed Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, to death on the Charlotte light-rail in 2025.

The claim about 25 murders appears to be based on a New York Post story reporting that at least 18 inmates released from prison were later charged with killing someone. But an analysis by WRAL News based on court and prison records found that “the majority of them either were already out of prison before the settlement was signed, or would’ve been out of prison anyway when they were accused of killing someone, even if they hadn’t been included in the early-release settlement.”

And contrary to Whatley’s repeated claims, Brown wasn’t in prison at the time of the settlement and the early release agreement had no bearing on Zarutska’s murder.

“Now, the most famous guy on this list, DeCarlos Brown Jr., got rearrested and re-released 13 times before he got on a light-rail car in Charlotte, North Carolina and brutally murdered a beautiful Ukrainian refugee named Iryna Zarutska in cold blood,” Whatley said in Greenville on Oct. 20. “That monster neve