Republican officials, who opened the midterm season with high hopes they would keep the Senate, are growing increasingly anxious about a state that voted for Donald Trump three times and has not elected a Democrat to the Senate in nearly two decades.
They’re privately conceding the party appears set to lose North Carolina’s Senate seat unless Trump’s poor approval ratings — and the high prices that caused them — improve dramatically in the coming weeks.
The state is one of nine battlegrounds that will likely determine control of the Senate, where Republicans now hold a 53-47 advantage. Six of the battlegrounds, including North Carolina, are currently in Republican hands.
Republican operatives closely involved in this year’s Senate races insist they will keep fighting for North Carolina. But a path to victory appears to be dimming for Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chairman tapped by Trump to run for the seat, they said.
Whatley has consistently trailed former Democratic governor Roy Cooper in polling by greater margins than Republican nominees in nearly every other battleground.
Late last week, a Republican super PAC canceled $6.5 million in advertising reservations in the race, prompting fears in the state that other national Republican groups could follow. But it hasn’t happened yet.
“He’s not in a left-for-dead situation,” one senior Republican strategist with close knowledge of Senate races said of Whatley. “There will be a pulse until election day.”
The assessment was hardly a declaration of confidence in Republicans’ chances of winning the southern swing state — where at least two competitive House districts are also trending toward Democrats despite GOP redistricting last fall.
The person, like several Republicans inside and outside the state who spoke to The Washington Post, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to publicly discuss GOP Senate strategy.
The senior strategist said that Republicans do not expect to abandon the race altogether — noting both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have stumped for Whatley in the past week.
But additional resources could still be pulled if Whatley doesn’t make sufficient progress in the coming week or two, according to the strategists and several others interviewed for this story.
Several Republicans with close knowledge of the race claimed some polls are tightening slightly, from a 9 to 10 point margin to a 5 to 6 point margin. But they acknowledged that Whatley is fighting an uphill battle, with little reason to believe the situation will dramatically improve.
“Michael Whatley’s got two problems he has to fix. He has to fix the voter enthusiasm turnout gap, and he has to be able to show the ability to win a majority of unaffiliated voters at a time when the president’s approval rating is at an all-time low with that universe of voters,” said Paul Shumaker, a longtime Republican strategist in the state who ran retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis’ winning campaigns.
“I don’t know what he’s done to distinguish himself from Trump,” Shumaker added.
Republican operatives, including some close to Trump, conceded privately to The Post that Whatley has been hampered by his reluctance to distance himself from the president. Whatley, a former state party chair, won Trump’s endorsement to lead the national party in 2024 in part because he boosted Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Tillis, who is vacating the seat, had several notable clashes with Trump.
Appearing with Trump in Gastonia last week, Whatley declared that he is “still with that guy.” A Whatley campaign official said he is counting on turning out Trump’s base to win. And three others familiar with his strategy said he has no plans to draw distance with the president as other candidates in tough races are doing.
“If Donald Trump were at 48 percent approval, we would be talking about how this race is neck and neck,” said Doug Heye, a Republican communications strategist from North Carolina who has worked in Congress, the George W. Bush administration and at the RNC. “I don’t think anything is doing Whatley in other than the president is massively unpopular. He is an albatross for these campaigns.”
The makeup of voters in North Carolina has also shifted since Trump was first on the ballot in 2016, when Democrats still had a registration advantage. While Republicans and Democrats are now close to even in the number of registrations, the number of unaffiliated voters has ballooned.
To win, Whatley will need to damage Cooper’s high approval marks with voters and hope that Trump’s numbers rebound, say Republican strategists involved. Whatley has made some progress in introducing himself to voters.
But Cooper — a two-term governor, four-term attorney general and longtime state legislator — remains far better known.
“The question is will there be enough runway?” another top-level GOP operative said, pointing to Whatley’s lack of name recognition. “If you look at voters who have an opinion on both, it is a competitive race. But it’s hard to beat 40 years of name ID.”
DJ Griffin, spokesman for Whatley, said Cooper’s lead will fade as the state has seen with Democratic Senate candidates in other recent elections.
“North Carolina voters, especially Republicans, tune in late and tend to break late, surging Republicans across the finish line come election day,” Griffin said.
While Cooper and other Democrats have succeeded at the state level, North Carolina has proved difficult for the party at the federal level. North Carolina voters have not elected a Democratic senator since 2008, when Barack Obama also carried the state in his first presidential campaign.
Before Obama, the last Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina was Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Even if the GOP pulls money from the race, Republicans are unlikely to abandon it completely, Republicans officials say, given its prominence in the Senate map and the party’s flush campaign accounts this year. The GOP so far hasn’t been forced to make as many difficult spending cuts as in elections past.
Among current Senate battlegrounds, only Georgia is less promising for the GOP. But Democrats already hold both the state’s Senate seats, and Trump lost there in 2020. North Carolina, by contrast, was expected to be more Republican-friendly.
“Is it an easy race? No,” the senior Republican strategist said of North Carolina. “Am I saying he’s going to win? No. I’m saying he still has a fighting chance, and folks are still engaged.”
Asked about the cancellation of $6.5 million in ads reserved to help him, Whatley this week told Fox News he feels “very comfortable we’re going to have the resources we need to get our message out.”
But money alone — even if it remains strong for Whatley — may not be able to compensate for the poor environment Trump has caused for Republicans.
Trump’s aligned super PAC, meanwhile, has reserved $6.7 million in ads for Whatley, while Senate Republicans’ spending arm has set aside $50 million, for now. Spokespeople for the groups did not answer questions about their future spending plans in North Carolina.
Officials from both Cooper’s campaign and Senate Democrats’ top outside spending group, Senate Majority PAC, both said in statements to The Post that they continue to take the race seriously.
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