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Our verdict

nobody gets our endorsement

Election Day is November 3. In-person early voting in North Carolina runs October 15 through October 31. This is the whole race — the platforms, the records, the worst claims against each man, and what the sources actually show. LiberalMind endorses neither of them. Read the research, and decide which flaw you can live with.

How North Carolina got here

This seat is open because Republican Sen. Thom Tillis read his own party correctly and got out. Tillis won this seat twice, in 2014 and 2020, both times 49% to 47%. But his own state party censured him in June 2023 — for supporting the Respect for Marriage Act, for immigration reform attempts, for backing the bipartisan gun bill that funded state red-flag laws, and for initially opposing President Trump's plan to use military construction money for the border wall. Washington called that independence. North Carolina Republicans called it something else.

The end came fast. On June 28, 2025, Tillis voted against advancing the One Big Beautiful Bill, saying the Senate bill's Medicaid changes "would be devastating to North Carolina." Trump posted that Tillis was "making a BIG MISTAKE" and said he would meet with potential primary challengers. On June 29, Tillis announced he would not seek re-election, writing that "leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species."

It is the Cornyn pattern, one state east: a two-term Republican with a conservative record discovered that his voters, not his colleagues, grade the paper. The Democrats have not won a Senate race in North Carolina since 2008. Trump carried the state in 2024 by 3.2 points. Cook rates North Carolina R+1 — as close to even as a state gets.

The men who replaced him on the ballot could not be more different in how they got there. Roy Cooper, the Democrat, has been winning statewide elections for four decades and has never lost one. Michael Whatley, the Republican, has never held elected office at all — he is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and of the North Carolina Republican Party, a party man nominated with Trump's endorsement. Cooper took 92.0% of the March 3 Democratic primary. Whatley took 64.6% of the Republican one.

In April, Cook, Sabato's Crystal Ball, and Inside Elections all called this race a toss-up. By October, all three had moved it toward Cooper — Cook to "Likely D" on October 6, Sabato to "Leans Democratic," Inside Elections to "Lean Democratic" on October 1. The polling averages have Cooper up roughly eleven points. The money tells the same story: through September 30, Cooper had raised $47.2 million to Whatley's $13.4 million, and in October the Senate Leadership Fund — after spending more than $30 million of a pledged $71 million — canceled its remaining North Carolina reservations and moved the money elsewhere. That is the race. Now the records.

Michael Whatley (Republican)

His platform: Whatley runs as Trump's man, in his own words: "When I win this seat … I'm going to be a conservative champion for North Carolina and I'm going to be an ally to our great president." On the stump: "safer communities, secure borders, more jobs and lower costs." On public safety: "We need policies that are going to put more cops on the street, that are going to pay them better, and we need policies that are going to put dangerous criminals behind bars, not back on our streets." His campaign supports the Trump tax agenda, including no tax on tips and no tax on overtime — his spokesman told FactCheck.org: "Facts are that Michael Whatley supports policies that allow working families to earn more and keep more." He is endorsed by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: He twice appointed a registered sex offender to the state party's rules committee. This one is documented, and Whatley's campaign has not answered it. Harvey West Jr. pleaded guilty in 2000 to five counts of taking indecent liberties with a child, was incarcerated until 2006, and is a registered sex offender — a history that surfaced publicly in 2012, when he resigned as an alternate RNC delegate. West told WRAL that Whatley appointed him in 2021 and again in 2024 to the state GOP's Plan of Organization Committee. A state party spokesman did not dispute West's account, noting only that West had also served on the committee before Whatley's chairmanship. Cooper's campaign is running the appointment in a seven-figure television ad. What questions were asked, and what Whatley knew, his campaign has declined to say.

Claim: Trump's Hurricane Helene "recovery czar" barely showed up. After Helene killed more than 100 North Carolinians and caused roughly $60 billion in damage, Trump announced during a January 24, 2025 visit that Whatley would oversee the recovery and "make sure everything goes well." The Asheville Citizen Times filed public-records requests and reported on September 25, 2026 what they found: six text messages and five phone calls totaling 38 minutes between Whatley and the state's senior recovery adviser over about a year; no records of direct communication with FEMA leadership, state emergency management, or 11 of 12 surveyed counties; and a FEMA response of "No responsive records were located." Records cannot capture every in-person conversation, and the paper says so. Whatley's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Claim: His own words on prices. Cooper's campaign built an ad out of Whatley's July 2025 Newsmax interview as RNC chairman: "Grocery prices are down, gasoline prices are down, housing prices are down, inflation is down," and, later, "there is no inflation." FactCheck.org found the quotes genuine — and the groceries line false when he said it and false now: food-at-home prices rose 0.7% from January to July 2025 and roughly 3.35% from January 2025 to July 2026. Gas was roughly flat when he spoke, then hit $4.50 a gallon in May 2026 after the Iran war began. Inflation was 2.7% annualized when he declared there was none.

The flaw, plainly: Whatley's platform is the conservative platform, and he would vote it. His flaw is that he is the apparatus itself — a chairman and an insider who has never once stood in front of voters and answered for anything. The two stories above are the only real tests of his judgment in the record, and they point the same way: appointments made without questions, a recovery assignment carried as a title rather than a job — and silence when asked about either. Before North Carolina hires a man who has only ever been appointed, it should ask what he did with the appointments he made.

Roy Cooper (Democratic)

His platform: Cooper runs on a cost-of-living plan he calls "Make Stuff Cost Less": "rolling back these chaotic tariffs, ending the war in Iran, restoring health care, stopping insurance companies from denying coverage for care a doctor says you need." On tariffs: "The United States Supreme Court was clear that the constitutional authority on trade and tariffs rest[s] with Congress. I will vote to roll back the tariffs." He takes credit for negotiating Medicaid expansion with the Republican legislature in 2023 — coverage extended to more than 650,000 North Carolinians on his campaign's count, more than 700,000 on the state health department's. He says he "strongly oppose[s] defunding the police," supports higher police pay, and points to his four terms as attorney general prosecuting "violent criminals and child predators." His campaign told FactCheck.org he supports eliminating taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime. He attacks the 2025 tax law as "tax cuts to billionaires" that "drove healthcare premiums up more than double." His endorsements include the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Reproductive Freedom for All.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: He let 3,500 criminals out of prison, and a grieving father's daughter is dead because of it. The Senate Leadership Fund's August ad has Stephen Federico saying his daughter Logan "was a casualty of an agenda. Roy Cooper let 3,500 criminals out on the street; 18 of them were murders." FactCheck.org dismantled it. The 3,500 figure is real: in February 2021, after a Superior Court judge ruled that plaintiffs suing over COVID conditions in prisons were likely to prevail and directed a plan, Cooper's administration settled, agreeing to the early release of 3,500 inmates. But the "18 murderers" were 18 released prisoners later charged with murder — and more than 90% of those released would have been out by the end of 2021 anyway, having completed their sentences. And Logan Federico was killed in May 2025 in Columbia, South Carolina. The accused, Alexander Dickey, was released from a prison in South Carolina — FactCheck.org: "Cooper had nothing to do with the accused murderer's release." PolitiFact examined the paired father-testimonial ads and found they "omit the fact that this legal agreement had zero connection to either of the featured homicide cases."

Claim: He is responsible for Iryna Zarutska's killing on a Charlotte train. The August 2025 murder of the Ukrainian refugee by DeCarlos Brown Jr. became a national story, and Whatley and Trump tied it to Cooper's 2020 racial-equity task force and the prison settlement. WRAL/PolitiFact rated the claim false: Brown served 100% of his sentence, was not paroled or released early, and walked out on September 20, 2020 — five months before the settlement and three months before the task-force report existed. North Carolina's governor has no power over who enters prison, and Cooper issued Brown no pardon.

Claim: As attorney general, he "let 16,000 untested rape kits sit on the shelf." FactCheck.org: misleading. The roughly 15,160 untested kits found by a 2018 inventory sat in the evidence rooms of more than 500 local law-enforcement agencies; they were never submitted to the state crime lab at all. No statewide count existed until a 2017 law required an inventory — after Cooper had left the attorney general's office.

Claim: He will tax your Social Security, tips, and overtime. FactCheck.org: misleading. Cooper never served in Congress and cast no vote on the 2025 law; he opposed the bill overall but has repeatedly said he supports eliminating taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime. And an RNC claim circulated this fall — that "54% of NC commercial driver's licenses were issued illegally to foreign nationals" under Cooper — PolitiFact rated flatly false: the figure came from a federal audit sample of 50 files; the state's full audit of 325,114 licenses found paperwork errors in 0.35% and zero licenses issued to undocumented immigrants.

Cooper's own side stretches too: his claim that officials "removed" the North Carolina A&T early-voting site PolitiFact rated Mostly False — the county has never hosted campus sites in a midterm and none was planned; "removed" was the wrong word.

The flaw, plainly: Cooper's flaw is not competence — he may be the most capable candidate on any ballot in America this year, a man who has never lost in four decades because he rarely makes a mistake. His flaw is what all that competence serves. His career is the Democratic program, executed well: Medicaid expansion, abortion-rights endorsements, more vetoes of a Republican legislature than any North Carolina governor in history. He is not a Manchin or a Fetterman — a Democrat who breaks with his party on the things that matter. He is the party's program with its best salesman attached. Competence in the service of the wrong values is still the wrong values.

Also on the ballot: Shannon Bray, the Libertarian — a Navy veteran and cybersecurity professional from Angier — and Michael Dublin, the Green Party nominee, a teacher. Neither has raised meaningful money, and neither is a factor the raters score; we note them because a ballot should be reported whole.

The verdict: nobody gets our endorsement

Two men. Two different flaws.

Whatley's flaw is that he has never been tested by the people he wants to represent — a party functionary whose documented judgment calls are appointing a registered sex offender to the rules committee, twice, and carrying a recovery-czar title through a year of other people's suffering without leaving records of doing the work.

Cooper's flaw is values: forty years of flawless campaigning for the proposition that government is the answer — to health care, to costs, to everything. He would do the job superbly. The job he would do is the one our readers exist to vote against.

So we will not tell you this race has a good answer. It has a research answer. The attacks on Cooper's crime record are, on the fact-checkers' reading, the most dishonest advertising in this race — say so plainly, because it is true. And then remember that an honest verdict about the ads is not an endorsement of the man they target. Vote early. Research your candidates. And vote for the flaw you can live with — a senator you will have to watch like a hawk, or a senator whose every well-executed instinct is the other side's program.

The seat is Tillis's old chair. Neither man earned it in advance.

Sources

AI-assisted article — but the sources are human, and the facts are very real.

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