Democrat Roy Cooper wins a North Carolina Senate seat

Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, the Democratic Senate nominee, speaks at a campaign event on Sunday in Concord, N.C. Allison Joyce/Getty Images hide caption

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Democrat Roy Cooper has won North Carolina's open U.S. Senate seat, according to a race call from the Associated Press, providing the party with a key Senate flip.

The former governor becomes the first Democrat elected to the Senate from North Carolina since 2008.

Cooper defeated Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chair who President Trump picked to replace retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis.

Cooper and national Democratic Party groups significantly outspent Whatley and Republicans. A few weeks before the election, national GOP organizations pulled TV ads from North Carolina and redirected their money to other battlegrounds like Kansas.

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Cooper, who served as governor from 2017 to 2024, focused his campaign on affordability issues. Each campaign stop he made across the state was promoted as the "Make Stuff Cost Less" tour.

Meanwhile, Whatley's campaign centered around crime and immigration issues. He criticized Cooper over a COVID-era legal settlement that released inmates from state prisons to address overcrowding during the pandemic. But polls indicated that the economy — not crime — was the top concern for North Carolina voters this year.

The race was Whatley's first run for elected office, and Cooper's campaign painted him as a lobbyist for Big Oil who would become a rubber stamp for Trump in the Senate.

Patrick Sebastian, a Republican strategist who did not work on the Whatley campaign, said his party's candidate should have made the economy a bigger focus.

"Really it's the economy is Issue A and then Issue B is probably government corruption, that people are following the most," Sebastian said. "So when we're not talking about those issues, it's going to be hard to connect with people that go to Walmart for their groceries and can only get 80% of what they used to buy because the prices have gone up."

The North Carolina Senate race was initially expected to be one of the most competitive — and most expensive — in the country, but Whatley never led in polling, and Cooper's lead widened over the course of the race.

Even as pro-Whatley TV ads largely disappeared in October, Trump and Vice President Vance came to North Carolina for multiple rallies in the final weeks of the campaign. Sebastian says those visits likely helped improve base turnout for GOP voters, but weren't enough to save Whatley's campaign.

Tillis announced in 2025 he wouldn't seek reelection, after Trump threatened him with a primary challenger for failing to support the president's tax cut and spending bill. Rather than campaign for Whatley, he's been promoting his new book criticizing fellow Republicans.