Roy Cooper's North Carolina Senate race could help decide control of the next Congress

Former Democratic Gov.

Roy Cooper’s Senate race against Republican Michael Whatley is one of Democrats’ best chances to flip a GOP-held seat in 2026.

Democrats have not won a presidential or U.S.

Senate race in North Carolina since 2008, even as they have won the governor’s race in each of the past three presidential election years.

The race will test whether North Carolina’s split-ticket tradition can survive national attention on Senate races that will determine control of Washington.

Every few years, North Carolina offers Democrats the same bargain: spend here with election dollars, organize campaigns here and believe this time will be different.

The state gives them reasons to hope.

Growth is reshaping its suburbs.

Urban centers like Raleigh , Charlotte and the Research Triangle are producing more Democratic votes .

Statewide races remain close.

Then, in the contests that decide power in Washington, North Carolina usually turns Democrats down.

That contradiction is now central to the fight for Senate control in 2026 when every competitive seat could matter in deciding the next congressional majority.

Democrats' narrow path back to a majority runs through a handful of Republican -held seats, and few are more consequential than the one in the Tar Heel State.

Former Democratic Gov.

Roy Cooper is facing Republican Michael Whatley , a former Republican National Committee chair and a close ally of President Donald Trump , for the open seat being vacated by Republican Sen.

Thom Tillis .

Democrats have not won a presidential or U.S.

Senate race in North Carolina since 2008.

Republicans have held the line through competitive election cycles , expensive campaigns and repeated predictions that demographic change was about to tip the state left.

And yet Democrats have won the governor's races in each of the past three presidential cycles.

The same electorate that handed Trump a 3.2 percentage point win in 2024 gave Democrat Josh Stein , who was running against Republican nominee Mark Robinson , a 14-point win in the governor's race that same day.

Robinson had faced calls to take himself out of the race after controversial statements he'd made about topics including civil and women's rights surfaced.

The state's 10 elected executive offices, known as the Council of State , are split evenly between five Democrats and five Republicans. "It is in North Carolina's DNA, just split tickets in a way it isn't the same in other states," said Christopher Cooper , a political scientist at Western Carolina University who is not related to Roy Cooper. "Where the rest of the South went from overwhelmingly Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican — and then some states, like Virginia and Georgia , came back — North Carolina was never as Democratic as its Southern neighbors." "Senate control could come down to North Carolina," Christopher Cooper said.

North Carolina's history of split tickets goes back generations.

In 1972, while Democrats still dominated much of the South, the state elected its first Republican governor in decades.

It has long judged Raleigh and Washington by different rules. "North Carolina Democrats have won federal elections when they've made the race about North Carolina.

Republicans win when they make it about national Democrats," said Michael Bitzer , a political scientist at Catawba College. "That tension is the whole ballgame in 2026." Voters still judge Democrats differently in races for governor, attorney general and other state offices, where campaigns can focus on competence, schools , storms, Medicaid , jobs and local roots, Christopher Cooper said.

A Senate race is harder to localize.

The office is inherently national: The winner helps decide which party controls the chamber , which judges get confirmed, how much power the president has and which agenda reaches the floor. "A Senate race becomes about party control almost immediately," Christopher Cooper said. "Even in North Carolina, a Senate candidate cannot fully escape Washington because Washington is the job." Republicans have understood that dynamic for years, said Eric Heberlig , a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "The question Republicans will frame this as is not whether voters liked Roy Cooper as governor," Heberlig said. "It is whether they want another Democrat helping Chuck Schumer control the Senate." That argument turns Cooper's biggest strength — his distinct statewide brand — into a secondary issue.

If the race is about Washington control, Republicans are on stronger ground. "North Carolinians may have voted for Roy Cooper as governor, but they have rejected Democrats running for president and the Senate because they often are not as wanting of the national Democratic agenda," Heberlig said.

Democrats have also spent more than a decade betting North Carolina's growth would make it look more like Virginia: increasingly suburban, diverse, college-educated and Democratic.

Parts of that theory have come true.

But not enough to overcome Republican strength elsewhere in the state.

North Carolina's population reached 11.2 million in 2025, making it the nation's ninth-largest state, according to the Census Bureau .

Since April 2020, the state has added roughly 757,000 residents — about 395 people a day, according to the Office of State Budget and Management .

From July 2024 to July 2025, it ranked first nationally for domestic migration, with a net gain of about 84,000 residents from other states, according to the OSBM.