The primary showdown for North Carolina’s vacant U.S. Senate seat will come into focus Tuesday, with a well-known Democratic former governor and a Donald Trump-backed but untested Republican appearing to lead the field.
In the Democratic primary, former two-term Gov. Roy Cooper is ahead in recent polls against a field of other candidates who have never held elected office. Cooper is widely seen among North Carolina Democrats as their best chance to flip a Republican-held seat now held by outgoing U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, a conservative who has turned tough on the Trump administration over its handling of health care, defense and the Epstein dossier revelations.
For Republicans, Michael Whatley, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, leads the field in the polls, with his closest competitor, Rep. Don Brown, in single digits.
Polling in both primaries has been relatively weak and may have masked weakness in conservative support for Whatley. About half of the Republican electorate remains undecided heading into the polls on Tuesday.
Whatley has Trump’s backing, but that hasn’t stopped complaints from the right.
“The president made a terrible mistake by imposing Whatley on us,” said Brant Clifton, who publishes the Daily Haymaker, a conservative news site in North Carolina. Whatley has been closely associated with Tillis over the years, tainting him among voters with whom Tillis has become unpopular, Clifton said. “Trump spends a lot of time talking about how bad Tillis sucks and expressing his anger toward Tillis, but here he is. He has the Republican National Committee working to shove Mike Whatley down our throats, but Tom Tillis and his wife are responsible for lifting Whatley from obscurity to the state GOP chair.”
North Carolina has unusual rules for primary runoffs. If the candidate with the highest number of votes does not obtain 30% of the votes, the second place candidate can request a second round.
Polls for a head-to-head matchup between Cooper and Whatley show Cooper with a 10-point lead. That reflects both Cooper’s long relationship with North Carolina voters and a sharply negative shift against the president among those voters. A poll commissioned last month from Change Research shows that 50% of voters strongly disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, while about 60% believe their income is falling short of the cost of living and three-quarters say inflation and rising costs make them feel stressed.
But the options for many North Carolina voters have been limited by redistricting in the middle of the decade, which widened the partisan advantage in several House seats to reduce the likelihood of Democratic gains.
Incumbent Democratic Rep. Don Davis, first elected in 2022, represents a district that had been majority Black and safely Democratic for decades. Lawmakers redrawn the district in 2025 to include many more Republican voters. Analysts believe the district now leans Republican based on historical voting patterns. Five Republican candidates will run in Tuesday’s primaries.
North Carolina’s 4th district in the Research Triangle area is overwhelmingly Democratic; The primaries will likely determine the winner in November. That seat has become a nationalized primary battle between incumbent Valerie Foushee and Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam, who has presented herself as the more progressive choice.
Outside groups have spent more than $4 million on the race, making it one of the most expensive primaries this year. The American Priorities Super Pac has spent more than half a million dollars to highlight Allam’s opposition to military aid to Israel, while the Article One Pac – whose donors are associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) – has spent around $600,000 supporting Foushee. Political groups linked to the AI industry have also backed Foushee, sending messages about “sensible AI regulation.”
With control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives shrinking to a few districts and a few races, North Carolina is attracting intense political attention at the federal level. But the most important race for North Carolina voters may be a state Senate race in Rockingham County, where state Senate President Phil Berger is in the fight of his political life against an insurgent rival, Sam Page, the county’s longtime sheriff.
Midterm primaries are typically sleepy affairs. But turnout is approaching presidential election rates in Rockingham County. Trump endorsed Berger and, according to multiple sources, attempted to remove Page from the race by offering him a federal appointment if he dropped his challenge.
Berger is widely viewed as the most powerful Republican politician in North Carolina, which has now begun to work against him in an intensely local race, Clifton said.
“They’re estimating that, when all is said and done, $10 million would have been spent on behalf of the Senate president for a job that pays $17,000 a year,” Clifton said.
