Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, will run for the U.S. Senate seat Republican Thom Tillis is vacating.
Cooper announced his bid Monday morning before business hours in a post to social media lamenting the degradation of the middle class under Republican leadership in D.C.
“It wasn’t always this hard, because being in the middle class meant something,” Cooper opened in a 2.5-minute video.
“You could afford a home, your kids went to good schools, your job paid enough to cover the basics and most Summers you could get away for a few days. For the most part, life was pretty good.”
But now, Cooper said, “the middle class feels like a distant dream.”
“Meanwhile, the biggest corporations and the richest Americans have grabbed unimaginable wealth at your expense. It’s time for that to change.”
Cooper has long mulled a U.S. Senate bid, and sources with knowledge of his thinking told various media outlets an announcement was imminent last week.
Cooper served two terms as Governor until last year, when term limits kicked in and he was replaced by fellow Democrat Josh Stein, the state’s former Attorney General.
Tillis’ announcement that he won’t seek re-election presents a rare pickup opportunity in the Tar Heel state, where Democrats have consistently fallen just short of capturing a Senate seat despite having success in other statewide elections.
Cooper’s candidacy is expected to make the race one of the most competitive nationwide in the 2026 Midterm cycle, as Democrats fight to retake a majority in the upper chamber of Congress.
Already, Cooper is setting the stage to appeal to North Carolina voters’ pocketbooks and sense of place.
“I grew up in Nash County working on the farm every Summer,” Cooper continued in his announcement, his token folksy cadence on full display. “My mom was a public schoolteacher, my dad a small town lawyer and farmer. It’s where I started my family, taught Sunday school for years and started my law practice that helped everyday people and small businesses.”
He touted his record as the former North Carolina Attorney General, a position he held from 2001 to 2017, when he was elected Governor. He noted that his work involved taking on “scammers, big banks and drug companies” while balancing the state budget each year and working with Republicans to raise teacher pay, recruit job creators, and expand Medicaid.
“But right now our country is facing a moment as fragile as any I can remember, and the decisions we make in the next election will determine if we even have a middle class anymore,” he cautioned.
“I never really wanted to go to Washington; I just wanted to serve the people of North Carolina right here, where I’ve lived all my life. But these are not ordinary times. Politicians in D.C. are running up our debt, ripping away our health care, disrespecting our veterans, cutting help for the poor and even putting Medicare and Social Security at risk just to give tax breaks to billionaires. That’s wrong, and I’ve had enough.”
Recent polling shows Cooper locked in a tie with a generic Republican on the statewide ballot for Senate, according to Newsweek. The poll put Cooper at 48% support, the same as a generic Republican, with 4% undecided.
That aligns with North Carolina’s voter registration data and historical performance on statewide ballots, where Democrats have emerged victorious in statewide races for state seats but have lost presidential and U.S. Senate contests in recent years.
North Carolina’s voting population is split at approximately 31% each for Democrats and Republicans, with Democrats holding a statistically insignificant voter registration advantage of about a tenth of a percentage point. Nearly 38% of North Carolina voters are nonpartisan, according to L2 voter data.
It’s worth noting that polling from late May, before Tillis bowed out of the race, also according to Newsweek, showed Cooper with a lead in a matchup against the incumbent, with Cooper at 49% support compared to just 31% support for Tillis.
While that could be an outlier, it’s a telling piece of the puzzle in the race; incumbents typically enjoy an edge. However, it could signal that North Carolina voters are turned off by the recent politics of Washington, where President Donald Trump’s control seems almost complete, with Republican majorities, even if slight, in both the House and Senate.
Another poll, conducted by Change Research/Carolina Forward this year, found Cooper in a far tighter race against Tillis, with Cooper leading 46% to 44% and holding a Slight advantage.
Jeff Jackson, North Carolina’s current Attorney General, also considered running as a Democrat, but has said he would support Cooper if Cooper gets in the race, according to WRAL.
Tillis was first elected to the seat in 2014. Last month, he publicly came out against Trump’s massive tax and budget package, dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” arguing it was a tax-and-spend measure that included cuts to Medicaid and would be politically unpopular. He warned ahead of voting against the bill that it risked breaking promises to Trump voters and was the “biggest risk” to Trump’s legacy.
While his remarks were supportive of the President, going against a Trump priority all but guaranteed a Primary opponent, a threat that Trump indeed made.
“I told the President in another text, ‘Now’s the time to start looking for my replacement because I don’t deal with that kind of bullsh*t,’” Tillis said, according to CNN.
On the Republican side, Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair and former North Carolina GOP leader Michael Whatley has said he will run for the seat, after former RNC Chair Lara Trump, the President’s daughter-in-law, declined to run. Whatley will run with President Trump’s blessing.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Wiley Nickel is already in the race. He has not said whether he would step aside in favor of a Cooper candidacy, though he also did not rule it out, according to POLITICO.
