“It’s not that Roy Cooper should run for Senate,” my friend Sam said over lunch. “He has to run.”
He’s right.
America’s house is on fire, and we all have to pick up a hose or a bucket.
Governor Cooper has the best chance to unseat Senator Thom Tillis next year and become the decisive vote and voice in Washington that reins in Trump.
There are worse Republican Senators than Tillis, a conventional conservative who was censured by the state GOP convention in 2023 for working with Democrats on LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and gun violence.
But Tillis has shown, again and again, that he doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to Trump.
Other Democrats may run if Cooper doesn’t: Hampton Dellinger, Dan McCready, Michael Regan, Deb Ross.
Wiley Nickel is already running, but I don’t see a lot of enthusiasm for him.
2026 could be one of those rare years that favors a Democrat in a North Carolina Senate race, like 1974 (Robert Morgan), 1986 (Terry Sanford), 1998 (John Edwards) and 2008 (Kay Hagan).
But this is about more than political calculation.
This is about saving America from Trump: his economic chaos, his cruel crackdown on immigrants, his contempt for our freedoms, his “Big Beautiful Bill” that digs us trillions of dollars deeper into debt and slashes healthcare for millions of people, and his assault on science, medicine, research and education.
Governor Cooper could be forgiven for thinking he and his family have given enough to North Carolina.
But he must answer the call of history.
He must run.
