Does Michael Whatley have a path to victory?

 Polling continues to show bleak prospects for Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley. Most recently, a Republican-affiliated group found Whatley to be nine points behind former Governor Roy Cooper. Cooper has led in every single publicly available poll since the beginning of the race and leads Whatley in fundraising by millions of dollars. This is when candidates have to get creative, to find a path. The question here is whether such a path even exists. 

Whatley has sought to frame this race with the populist blueprint his party has increasingly favored since the rise of Trump. Despite his tony pedigree and Washington experience, Whatley wanted to portray himself as the tobacco-chewing tribune of the plebs leading a revolt against elites like, well, Roy Cooper. Early in the race Whatley made ludicrous comments about how Cooper represents “San Francisco values” and charged that Roy Cooper was a leftist like Zohran Mamdani. The irony is that he made many of these comments at a local tap room named after the Loray textile mill, site of one of the most violent worker crackdowns in US labor history. 

Whatley desperately wants to turn this campaign into a rerun of the populist GOP playbook. He has identified himself with Trump and Trumpism, and made wild claims that Roy Cooper (D-Rocky Mount) is a New York-California-Purgatory-Hell left-wing radical. But how about the right-wing radicalism Whatley has espoused in his years as a top pro-Trump operative? Whatley heaped lavish praise on The Black Nazi Formerly Known as Minisoldr. From Mark Robinson (the “best lieutenant governor in America,” per Whatley) to the Big Beautiful Bill and all its Medicaid cuts, Whatley has given a giant bear hug to the least popular items in the Republican milieu. 

Whatley’s decision to posture as a populist reflected his orthodox political thinking. As a loyal GOP apparatchik, the former RNC chair sought to rerun his party’s populist successes in presidential races and some downballot contests. But Whatley’s blinkered partisanship was incompatible with the dynamics of recent North Carolina history. MAGA populists have done far worse here than in other Southern red states. In 2024, in fact, every MAGA candidate on the state ballot lost even as Donald Trump himself narrowly carried the state. In a suburbanizing, increasingly cosmopolitan state, successful Republicans have tended to resemble Thom Tillis or Richard Burr more than JD Vance or Kari Lake. 

But here Whatley is, the Trumper in full, trying to ride the magic carpet of MAGA up the marble steps of the Capitol. He has locked himself into a disadvantageous position. MAGA populism has not translated to downballot success in North Carolina. And the Sun King of the MAGA realm is rapidly losing popularity here. Generally, Donald Trump has received approval ratings of about 42% positive to 55% negative in North Carolina. It may be a bit hard to believe that Trump has grown so weak here given his repeated victories. But both George W. Bush and Barack Obama became bitterly unpopular in North Carolina despite winning the state. We’re a red-leaning state. We are not a state of partisan drones. 

I think it is very unlikely that the political environment will improve for Republicans. The deterioration in their standing is being driven by Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s disastrous policy decisions. Trump is an 80-year-old man with severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Things do not get better for 80-year-old men with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. 

Michael Whatley faces a conundrum. He is deeply tied to an unpopular president, and yet he is still disliked by the most pro-Trump members of his base. Despite advertising himself as “Trump-endorsed” Michael Whatley, Whatley lost 35% of the primary vote to more-MAGA candidates who portrayed him as a squishy quisling. Now he is trapped. He could (try to) become even more populist and pro-Trump—but this would further reduce his standing among swing voters, who increasingly dislike the president. Or he could move to the center—but all that would seem to do would be to confirm MAGA suspicions that he was a traitor to the cause. 

It is extremely difficult to imagine a path to victory for Michael Whatley. He has no credible way of attacking his opponent and he is trapped in a binding, but unsatisfactory, embrace of Donald Trump and MAGA. Perhaps the political environment will be radically transformed and Donald Trump will become an asset to Whatley rather than a mentally unstable menace to democracy. Perhaps pigs will fly—but I’ve never seen one sprout wings.