Whatley’s failure and a potential blue wave in NC

Published 8:31 p.m. yesterday

By Alexander H. Jones

Washington, DC Republicans have abandoned their former boss. The Senate Leadership Fund, the NRSC, and another powerful Republican Super PAC have withdrawn much of their funding from Michael Whatley’s Senate campaign, leaving the former RNC Chair marooned in irrelevance and likely to face humiliating defeat. Clearly, the imperative of retaining their party’s Senate majority outstripped any sense of loyalty to Whatley. A lifelong Republican operative has lost his lifeline.

National Republicans made extraordinarily deep investments in North Carolina. Starting earlier this year, the Senate Leadership Fund spent $30 million largely on attack ads against Roy Cooper. It seems that national Republicans were overconfident. Like many observers in DC, the GOP elite may have exaggerated North Carolina’s red lean. They interpreted North Carolina’s persistent support for Republican presidential candidates as evidence that we were a Southern red state, ripe for the seductive charms of conservative demagoguery. The reality is that North Carolina is, yes, Southern, yes, conservative, and, yes, as infected by stubborn spirits of bigotry as any American state. But we are no Mississippi, and Roy Cooper was hardly an easy mark.

Nevertheless they spent. They cut ads telling florid tales of violence, blaming Cooper, and hoped that this racially tinged skullduggery could return North Carolina to the ugliest Southern traditions that made us a red state. It’s hard to know how extensively Whatley influenced the Senate Leadership Fund’s strategy. But his campaign’s official messaging closely resembled the themes of SLF’s ads. Whatley passed out orange placards at his primary-night party reading “Cooper for Criminals,” with a drawing of handcuffs dangling from the lettering. Both Whatley and his (former) DC allies seem to have decided that the way to attack Roy Cooper was to portray him as a quivering apologist for criminals and to lie shamelessly about Cooper’s record. The strategy yielded them no discernible results.

As disgruntled conservatives have observed, the GOP has begun articulating excuses for Whatley’s failure. The easiest copout is to say that Cooper is simply invincible. Cooper’s never lost an election, and Whatley’s failed campaign just puts him in the company of Pat McCrory, Dan Forest, and other hapless opponents who lost to Roy Cooper. This may be true to a degree. But Cooper has had competitive elections. What makes Cooper’s electoral record so impressive is that he has defeated solid Republicans in elections a weaker Democrat probably would have lost. I’m not sure any other Democrat could have beaten Pat McCrory, a Republican incumbent in a Republican wave year. And Cooper’s victory that margin that cycle was extremely thin. Michael Whatley could have made this Senate race competitive with a better campaign.

He did not. This race, in a highly competitive but red-leaning state, has taken the course of a boring procession toward an overdetermined outcome. Given North Carolina’s fundamentals, I think it is fair to say that Whatley fell short of what a generic Republican would have achieved. Michael Whatley has shown that he is simply not a talented politician and has remarkably poor instincts for someone who rose to the pinnacle of the political profession. He chose a deeply misguided message to attack Cooper and never even established himself as a known entity in the state. This was blunt, simple failure.

What Democrats need to do now is to try to make sure Cooper has serious coattails. It has been years, decades really, since the Democratic Party dominated a top-of-the-ballot race here. With Whatley facing abandonment, Republicans have no firewall to shield their candidates from a blue wave. For the first time in this cycle, I think it is possible that Cooper will win by double digits. A win that big would bring a crushing hammer down on the GOP in North Carolina, and possibly reset state politics for years. Fasten your seatbelts.

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