North Carolina is once again on track to host one of the most expensive elections in American history — this time for an open US Senate seat in 2026, with spending projected at $600–$800 million. The contest is shaping up around former Democratic governor Roy Cooper and former North Carolina Republican Party and Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley. Yet the sheer scale of the spending cannot be explained by résumés alone.
North Carolina is a perpetual battleground, not merely because it is closely divided, but because its recent election history has taught political actors on both sides that it is always worth fighting over.
A December 2025 working paper by economist Patrick Testa of Tulane University helps explain why states like North Carolina rarely exit the political spotlight once they enter it. Published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the paper offers a general framework for understanding how elections shape future political investment — and why some places become magnets for money, attention, and organizational effort long after any single cycle has ended.
That framework fits North Carolina almost perfectly.
Elections as signals, not just outcomes
Testa’s central insight is that elections do more than select officeholders. They also serve as public signals that coordinate future political investment. Donors, party committees, activists, and allied organizations want to invest where their efforts will matter — but they also want to invest where others will invest. Recent election results help solve that coordination problem.
Close elections are especially powerful signals. They indicate that underlying fundamentals are competitive — and that marginal resources could plausibly change the outcome. When those signals recur, investment becomes self-reinforcing.
North Carolina has sent that signal for years. A long run of narrow presidential and Senate races — from Thom Tillis’s 2014 victory through his close reelection in 2020 and another competitive race in 2022 — has made clear that neither party can safely disengage. As Dr. Chris Cooper notes in “Anatomy of a Purple State” (2024), durable partisan competition is the norm. Testa’s framework explains why the national spotlight never fades: each close result justifies continued investment, but none is decisive enough to end it.
SCARCITY TURNS COMPETITIVENESS INTO A FLOOD
This dynamic is amplified by today’s national landscape. As ideological sorting has locked most states into predictable red or blue camps, the number of true Senate and presidential battlegrounds has sharply declined. In 2026, only a handful of Senate races are expected to be genuinely competitive.
Scarcity concentrates capital. That is why North Carolina is projected to attract $600–$800 million in Senate spending this cycle. The escalation reflects a rational response to fewer opportunities combined with a long record of close outcomes. North Carolina is one of just three true Senate battlegrounds in 2026, alongside Georgia and Maine — ensuring that national money, once spread broadly, now floods a few states.
Testa also shows that political investment has the greatest impact where organizational infrastructure already exists. Money works best when it can plug into dense networks of campaigns, donors, volunteers, and media markets.
North Carolina has spent years building that infrastructure. Repeatedly competitive races have created an ecosystem capable of absorbing ever-larger sums, even as advertising returns diminish. At that point, spending becomes less about persuasion than defense — maintaining parity and denying the other side uncontested ground. The result is a ratchet effect: roughly $120 million in 2014, nearly $300 million in 2020, and higher projections today.
Everything that makes North Carolina a Senate battleground also makes it a presidential one. Repeatedly close margins activate the same organizational networks and coordination logic: once a state proves it can swing, ignoring it becomes political negligence.
Testa’s framework shows why this equilibrium is hard to escape. Close elections invite investment; investment sustains competitiveness; and competitiveness produces more close elections. Absent a run of decisive outcomes, North Carolina remains locked in perpetual contention.
The lesson is institutional, not partisan.
North Carolina is not a battleground because of any single candidate or trend, but because its recent history has taught political actors that it is always close enough to matter. The result is an expensive and exhausting politics — one that, for better or worse, is not going away.
