The stakes in North Carolina

Filing is underway so the 2026 election has officially begun.

With filing in full swing in North Carolina, the 2026 election cycle has officially begun. Democrats in the state need it to be a good one. They have a chance to make up for lost ground and the political environment is shaping up to favor them. Republicans, for their part, will to try to curtail access to the ballot to Democratic leaning voters. It will be another fierce fight.

At the top of the ticket, former Governor Roy Cooper will likely face former Republican Party Chair Michael Whatley. Cooper starts with a substantial lead and several advantages. He is well-known throughout the state and begins with high favorability ratings with 50% of the people approving and 35% disapproving, according to a recent Catawba College poll. Republicans will have difficulty defining him because North Carolinians already have an opinion formed by his eight years as governor.

Whatley, in contrast, is largely unknown. He’s never held political office and has spent his life as a political hack. Democrats will be defining him at the same time he is trying to define himself. He will also be saddled with the Trump endorsement. It might help him with MAGA, but he’s going to need the moderate swing voters that are driving Trump’s numbers underwater in the state.

Republicans will attack Cooper on several fronts. They will try to tarnish his record as governor by dredging up the state’s COVID response, blaming Cooper for failing school performance and business closings. They will also go after him on his hurricane response, focusing on the recovery effort following Hurricane Matthew in eastern North Carolina.

Neither attack will work. People want to move on from COVID and generally gave Cooper high marks for handling the pandemic. They aren’t going to decide their vote on it. Any failures around Matthew were limited to a relatively small area where Democrats are weak anyhow. It’s not going to stick as a negative attack.

Republicans will also try to portray Cooper as a culture warrior promoting a radical agenda. It’s a tired attack that won’t work, either. He was governor for eight years. If any of that was true, some of it would have come out by now. Again, they already know Cooper so introducing new information about him will be met with skepticism.

Democrats, for their part, will likely start defining Whatley before he can begin to define himself. They will tie him to Trump, portraying him as a lapdog, indicating that Whatley will be more beholden to the White House than the people of North Carolina. They will hang everything unpopular about Trump around Whatley’s neck, weighing him down as he tries to introduce himself to the people of North Carolina.

Whatley won’t be able to separate himself from Trump when he needs to. He’s wrapped himself around the president, declaring, “The reason I’m running for this race is because President Trump asked me to run in this race.” His fortune will rise or fall with Trump. That die is cast.

Whatley is getting swept up in the division tearing at the GOP right now. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon declared, “Whatley is not MAGA.” Whatley faces two opponents in the GOP primary that he should be able to handle, but that’s the same electorate that nominated Mark Robinson so you never know.

The race could come down to health care. Cooper made Medicaid expansion the crowning achievement of his campaign and worked across the aisle to get it done. In contrast, Trump and the Republicans have voted to strip Medicaid from thousands of North Carolinians and are probably going to allow ACA premiums to skyrocket for thousands of more. Whatley will own the pain.

The other prominent statewide race on the ballot will be for the Supreme Court. Justice Anita Earls is running for re-election. She’s going to be challenged by Republican state Senator Sarah Stevens. Democrats need Earls to hold her seat in order to win back the court when three of the seven seats are up in 2028.

Republicans will portray Earls as a progressive activist for her career as a civil rights lawyer because, you know, civil rights are bad. However, Earls has already faced that line of attack when she won in 2018. She knows what she’s up against.

Their other line of attack will be that Earls is an “activist” judge. That’s rich because this Supreme Court has been the most activist in history. They literally voted to change the rules of an election after the fact. They also threw out tradition and overturned cases recently decided by the previous court. They have legislated from the bench and lost any veneer of being a fair and impartial body.

Stevens, for her part, has been in the legislature for fifteen years. Every vote she’s taken is fair game in this election. She was there when Republicans took power in 2011, stripping health care from families, cutting teacher pay, and politicizing the state’s universities. She also been part of the leadership that failed to pass a budget this year.

In addition to the Supreme Court race, three court of appeals seats will be up. They will have a difficult time cutting through the noise above them, but Democratic activists need to let voters know how important they are. They can stop bad legislation and protect the rights of citizens before they get to the Supreme Court.

In the legislature, Democrats need to expand their one-vote veto-proof House majority to give Governor Josh Stein the power to stop bad legislation. In the Senate, they need to pick up a couple of seats to get to a sustainable veto-proof majority. While the filing in these seats is still unfolding, Democrats appear to have a good recruiting year so far.

The most determinative force in the cycle will be the political environment. The fundamentals favor Democrats. It’s a midterm election which usually means a good year for the party not in the White House. Republicans also control both Houses of Congress so they will get blamed for everything going wrong in the country. Trump has nationalized every election and now Republicans will face the consequences.

I suspect 2026 will be more like 2018 than 2022. If the North Carolina had a Senate race on the ballot in 2018, the state would probably be represented by a Democrat now. Trump may drive his base to the polls, but he also motivates those who oppose him. That’s a formula for a good Democratic year.