If Democrats are to have any hope of retaking the Senate this fall, then Roy Cooper, the former North Carolina governor, must flip the seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, in one of the most anticipated races of the 2026 midterms. The stakes of the race have already led to an influx of cash and media attention: Cooper, who will likely be running against former RNC chair Michael Whatley, set fundraising records the day after announcing his candidacy last July, in a contest that could be one of the most expensive in history.
For North Carolinians like me, long before Cooper had the fate of the Senate resting on his shoulders, he was a familiar fixture in state politics. Cooper joined the state legislature in 1987 before serving four consecutive terms as the state attorney general, then winning the governorship in 2016 and again in 2020.
As a state politician, Cooper’s style was often about getting results, even when it meant working with Republicans or breaking with his own party. As governor, he’s remembered for working with Republicans to repeal HB2, which prohibited transgender people from using public restrooms aligned with their gender identity, and for passing Medicaid expansion with bipartisan support. But his gubernatorial career was also defined by a contentious relationship with state Republicans who held a supermajority in the legislature—and thus the ability to overturn Cooper’s vetoes—for four of his eight years in the office. As governor, Cooper vetoed 104 bills. Republicans overturned half of those.
I remember Cooper campaigning for his first gubernatorial bid on my college’s campus and sitting courtside at basketball games. To me, he seemed like he could’ve been a classmate’s dad.
Despite those political battles, Cooper has managed to remain pretty well liked by voters in a long-time purple state growing redder (thanks, in part, to newly drawn congressional maps). North Carolina has the country’s second largest rural population and, to reach these voters, Cooper often touts his upbringing in rural Eastern North Carolina as an indicator of his trustworthiness. North Carolinians will be familiar with his stories of cropping tobacco on his family’s farm during the summers and his frequent reminders that his mother was a public school teacher.
I remember Cooper campaigning for his first gubernatorial bid on my college’s campus and sitting courtside at basketball games. To me, he seemed like he could’ve been a classmate’s dad. He ate Bojangles. He liked Cheerwine. He’s a self-described “caniac”—a fan of the North Carolina hockey team, the Carolina Hurricanes. But will this nice-guy appeal be enough to propel Cooper to victory when the stakes are higher than ever? Recently, I traveled to Nash County, where Cooper grew up, to find out.
I’m from Eastern North Carolina, about an hour and a half from Nash County. I’ve spent a lot of time driving through this area and have become familiar with the landscape: lots of pine, oak, and maple trees; state roads curving through small towns; plenty of lakes, rivers, and creeks. Driving around Nash County feels familiar, with its rows of crops—this time of year, likely cabbage or collards. Nash has strong railroad ties, so I often bumped over tracks as I drove around.
While some parts of Nash County feel like forgotten ghost towns, others are seeing a surge of new development. Rocky Mount Mills, once a thriving cotton mill at the center of the county’s largest city, is now a bustling campus with bars and businesses where locals and visitors gather.
In nearby counties, it’s become common to see a Trump flag hanging next to a Confederate flag or Trump signs outside of homes, businesses, or roadside produce stands. But driving through Nash that day, the only political ad I saw was from a 2022 congressional campaign. Nash County’s political allegiances are a bit of a mystery, with the rural county emerging as a bellwether in recent elections. Since 2012, the county has supported the winning candidate in each US presidential election. And when President Donald Trump won the county (and the state) in 2016, so did Cooper.
I drove into Rocky Mount and stopped at a coffee shop, where I saw a chalk sandwich board that read, “Welcome. All are friends.” A few of the employees said they didn’t know enough about Cooper to have strong opinions about him. Opinions about Cooper around town are “mixed,” one barista told me.
While in Nash, I met with Harris Walker, a Rocky Mount native running for North Carolina General Assembly, at a burger spot. As a kid, Walker volunteered for one of Cooper’s earlier state assembly runs, helping distribute pamphlets.
I asked if Cooper’s long political career in the state had inspired Walker to run for office. “When he was representing Nash County he always fought for what would improve the livelihoods of people right here. Yeah, that did inspire me,” Walker said. “Watching Roy come from here and be able to follow that trajectory was important.”
Walker knew he wanted to go into politics one day, so when he was a teenager, Cooper sponsored him to be a legislative page in the state’s General Assembly. When Walker’s grandparents died during Cooper’s tenure as attorney general, Cooper attended their funerals, where he sat in the back. “It wasn’t a campaign thing for him,” Walker said. “That’s Roy Cooper.”
Still at the burger spot, I asked my waitress what she thought of Cooper as I paid my bill. She turned her head to the side. “Who’s that?” I briefly went through Cooper’s bio. “Oh, I think I like him? Well, I think I voted for him,” she replied.
Before he was going toe-to-toe with lawmakers in Raleigh, Cooper was a managing partner at the law firm his father co-founded, Fields & Cooper, in the town of Nashville. In 1997, he hired Mark Edwards, a Nash County native who’d just graduated from law school at Wake Forest University. Edwards, who chaired the Nash County Republican Party from 2009 until last year, surmises that Cooper’s time in the smaller firm in Nashville helped prepare him for his role as attorney general. “He just has a very practical demeanor about himself and is able to relate to almost anyone in any circumstance,” Edwards said. “I could see that when he was practicing law and I could see that when he was serving as attorney general.”
Walker told me he thinks many folks are proud that Cooper is from Nash County, but Edwards wonders if the national stage of a US Senate race will change that. “It’s going to be a much more partisan affair, and if he were to win, I’ll be curious to see if there’s that same feeling,” Edwards said.
Later in the day, I drove into Rocky Mount’s downtown and met Cassandra Conover, who chairs the Nash County Democratic Party, at the party’s headquarters near an old train station. Conover and her husband, John, moved to Nash County from Petersburg, Virginia, just before the pandemic. Conover, who was a longtime prosecutor in Virginia, wasn’t surprised to hear that some people were un-opinionated about Cooper. She explained that there’s a “level of apathy” about politics in the county. But she hopes that’s changing. Each of the county’s 24 voting precincts enlists a chair to help organize elections and reach voters in their precincts, but when Conover arrived, most of the positions were vacant. Now, all but one precinct is chaired.
Because Cooper’s a familiar name around town, Conover thinks voters in the county are comfortable with him as a candidate. Cooper “has demonstrated the things that make him more credible and more authentic,” Conover said. “And that’s what the voters right here are looking for.”
“He was the governor for all the people,” Roberson said. “And going into the Senate, I feel that he’ll be a Senator for all of the people.”
Nearly everyone I spoke to recalled Cooper coming back to Nash County for various reasons: to attend funerals, birthday parties, community events, and to visit and care for his aging parents.
Morris Roberson, whose brothers attended Northern Nash High School (one of the first Rocky Mount schools to integrate) with Cooper and played with him on the football team there, remembered Cooper visiting Rocky Mount for the 85th birthday party of his high school basketball coach, Bobby Dunn. Cooper attended the event wearing his high school letterman jacket and shared a few words with the crowd. Roberson thinks Cooper will “represent the masses” if elected to the Senate. “He was the governor for all the people,” Roberson said. “And going into the Senate, I feel that he’ll be a Senator for all of the people.”
Brenda Brown, the Republican mayor of Nashville, lived next to Cooper’s parents for years. Just a few years older than the former governor, Brown remembers Cooper as a “regular Nash County boy with ambitions.” Despite their political disagreements, Brown describes Cooper as a “great person.” “He hasn’t lost the connection with Nashville, and it is appreciated,” Brown said.
Echoing the barista I spoke to earlier, Brown said that now, opinions are “mixed” when it comes to Cooper. “I think he still has a lot of respect from our county for what he did as governor, but at the same time, I think there’s some people that were disappointed,” she said.
Of course, not all Republicans take as favorable a view of Cooper. State Republicans—including Whatley—blamed the August murder of a passenger on a Charlotte light-rail train on Cooper’s “soft on crime” policies. Cooper has also been repeatedly criticized by Republicans for how his administration handled disaster relief efforts after Hurricane Helene. Under his administration, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, which assists homeowners with disaster recovery efforts, was mismanaged and left many hurricane victims displaced.
While the latest polling shows Cooper with a comfortable lead on Whatley, only Election Day will prove whether Cooper’s homegrown persona is enough to win a national race. To do so, he’ll have to not only win urban areas like Raleigh and Charlotte, but also minimize his losses in some of the state’s more conservative rural counties—where trailing Whatley by 10, 15, or even 25 points would be a triumph for any Democrat. If Cooper can repeat his performance as a gubernatorial candidate and “lose less badly” in those counties, he may be on track to victory, said Asher Hildebrand, a professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. “That is important at a time when many voters—especially right of center voters—feel kind of looked down on by today’s Democratic Party,” Hildebrand said.
Though Democratic candidates on both ends of the spectrum—from democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to moderate Abigail Spanberger—celebrated victories in November’s elections, politicians like Cooper are an increasingly rare breed. In many ways, Cooper is a “bridge” between the Democratic Party of the last century and the party today, Hildebrand said.
When he was elected governor, Cooper was a relatively moderate former state AG with an “ideological pragmatism” reminiscent of 20th-century Democratic governors, who valued getting work done over party allegiance, Hildebrand said. But though he never lost that results-oriented approach, his governorship also came in an era of increased partisan fighting and ideological orthodoxy, shaped by what Hildebrand describes as “a political ecosystem that rewards stridency over compromise.” Somehow, Cooper has managed to hold on to his nice-guy reputation despite that—at least in his home county. In North Carolina, where unaffiliated voters outnumber both major parties, Cooper’s likability could be valuable.
“He has an ability to connect with voters in a way that is authentic and respectful and doesn’t look down on them,” Hildebrand said. Cooper’s style is “a throwback to politics as it once was. It’s a throwback that I think a lot of voters still want in this era.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.