Hendersonville, North Carolina
THERE’S BEEN NO SHORTAGE OF MEDIA ATTENTION for dynamic Democratic Senate candidates, especially as the party casts around for new faces to lead it into the future—or at least, with luck, win control of the Senate. Texas’s James Talarico has been the subject of a 9,000-word New Yorker profile; reporters have followed around Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, treating him like a mini-celebrity; and, before his crashout earlier this summer, seemingly every national outlet sent a photographer to Maine to document Graham Platner’s tattooed biceps.

Far less attention has been paid to Roy Cooper, the former North Carolina governor and current Democratic nominee for Senate. Even as poll after poll shows Cooper leading Trump-backed Republican Michael Whatley, making North Carolina increasingly look like it could be the Democratic party’s best pickup opportunity this year, his campaign seems to be flying under the national radar. There’s a case to be made that he likes it that way.

Part of the reason for the Cooper campaign’s low profile is obvious: He’s neither a showman nor a social media star.

I can’t wax poetic about Cooper’s biceps because, unlike those of Platner and El-Sayed, I do not know what the 69-year-old’s upper arms look like. He almost always wears a suit jacket and a button-up shirt. I can’t offer you a buzzy piece about Cooper’s savvy social media strategy, because it doesn’t exist.¹ And I can’t give you a colorful story about his career as something unexpected, like an oyster farmer or seminarian, because Cooper has been an elected official since 1987.

In a political age where success is increasingly determined by a candidate’s ability to get attention and go viral, Cooper campaigns like the internet still runs on dial-up. His first TV ad was so basic and gimmick-free it felt like it was from a different era. His campaign slogan is aggressively simple: “Make Stuff Cost Less.” For the past few weeks, he’s been traveling the state on his “Make Stuff Cost Less Tour,” often repeating one of his favorite lines: “For too many North Carolina families, there’s just too much month at the end of the money.”

He talks about high utility costs, rising grocery prices, his record as governor addressing crime, and the federal government’s failure to take care of Hurricane Helene victims. And he hasn’t leaned into Resistance-style rhetoric. Cooper refers to Donald Trump as “this president” or “this administration,” but rarely by name.

Can such a simple—if not downright old-fashioned—approach to politics really be what flips a North Carolina Senate seat blue for the first time since 2008, particularly in an election cycle largely defined by voter frustration with the status quo?

“It doesn’t have to be all glitterati and clicks,” said John Anzalone, a top Democratic pollster who has worked with Cooper since 1996. “Sometimes meatloaf and potatoes is just the most comfortable food that you can have on a certain day. And Roy Cooper is a super comfortable candidate to North Carolina voters.”

When I asked Anzalone if Cooper was, dare I say it, “boring,” he argued the question missed the point.

“He’s anything but boring. I think he’s authentic. And what is boring to the ivory tower, the media class, or the political activists, is really important to real people. So that’s where I just think that they’re off,” said Anzalone. “This guy connects at a different level.”

That may be true. When I arrived at the Oklawaha Brewing Company in western North Carolina last week for Cooper’s roughly twentieth stop on his tour, more than a hundred people were crammed into the bar. As supporters fanned themselves with “Make Stuff Cost Less” posters and ordered pints of frothy beer to keep cool in the August heat, I asked attendees what it was about Cooper that had him up nine points, according to a recent Fox News poll.

Martha Oldham Huggins, an independent, told me it was his “folksy” demeanor. Wanda Hembree, a lifelong Democrat from Morganton, highlighted Cooper’s “sincerity, his fairness.” And after watching her congressman, Republican Chuck Edwards, abruptly end his re-election bid earlier this month amid reports of inappropriate conduct toward female staffers, Shannon Davis Zaragoza said she was just looking for someone who “wasn’t shaking things up or causing anything to be ashamed of.”

As Morgan Jackson, Cooper’s longtime political adviser, explained it to me: “Voters are so frustrated with the status quo, they feel like D.C. is broken. . . . And what people are looking for when they want change is people who will get stuff done.”

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BUT JACKSON IS THE FIRST to admit that, while Cooper’s regular-guy appeal helped him get elected four times as attorney general and twice as governor, federal races are a different beast.

The North Carolina Democratic Party’s recent success winning governorships, lieutenant governorships, attorney general races, and Supreme Court seats hasn’t transferred into presidential or Senate victories. The last Democrat to win a Senate seat in the state was Kay Hagan, who defeated GOP Sen. Elizabeth Dole in 2008 before losing her re-election bid to Thom Tillis in 2014.² Barack Obama was the last Democratic candidate to carry the state at the presidential level, winning by less than half a percentage point in 2008.

Even so, Dems remain competitive. Unlike states such as Florida—which has gotten far Trumpier over the three elections that the owner of Mar-a-Lago has appeared on the ballot—the GOP’s presidential margin of victory in North Carolina has remained slim. Mitt Romney won the state in 2012 by 2.0 points while Trump has carried the state by 1.3 to 3.7 points. Those shouldn’t be insurmountable numbers for Democrats. And yet, even as North Carolina has been one of the