ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. — The Friday night before Christmas would seem an inopportune time to schedule a political rally.
Yet there was President Donald Trump, holding forth in eastern North Carolina for an hour and a half, touting his record and making an early push for Michael Whatley, his handpicked candidate for a critical open Senate seat.
Trump's approval ratings have been dropping nationally and he's enmeshed in sagas far removed from the financial burdens that have left many Americans unnerved, including the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and the renaming of the Kennedy Center. But as has largely been the case with other Republican leaders, Whatley has Velcroed himself to president, who remains largely popular with rank-and-file GOP voters.
"Donald Trump right now is the most transformational president in our lifetime," Whatley said, when Trump invited him on stage.
"And President Trump, my pledge to you is this: When I win this seat ... I'm going to be a conservative champion for North Carolina and I'm going to be an ally to our great president."
Trump personally recruited Whatley, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, to enter the race and sorely needs him to hang on to retiring Sen. Thom Tillis' seat for the GOP next November.
If Democrats can flip it, they’ll have taken a giant step toward erasing the GOP’s four-seat advantage in the Senate for the back half of Trump’s term.
Maine, Michigan and Georgia are the other three battleground races that are considered toss-ups in the 2026 elections. Democrats' path to the Senate majority involves winning all four toss-ups, plus two more states that Trump won by double digits last year. So if Democrats fail to pick up North Carolina, their chance of capturing the Senate all but vanishes, analysts say.
Aware of the stakes, Trump phoned Whatley unexpectedly after Tillis' announcement this summer with not so much a request as a command.
"The president called and said, 'With Sen. Tillis not running, here's the deal. You're going to run, you're going to win and you're going to do great. So, congratulations,'" Whatley recalled in an interview.
That won't be easy. In former Gov. Roy Cooper, Democrats have fielded "the best Senate candidate they've had in decades — someone proven to get Trump voters," said Jessica Taylor, an editor at the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, which handicaps elections.
Cooper, the Democrats’ likely nominee, won races for governor in 2016 and 2020 even as Trump carried North Carolina at the presidential level in both elections.
“We know that Roy Cooper is formidable. He came out of office as a relatively popular governor, unscathed from what a typical politician, Democratic politician, would experience,” said a Republican operative involved in Senate races, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. The operative noted Cooper did not face well-funded opponents in his previous races, and that would not be the case next year.
North Carolina Republicans said they recognize that Whatley, who has run both the national and state Republican Party apparatus but has never held elective office, will have a tough road ahead.
“It’s going to be a fight,” acknowledged Kyle Kirby, Republican Party chairman for Mecklenburg County, which is one of the largest in the state and leans Democratic.
Some trouble for Whatley on the right
Both parties expect that the race could shatter spending records for a Senate contest, with Whatley estimating that the total could reach $800 million by Election Day. Cooper has already raised more than $10.9 million as of Sept. 30, while Whatley's collected nearly $1.4 million, according to the latest campaign finance reports.
Whatley has at least one high-profile friend positioned to make him better known: His former co-chair at the Republican National Committee, Lara Trump, who is married to the president's son, Eric. She hosts a show on Fox News called “My View.”
“We’re definitely planning on a ‘My View’ episode with Michael Whatley on,” Lara Trump told NBC News in an interview.
“He spent a lot of time on TV over the course of the 2024 election,” she added. “I do think people will remember his name and face. Maybe they need a refresher or a reminder. Maybe my show can help with that.”
Even with Trump's endorsement, Whatley is facing some unwanted competition for the Republican nomination. One challenger is Michele Morrow, who ousted the incumbent in a GOP primary race for state superintendent of public instruction last year before losing in the general election.
What's more, some Republicans say they are underwhelmed by Whatley's appearance on the ballot.
Last week, at a “Tacky Christmas Sweater Party” in Charlotte hosted by a local Young Republicans group, some guests said they’d prefer to see Lara Trump, a North Carolina native, run instead.
“Michael Whatley is an awful candidate,” said Sean Conway, 30, who lives in Charlotte, eating a slice of pizza at a table with other Young Republicans. “I don’t know why Trump endorsed Whatley so early; it was a mistake.”
Sitting across from him was a 35-year-old who declined to give his name. “The chances of beating a guy like Cooper are astronomically low,” the man said in an interview.
Steve Bannon, who was a senior White House adviser in Trump’s first term, said on his podcast that Whatley is “not MAGA and one of the reasons he’s running so poorly in North Carolina if you talk to the MAGA folks down there, they’re just not enthusiastic about it.”
Don Brown, another Republican running for the GOP Senate nomination, said in an interview that the Trump rally last week was an unmistakeable clue that Whatley is proving to be a tough sell.
“Read the tea leaves,” Brown said. “Why would you have to bring him [Trump] in this early unless you’re seeing [poll] numbers that concern them?”
Others said that the president's blessing testifies to Whatley's credentials.
"I don't expect Michael to distance himself in any way from this president," Lara Trump said. "He never has. I don't believe he ever will. He knows that the president has the right formula to make sure we get things moving in the right direction."
She praised Whatley's managerial skills. When the pair took charge of the RNC last year, she said, “frankly, it was a mess.”
“There was a lot to clean up. A lot of heavy lifting to do in a short amount of time and it was in large part because of Michael’s leadership and his understanding of how to get things done in an effective way” that served to “really cut the fat out of the RNC.”
As for her own political future, she left open the prospect of running for office in North Carolina some day.
“For me right now, I live in Florida with my family,” she said. “This is the place we’re going to be for the foreseeable future.”
“At the right time and if I’m in North Carolina that would be a great opportunity,” she added. “But currently, if I’m not in it I think Michael is the next best person.”
Trump's North Carolina staying power
With Trump’s approval ratings sinking, Democrats’ strategy might seem clear-cut: Tie Whatley to the struggling president. But that’s not the Cooper campaign’s approach.
Trump has proved a resilient force in North Carolina, one Democratic strategist said. It's the only battleground state Trump has won all three times he’s been on the ballot, most recently by 3 percentage points. What’s more, Republicans have virtually wiped out a voter registration advantage that Democrats have held in North Carolina for years. (Independents have grown in numbers and now constitute a plurality of registered voters.)
Making Trump the face of the anti-Whatley campaign is a losing bet, people close to the Cooper campaign said. For the last decade, a string of North Carolina Democrats have tried to tarnish Trump, with little to show for the effort, they said.
Morgan Jackson, a Cooper campaign adviser, described Whatley as a “wholly owned creation of Donald Trump” who “rotates around in Trump’s orbit all day.”
That said, the Cooper campaign is talking less about Trump than about the cost of living and what they see as Whatley’s insider status. The idea is to avoid antagonizing Trump supporters and instead paint Whatley as a creature of Washington who has lost touch with everyday North Carolinians, Democratic strategists said.
“Trump has a certain amount of Teflon to him that doesn’t extend to other Republican candidates,” Jackson said. “Voters don’t give other candidates the same pass they give Trump. They get judged on their positions and what they say way more harshly.”
“You’ll see our campaign talk about issues that voters are concerned about and focus laser-like on affordability and how to reduce costs.”
Cooper's campaign did not make him available for comment for this story.
Whatley worked as a lobbyist for over a decade between stints in government and as a party leader.
Lobbying disclosure documents show the Consumer Energy Alliance, an advocacy group tied to Whatley’s firm, was one of his major clients.
The group’s members including some of the largest oil and gas companies, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell USA.
During his time as a lobbyist and as an executive vice president of the Consumer Energy Alliance, Whatley advocated for offshore drilling and supported the Keystone XL pipeline. Whatley served as vice president of Consumer Energy Alliance until 2019, when he became chairman of the North Carolina GOP.
In an interview in Raleigh, Whatley played up his North Carolina roots. As state Republican chair he said he made a point to visit all 100 counties in North Carolina each year, as the odometer on his 2015 GMC Sierra attests. He has logged 380,000 miles.
He also defended his record as a businessman.
“I spent 15 years working in the energy industry and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how you buy affordable, reliable electricity, which we desperately need in North Carolina,” Whatley said.
Wearing a button-down shirt, jacket and cowboy boots, he said, “In terms of defending a record of fighting for rational, balanced energy policies, I’m actually fairly proud of that.”
Any Republican senator walking the halls of the U.S. Capitol gets questions from the media about Trump’s steady stream of controversial statements.
Last week, after the actor and director Rob Reiner was murdered, Trump politicized the episode, posting about Reiner’s anti-Trump views. Whatley declined to weigh in.
“I don’t have any comment on that,” he said.
