Where the Cooper-Whatley race really stands
A ton of polls hit last week. On the surface, they look all over the place. Underneath, they’re telling a pretty consistent story.
Now that we’re past the primary, we got a blitz of polls over the past week gauging the U.S. Senate race between former Gov. Roy Cooper and Republican Michael Whatley.
At first glance, they seem to be all over the place:
PPP: Cooper 47, Whatley 44, undecided 9 (Cooper + 3)
Carolina Journal: Cooper 49, Whatley 41, other 4, undecided 6 (Cooper + 8)
Quantus Insights: Cooper 48.6, Whatley 43.8, other 1.9, undecided 5.7 (Cooper + 5)
Healthier United: Cooper 50, Whatley 32, Shannon Bray 4, undecided 14 (Cooper +18)
Catawba College: Cooper 48, Whatley 34, undecided 14 (Cooper + 14)
As I’ve written before, poll reading is as much art as it is science. We know Cooper is ahead. But is he up three, or is he up 18?
I think the answer is that the polls look more different than they really are, and the biggest reason is how they treat undecided voters.
Some pollsters push respondents harder. They ask leaners where they are leaning and try to force a softer choice. Others cast a wider net and allow a much broader undecided bucket. People are much more likely to tell a pollster they are “unsure” than they are to walk into the voting booth with no real preference at all. That’s especially true when they may have never heard of one of the candidates.
Obviously, Whatley is going to get more than 32 percent of the vote. We learned in 2024 exactly where the floor is for a statewide Republican candidate’s support, and it’s at 40%. Whatley is not Mark Robinson.
So the question is not whether Whatley gets off the floor. He will. The question is how high he gets.
Plenty of right-leaning unaffiliateds will come home once the race is better defined. Some will not. A lot of them just won’t vote at all.
Then you have unaffiliated voters who are just alienated and unhappy with both parties. That’s why I think polls that do not ask about Libertarian Shannon Bray are missing something crucial. In a pessimistic electorate, a small protest vote is more likely to be meaningful.
Then there is turnout. Trump is not on the ballot and turnout is going to be a problem for Republicans.
Cooper isn’t going to win many actual Trump voters, but he does not need to. If a chunk of softer Trump voters are unengaged in a non-presidential race and stay home, that has basically the same effect. In other words, Whatley’s risk is not really mass crossover. It is drop-off.
The question is not whether Republican voters prefer him to Cooper. Of course they do. The question is whether enough of them are engaged enough to show up when Trump himself is not on the ballot.
The history points in the same direction.
North Carolina Senate races are usually close, or at least close-ish.
U.S. Sen. Ted Budd won 50.5 to 47.25 in 2022
Sen. Thom Tillis won 48.7 to 47 in 2020.
Former Sen. Richard Burr won 51-45 in 2016.
Tillis won 49-47 in 2014.
Burr won 55-43 in 2010.
Even clear wins here usually happen in the low 50s, not the mid-50s.
That is why I do not think a 55-40 type result is the likeliest read of this race.
The closer analogue is something like former Sen. Kay Hagan’s 52.6 to 44 win in 2008 against former Sen. Elizabeth Dole. You’ve got a Democrat with a favorable environment, a Republican who is not collapsing but still cannot quite get where they need to be, and a result that is clear without being apocalyptic.
I’m not doing any statistical analysis of these polls. I’m not building a model. I’m just looking at the data we have, how unaffiliateds tend to behave, what turnout may look like without Trump on the ballot, and the basic history of U.S. Senate races in this state.
And if I had to guess, if the election were held today, I’d put it at:
Cooper 52
Whatley 45
Bray 3
That is my read of where the Cooper-Whatley race really stands.
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Solid process for thinking through the polls. Of course it's way too far out to predict the mood of conservative North Carolinians in 5-6 months, but unless things are shaken up somehow the odds favor your estimate. I'm not seeing a lot of effort on Whatley's part to increase awareness of his campaign or positions (or even name recognition).
I was reading a bit last week about the money difference nationally between Rs and Ds (enormous, favoring Rs), and wondering if part of the (national and state) R strategy is waiting to allocate a worthwhile chunk of that money for a bigger push through summer & early fall. That doesn't always make the difference but at least could help Whatley become more familiar. No doubt Ds will pour money into this race, if they have it. Unless they get complacent?
The wild cards, IMO, include the extent to which any of the fraud investigations reveal notable shenanigans in NC, and if/how/what federal election integrity laws come into effect in time for this election. One in our household already got a letter and re-registered per NC law; it was a trivial process but still, a threshold. Charlotte seems like a mess, whether BLM, DEI, crime and illegals, or any other story we've read in the last year, and I'd love to have a real DOGE or this new effort under Vance take a good hard look especially there, Raleigh/Triangle, and the Outer Banks (for instance). I was & still am nauseated by Cooper slow-walking Helene aid in 2024, although perhaps nothing he did was strictly or federally illegal. More sunlight would be welcome.