Summary:
- Republican Senate Nominee Michael Whatley has championed election security – but was accused of “stealing” his election for NCGOP chair in 2023.
- The resulting lawsuit was dismissed on technical grounds, without hearing the evidence
- That evidence looks quite bad for Whatley
The frontrunners for our 2026 Senate election in North Carolina are clear on both sides. For Democrats, Roy Cooper launched his campaign in late July and quickly moved to be the presumptive nominee. As a former North Carolina state representative, state senator, Senate majority leader, attorney general, and two-term governor, Roy Cooper has incredibly high name recognition, especially when compared to the republican presumptive Nominee, Michael Whatley.
When comparing resumes, it’s not surprising that while only 3% of North Carolinians haven’t heard of Roy Cooper, more than a third are unfamiliar with Michael Whatley, with 30% of those who have heard of him unsure about how they feel about him. Whatley’s biggest roles have been within the Republican establishment, as a former chair of the North Carolina Republican Party and the Republican National Committee. As of October 27th, he doesn’t have a positions page on his campaign website.
Whatley has spent his political career deep in the national Republican party establishment, while never holding an elected office himself. When we examine that activity, Whatley comes across as a shrewd political operator and campaign operative, willing to bend and even break his own rules to win an election.
One example was Whatley’s own election as Chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party. Whatley has previously elevated the false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and heavily supports President Trump’s efforts to make voting more difficult for Americans. Whatley’s willingness to go along with false claims of voter fraud and use them to restrict your ability to vote is increasingly awkward, given his own election experience.
In 2023, after Republicans re-elected Whatley to lead the North Carolina Republican Party, three Republican activists sued the party for violating the party’s own election rules. The suit alleged that, despite Whatley’s claims that “having machines that do not and cannot connect with the internet” is a massive component of election integrity efforts, the NC Republicans launched a “mobile phone application which allowed votes to be cast from outside the Convention floor in the contested Chair election.”
Reading through the complaint, the blatant disregard by Whatley and the North Carolina Republican establishment for their own rules is very apparent. Their own Convention Rules required that “delegates casting a vote must be on the floor of the Convention at the time such vote is cast.” However, the NCGOP decided to roll out a mobile application that allowed voting from members, a flaw that officials were made well aware of.
There were other irregularities as well, such as delegates casting votes for Michael Whatley’s opponent, yet mysteriously having all the votes from their region come back as votes for Whatley. Some counties also registered more votes than the number of people. Eventually, the Convention Chair disallowed those votes, but the mere fact that such irregularities occurred raises many questions.
This lawsuit wasn’t even decided on the merits. Instead of fighting the suit and its claims in court, the NCGOP had it tossed out on procedural grounds, claiming not innocence, but that the plaintiffs lacked standing, or the ability to bring such a case before the court in the first place, and that they didn’t establish a claim the court could adequately redress.
This was Whatley’s re-election for the GOP Chairship. This was his Republican Party. And with no public service experience, no published platform or positions, no real political identity outside of being deeply involved in internal republican politics, this is all there is to fill in the gaps for the majority of North Carolinians who have never heard of, or have no opinions of him. A republican who is more than happy to restrict the ability of people to vote, but when it comes to his own internal election, someone who is willing to let rules be broken if it means he stays in power.
