Last week, the Senate Leadership Fund - the main Republican super PAC that is euphemistically separate from Michael Whatley’s campaign for United States Senate - released a new ad claiming that “Roy Cooper let Jimmie Speight out.” This is, once again, utterly false.
In fact, Speight served his full prison sentence and was released on post-release supervision in November 2020 - four months before the court-ordered COVID settlement Republicans blame for it even existed. Republicans made the identical claim about DeCarlos Brown, the man accused in the fatal Charlotte stabbing of Iryna Zarutska. This claim, too, has been panned by every credible news organization in the state of North Carolina (including WRAL, the Charlotte Observer, and The Assembly). The only outlet willing to run it was a gutter tabloid all the way up in New York City.
In his quest to become a U.S. Senator, Michael Whatley has not so much lied, as told this same lie over and over again. That lie began with a claim that Cooper was somehow involved in the release thousands of hardened and dangerous criminals. The lie has continued and grown, encompassing even crimes in other states that have no connection to North Carolina or Governor Cooper whatsoever. The Whatley campaign even resorted to lying to the grieving family of a murder victim to trick them into appearing into a political attack ad. The Whatley campaign’s default to dishonesty has, by now, become the trademark of their campaign.
The silver lining? They won’t have to keep it up for much longer.
The burden of fact
Of course, attacking a political opponent on crime is hardly unusual, and politicians in both parties have run some version of this act for decades. What’s unusual is how completely the commitment to this bit has swallowed the rest of the Whatley campaign’s message.
To date, the Whatley campaign has said almost nothing about health care, even as the U.S. Senate Republicans who Whatley hopes to join make cuts to Medicaid that threaten rural hospitals. The campaign has said little about the tariffs weighing on North Carolina’s farmers, or skyrocketing gas prices following the Trump administration’s choice to go to war with Iran - a war from which Whatley’s own oil and gas stock holdings stand to benefit. And it has said nothing about the president’s job approval, which has fallen steadily through most of this year.
A campaign running on a fabricated story about crime is usually avoiding something else. Here, that something else is the actual economic condition of the state.
The pattern is the point
Whatley’s fabrications aren’t confined to the Speight ad. He has spent much of the year insisting he “grew up” in Blowing Rock and calling himself a “son of Western North Carolina,” though Whatley was actually born in Michigan and didn’t move to the state until high school. Discoveries of his heavy use of private jets have similarly undercut the pickup-truck, every-county persona his campaign projects. Then there was the stranger episode: his campaign posted an AI-generated image of a Carolina Hurricanes player who does not exist, and when a reporter gave him three chances to name a single player on the team, he couldn’t.
Any one of these might be an embarrassing gaffe on its own. But seen together, they describe a candidate with a difficult relationship with the truth - about his biography, his lifestyle, his fandom, and now his opponent’s record. If Whatley’s team wanted North Carolinians to believe he understands the state the way Roy Cooper - an actual native, and an actual Hurricanes fan - obviously does, this is not how they’d go about it.
The voters aren’t buying it
Of course, the proof is at the finish line. If Whatley’s strategy were working, we might expect the race to tighten in the final days. But it has not. Even with enormous funding and the vocal support of a president who carried North Carolina three times, Michael Whatley is trailing badly in the polls and his campaign may soon be “triaged” by the national GOP, which is being pressured to invest in other, more salvagable races.
Whatley entered his first race for elected office believing a fabricated crime story could do the work his own record and message could not. North Carolina voters, by virtually every measure available, have declined the offer. That is an expensive lesson for Whatley’s political debut - and for the national party that bet a Senate seat on him learning it too late.
