Roy Cooper in 2024Chris Seward/AP

If Democrats are to have any hope of retaking the Senate this fall, then Roy Cooper, the former North Carolina governor, must flip the seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, in one of the most anticipated races of the 2026 midterms. The stakes of the race have already led to an influx of cash and media attention: Cooper, who will likely be running against former RNC chair Michael Whatley, set fundraising records the day after announcing his candidacy last July, in a contest that could be one of the most expensive in history. 

For North Carolinians like me, long before Cooper had the fate of the Senate resting on his shoulders, he was a familiar fixture in state politics. Cooper joined the state legislature in 1987 before serving four consecutive terms as the state attorney general, then winning the governorship in 2016 and again in 2020. 

As a state politician, Cooper’s style was often about getting results, even when it meant working with Republicans or breaking with his own party. As governor, he’s remembered for working with Republicans to repeal HB2, which prohibited transgender people from using public restrooms aligned with their gender identity, and for passing Medicaid expansion with bipartisan support. But his gubernatorial career was also defined by a contentious relationship with state Republicans who held a supermajority in the legislature—and thus the ability to overturn Cooper’s vetoes—for four of his eight years in the office. As governor, Cooper vetoed 104 bills. Republicans overturned half of those. 

I remember Cooper campaigning for his first gubernatorial bid on my college’s campus and sitting courtside at basketball games. To me, he seemed like he could’ve been a classmate’s dad.

Despite those political battles, Cooper has managed to remain pretty well liked by voters in a long-time purple state growing redder (thanks, in part, to newly drawn congressional maps). North Carolina has the country’s second largest rural population and, to reach these voters, Cooper often touts his upbringing in rural Eastern North Carolina as an indicator of his trustworthiness. North Carolinians will be familiar with his stories of cropping tobacco on his family’s farm during the summers and his frequent reminders that his mother was a public school teacher. 

I remember Cooper campaigning for his first gubernatorial bid on my college’s campus and sitting courtside at basketball games. To me, he seemed like he could’ve been a classmate’s dad. He ate Bojangles. He liked Cheerwine. He’s a self-described “caniac”—a fan of the North Carolina hockey team, the Carolina Hurricanes. But will this nice-guy appeal be enough to propel Cooper to victory when the stakes are higher than ever? Recently, I traveled to Nash County, where Cooper grew up, to find out. 

I’m from Eastern North Carolina, about an hour and a half from Nash County. I’ve spent a lot of time driving through this area and have become familiar with the landscape: lots of pine,........

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