Dems Are Looking Good in North Carolina—or Are They?

In today’s newsletter, read about why Roy Cooper’s polling advantage might not last, the furor in Minnesota over a recent Tim Walz order, and more ...

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Dems are looking good in North Carolina—or are they?

If Democrats want to take back the Senate, they need North Carolina—their best chance to pick up a previously Republican-held seat, according to the Cook Political Report. So you think they’d be delighted: For months, polls have consistently put former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper ahead of his opponent, former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley. But Cooper’s campaign is on edge, and experts say it should be—Whatley could still win this race.

In early August, a Harper Polling survey of likely voters found Cooper up by 13 points against Whatley in the race to replace retiring GOP Senator Thom Tillis. A Change Research poll of likely voters from around the same time had Cooper up by seven points: 50 percent of respondents said they’d vote for Cooper, 43 percent for Whatley, and six percent were undecided. Those undecided voters could be where Whatley finds his margin of victory.

“I think that polls at this stage of the race, when we’re still a couple months out from an election in a race that will have very difficult-to-predict turnout, should be taken with a grain of salt,” said Jason Husser, a professor at Elon University and the director of the Elon Poll. “The race is far from over, and we have seen historical precedent of Republicans surging at the last couple weeks in the state.”

In the 2016 Senate race, for example, Republican candidate Richard Burr launched a barrage of effective attack ads against Democrat Deborah Ross toward the end of the campaign, and ultimately won. In the 2014 Senate election, Tillis was trailing Democrat Kay Hagan in the vast majority of polls, only to win by 1.5 percentage points. In Cooper’s run for governor in 2016, polls consistently showed him leading by at least two percentage points, but he won by only 10,000 votes.

The Cooper campaign is particularly concerned that a recent Supreme Court decision on campaign finance spending will help Whatley’s campaign. The decision says that political parties can now coordinate directly with campaigns and raise unlimited funds. Since the RNC has a major cash advantage over the Democratic National Committee (which is actually in the red financially), Republican candidates could get bigger infusions of cash this cycle.

“The RNC has been stockpiling their money because they knew their former chairman Michael Whatley would need to get bailed out,” Jeff Allen, Cooper for North Carolina campaign manager, said in a statement to The New Republic. “Whatley’s elite D.C. connections and party loyalty means he’s first in line for the RNC’s nearly $130 million war chest. The Supreme Court just guaranteed that this race will be among—if not the—most expensive races in the country.”

Despite that, Cooper remains ahead in direct campaign fundraising, having raised $35 million to Whatley’s $16 million. Outside group spending is in full force: In late July, the Senate Leadership Fund, a GOP super PAC, announced that it was spending $17 million on an ad buy attacking Cooper’s record on crime as governor. While Cooper’s campaign is focused on affordability—he’s been touring the state on a “Make Stuff Cost Less” tour—Whatley has been hammering on crime and public safety.

Big ad spends could help Whatley with undecided voters and voters who don’t know who he is. After serving in state government for 38 years, with eight years as governor, 92 percent of voters are familiar with Cooper, while just 69 percent are familiar with Whatley.

“If we just look at the subset of voters who have high levels of familiarity with Michael Whatley, the race looks pretty competitive,” said Husser, who polled this question earlier this summer. “And so instead of it being a 10-point Cooper blowout, it starts looking like a typical North Carolina nail-biter.”

Husser found that voters’ familiarity with Whatley increased by 15 points over the course of this summer. A July Public Policy Polling, or PPP, survey found the closest margins yet, with 48 percent saying they’d vote for Cooper and 44 saying they’d choose Whatley.

But that poll also found that “Democrats are almost completely lined up behind Cooper, while a lot of Republican voters remain undecided. That gives Whatley much more room for growth,” PPP noted in its press release. That’s exactly the kind of analysis that should worry Cooper’s campaign.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued an executive order Tuesday blocking mining near the famous and fragile Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and boy are people worked up about it. Within hours, Republican Representative Tom Emmer had called Walz a “lame duck loser” who “let fraud run rampant while holding hardworking, tax-paying Minnesotans back from the opportunity for better lives,” while his fellow Republican Representative Pete Stauber called it a “spiteful and harmful attack against hardworking people.” The Minnesota Star Tribune’s liveblog of reactions to the news notes that Democratic Representative Betty McCollum, Democratic Senator Tina Smith, and Chair of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa Carlos Hernandez praised the decision, although the Boundary Waters area’s Democratic State Representative Grant Hauschild registered his disapproval. Walz’s term is up in January, and state law dictates that executive orders expire 90 days after the governor leaves office. Democrat Amy Klobuchar currently leads Republican Lisa Demuth in the polls. (As of this writing, neither had weighed in on the decision yet.) This whole thing started when Congress voted last spring to lift a 20-year ban on mining in the area.

While votes are still being counted in Alaska, it’s already clear that Democrat Mary Peltola and Republican Dan Sullivan will advance in the state’s nonpartisan “top-four” primary. Just before Tuesday’s primary, a poll from Data for Progress tried to simulate a general election matchup using Alaska’s ranked-choice program, and found Peltola up six points (47–41) over Republican Sullivan. That would be for the first round of counting. Peltola also led by six (53–47) in its attempt to calculate how a second round might go. You can read The TNR Blue Book’s prior coverage of this race here.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Center for Strategic and International Studies holds an “emergency” podcast episode to discuss Trump’s withdrawal from joint military exercises with South Korea. Mark Lippert hosts Andrew Yeo, Sydney Seiler, and Victor Cha. “At a strategic level, I think there’s a lot that’s being risked and a lot that could be lost,” says Yeo. Watch or read the rest here.

Public Citizen accuses Todd Blanche of violating the Hatch Act by attending a campaign rally with Trump in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups have released a statement cheering California’s “first-in-the-nation efficiency standards for replacement tires,” a development that “shows how practical climate policy can deliver meaningful benefits for Californians,” according to NRDC California climate and energy policy director Merrian Borgeson. The statement notes that, according to California Energy Commission calculations, the standards “will save drivers about $180 in gasoline costs over the lifetime of a set of replacement tires” and “will reduce nitrogen oxides and particulate matter pollution and cut annual greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to those from 400,000 gasoline cars.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

Book of the Week: The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, by Jill Lepore

THE GIST: Emerging from an outstanding 2024 New Yorker piece about the rise of the algorithm and the decline of trust in the state, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State argues that liberal, democratic governance is increasingly being replaced by automation and artificial intelligence. The book covers everything from pesky robocalls and scammy fundraising to what it means to be political in a world run by machines.

PRAISE: It’s an eclectic mix of blurbs—from novelists George Saunders and Philip Pullman to technologist Jaron Lanier and Lepore’s New Yorker colleague Elizabeth Kolbert. Kolbert calls the book “dazzling in its range and totally on target.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: This is a Jill Lepore book, which means it’s a sweeping history, not a polemic—or at least not just a polemic. The Simulmatics Corporation, an early data company founded in the 1950s that promised to predict human behavior—and shape American politics—is one area of focus. Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a supporter of the “Technocracy Movement,” which aspired to replace politicians with scientists (and an avid backer of Apartheid), is another. Lepore’s references are, as always, pleasantly diverse: The introduction features excellent close readings of both Hannah Arendt and poet Richard Brautigan.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: It’s hard to think of someone better to write a book like this—a history of humanity’s use of technology and data that doubles as a penetrating critique of artificial intelligence, automation, and the increasing tyranny of the algorithm in everyday life. As bleak as Lepore’s diagnosis is, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is also a surprisingly hopeful book. “A wall of mirrors can be smashed with the slightest hammer, the nearest rock,” she writes. “That rock is the right of the people to elect a government by consent and not by automation.”

Political Trivia Question of the Day

With Donald Trump now officially in the low 30s in approval ratings: In the modern history of polling, which president had the lowest ever approval ratings, and how low did he go? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

Florida’s Democratic Senate Primary Isn’t What It Seems

In today’s newsletter, read about Angie Nixon versus Alex Vindman, Arkansas’s upcoming Medicaid crisis, and more ...

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Florida’s Senate primary isn’t what it seems

On the surface, Angie Nixon’s and Alex Vindman’s contest in Florida on Tuesday might look like another progressive-versus-moderate primary, as we’ve seen in other Democratic primaries this cycle. But neither candidate is eager to portray it that way. Instead, both seem focused on whether Dems might have a chance in this once-purple, increasingly-red state. Whichever one wins the primary will be facing an uphill battle against a Republican incumbent that few outside Florida have even heard of: Ashley Moody, who Governor Ron DeSantis appointed to fill the seat vacated when Marco Rubio became Secretary of State.

Angie Nixon, a member of the Florida House of Representatives since 2020, who recently joined the Democratic Socialists of America (the organization hasn’t endorsed her), is running on Medicare for All, a tax on billionaires, and free childcare. Alex Vindman—known for his role as a whistleblower during President Trump’s first term, as well as for being Representative Eugene Vindman of Virginia’s identical twin brother—has emphasized cost of living, corruption, and his military service. His testimony in 2019 ultimately helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment charge.

Though Vindman is the more moderate of the two candidates, he’s also framing himself as the anti-establishment choice, a different dynamic than other elections this cycle like the primary between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens in Michigan.

“If you want an outsider who is ready to take on the establishment and has the grassroots support to defeat Ashley Moody in November, I’m your guy,” Vindman said in a statement to The New Republic, touting his first-time run and rejection of corporate PAC money. He added that he wants to “lower costs for working Floridians and fight corruption in D.C., starting with lowering the cost of homeowners’ insurance, gas, and housing and banning Congressional stock trading.”

Nixon likewise rejects the framing of progressive versus moderate: “I think too much of politics today is about labels. People in Washington want to put candidates and voters into neat little boxes, but Florida is not that simple,” she wrote in a statement to The New Republic. “What I hear from people across this state is that they are worried about the things that actually affect their lives: Can I afford my groceries? Can I afford a home? Can I afford childcare? Can I keep a roof over my family’s head?” Like Vindman, she also cited the high cost of insurance in the state.

Polling so far is sparse, but a July poll of likely voters found Vindman ahead of Nixon by 15 points, though 36 percent of voters were undecided. A different poll from the University of North Florida found Moody ahead of both candidates in a general election matchup. In the poll, Moody has a 10-point lead on Vindman and an eight-point lead on Nixon. A survey of likely voters in mid-June had Moody and Vindman tied with 46 percent of the vote.

Since primary polling has been so limited, experts were careful not to make any predictions for Tuesday night. But in an expensive state like Florida, fundraising matters, said Kevin Wagner, a professor at Florida Atlantic University. So far, Vindman has massively outraised both Nixon and Moody. At the end of June, Vindman had raised over $14 million, compared to Moody’s nearly $11 million and Nixon’s $625,000. The Vindman campaign also noted that 13 percent of its donations have come from No Party Affiliation, or NPA, voters........

© New Republic