Breaking: Cooper by a DOZEN. (But, hey, Thune’s coming.)

Posted on by

National polling firm Big Data Poll has taken a look at our Senate race and found Roy Cooper with a twelve point lead.  That makes FIVE of the last eight publicly-released polls of the Whatley-Cooper contest showing a double-digit lead for the Democrat former governor.

Here’s an interesting breakdown of what the pollster found:

Let me try to translate for you.  The pollster looked at this two ways: (1) incorporating leaners and (2) just the total vote share.  Category 1 includes people who said YES WHATLEY or YES COOPER, but also threw in people who were leaning toward either of those two.  Category 2 disregards leaners and counts only people who said definitely Cooper or definitely Whatley.

With leaners, this race is at 51-39 in Cooper’s favor.  Cooper has a big lead among respondents who called themselves “extremely enthusiastic.”  The poll also looked at how Trump voters and Harris voters from 2024 are looking at the 2026 Senate race.  Cooper gets a surprising 17% of 2024 Trump voters who responded to this poll. Whatley gets 3 percent of 2024 Harris voters.

Let’s knock “leaners” to one candidate or another out of the equation.  Looking at it this way, this race is 47-35 in favor of Cooper. 

Cooper leads Whatley 61-33 among respondents who call themselves “extremely enthusiastic.”  Cooper gets 16 percent of the 2024 Trump voters, while Whatley gets about 1.7 percent of Harris voters.

In both versions of the survey, Whatley appears to have only nailed down 70-74 percent of people who voted for Trump two years ago.  Meanwhile, Cooper is getting 83-88 percent of Harris voters from 2024.

Looking at BDP’s work in other swing-state Senate races, there is a common theme of “Base Depression, Defections, and Trust to Handle Issues.”   Translation: they are finding what we’ve known and have been trying to tell you.  There is major discontent in MAGA-land.  

The GOP establishment has not taken this seriously, and the polling appears to indicate they’re going to pay at the polls for not doing so.