FINALLY figuring out that Mike Whatley is a DUD?
I caught a report by Fox News’s Chad Pergram over the holiday highlighting North Carolina as having one of the two currently GOP-held US Senate seats most likely to flip to the Democrats. Now, here comes Newsweek with the same kind of thing. Both reports relied heavily on “Washington sources.”
[If that comes true, the GOP Senate majority would fall from 53-47 to 51-49. JD Vance would basically have to live on Capitol Hill for the last two years of this term. Under the current majority, it’s been nearly impossible to get anything conservative passed. There is a handful of GOP senators who will run over to the Democrats in a heartbeat. ]
That kind of talk is really interesting. Since July, we’ve been force-fed the spin that Mike Whatley is “the best equipped and most qualified to beat Roy Cooper.” Never mind that there is not one single piece of publicly-available polling to support that assessment. The most recent piece of polling – sponsored by a major in-state GOPe butt-kisser — found Whatley losing to Cooper just as badly as his GOP primary opponent Don Brown. Polls – since July – have found Whatley trailing Cooper anywhere from six to nine percentage points.
Trump’s choice. Yep. We’ve been bludgeoned about our heads and shoulders with that claim. If you actually follow the national political news closely, you’ll find that President Trump approached anywhere from three to five other people before settling on Mike Whatley. Yeah, Trump had so much faith in Whatley that he named him RNC chairman and tapped his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chair to babysit him.
In his stumping for Whatley, Trump hailed the fact that he won North Carolina three times. Whatley was first elected state party chairman in 2019. So, he was not in a position to impact the 2016 race. Donald Trump is not a hard-sell in North Carolina. Whatley and his pals could have run off to Antarctica for a year – closing up NCGOP HQ while they were gone — and Trump still would have won the state.
Trump also hailed Whatley’s “leadership” in ballot security. Whatley’s last run for reelection – against Raleigh’s John Kane — was so riddled with irregularities. A sketchy voting app – which apparently accepted votes from outside the meeting room AND outside the state — was used for the first time. The situation screamed for an investigation, but Whatley and his team swept it all under a rug and moved on.
Trump eagerly sought the replacement of Thom Tillis. Yet, he comes along and endorses Tillis’s protégè and preferred successor. (Whatley kicked off the press conference announcing his final run for state party chairman with a keynote speech by Tillis.)
We’ve seen this scenario before — in the 2024 governor’s race. Consultants and other party apparatchiks introduced us to the Pretend-there-is-no-Primary game. With the help of a compliant news media, the conspirators were allowed to whisk Mark Robinson through the primary season unscathed and into the general election — where the media turned on Robinson and joined the Democrats in definestrating the GOP nominee. An actual primary where the issues got discussed and the candidates got vetted would have helped avoid that conclusion. But the all-knowing Raleigh political class, um, *knew better.*
One — I hope – unintended consequence of this aggressive pro-Whatley campaign is the tamping down of conservative turnout in North Carolina in 2026. Whatley – like Tillis — has done his best to irritate (read: *piss off*) party conservatives. Trump is not on the 2026 ballot. If Whatley gets the nomination, he’ll lead the ticket. There are a lot of folks out there who would seriously consider sitting home rather than showing up at the polls for Mike Whatley. There are a lot of important judicial, legislative and congressional races that are also on the ballot. A lot of those folks are counting on strong conservative turnout in March and November.
How do you ensure that with a Senate nominee who has — with his pal Thom — been giving conservatives the finger for years? (Remember, Tillis himself never got to 50 percent. And Roy Cooper has never lost an election.)
I’m not saying any of the rest of the GOP primary field could do a better job against Cooper. But an actual primary — where we could learn about these folks and feel them out — would have helped. At least, to make sure we are putting our strongest combatant forward.
Lest we forget… in 2019, months before Whatley “won” the GOP chair race for the first time, the GOP elite, was in trouble. Disgraced Party Chairman, Robin Hayes’ endorsed candidate was getting trounced by grassroots genius, Jim Womack and Tillis was panicking.
Already hated by the party base, ol’ Thom knew better than to show his face at any NC events, unless they were $1,000-a-plate dinners. Instead, the coward sent his wife all over the state, speaking to Republican Women’s Federation audiences. Susan Tillis told the women that Whatley, an unknown DC lobbyist with tenuous NC roots, was their new Chosen One.
Then, Saturday morning at the NCGOP State Convention, a few buses showed up with more than 100 Young Republicans standing in line to be credentialed by the Tillis Cartel.
But the best was yet to come: When the doors were locked and the delegates all seated, the Cartel surprised the room by presenting electronic “voting” devices on lanyards to each delegate. Instead of using paper ballots, these were foist upon the room. In the name of “efficiency.”
Before anybody could debate NOT using the devices, the vote was on and with no way to audit the results, the Cartel tallied the votes and declared Womack had won the popular vote, but Whatley had won the weighted vote.
The next 90 minutes involved numerous county Chairs challenging their delegation’s results. Some complained that their posted number of delegates was less than the number physically present. In other counties, the opposite problem arose. They got MORE votes than delegates! In the end, the GOPe ignored the undercount complaints and only adjusted those counties with overvotes.
In 2021, Covid rules meant that only party insiders would bother attending that convention, but they still used electronic voting and Whatley “won” again!
By 2023, even the donor class was onto Whatley, and John Kane Jr was deployed to unseat Whatley. You’ve reported well on that disaster, so no need to repeat it here.
The bottom line is that Whatley NEVER won an election without paperless electronic balloting that was impossible to audit Anna SO many delegates have been alienated by such heavy handed arrogance, that you’re absolutely right when you say Whatley’s name at the top of the ticket will depress Republican turnout all the way down the ballot.
I attended all those crooked conventions. I will never support Whatley.
When Whatley, the so-called “champion of election integrity,” was re-elected as NCGOP Chair in 2023 in that sham election described in the article, I left the Republican Party and registered as Unaffiliated. I’m guessing there were many others who did as well. The man is Thom Tillis 2.0 and I WILL NOT vote for him! Don Brown will represent us faithfully and honorably in the US Senate, and deserves the support of every fair-minded conservative/Republican in North Carolina!
Don Brown is the only choice for any honorable North Carolina conservative.