Mike Whatley: The rodeo clown Roy & his gang WANT
When it is all said and done, Michael Whatley will be remembered as 2026’s Mark Robinson – the boob who got maneuvered into place for the general election and then spectacularly electorally eviscerated.
The GOPe and the stupid, lazy legacy drive-by media have all played along. It’s been a game of “Pretend” — act like Mike Whatley is the only candidate to file as a Republican for the US Senate seat in North Carolina. Since July, the feeble, amoral drive-by press has talked of Whatley as “the Republican nominee.”
We have a primary on March 3. Early voting started today. There are six candidates running for the US Senate as Republicans. President Trump and most Republicans have spoken out about their joy over Thom Tillis leaving office. However, Trump has supposedly *endorsed* Tillis’s protege AND Tillis’s preferred successor. 
Meanwhile, we have Don Brown out there who has been living, breathing and fighting for the Trump / MAGA agenda. Yet donors, activists, vendors and consultants have been aggressively chased away from him.
Why would Roy Cooper and his media friends want to see Whatley as the nominee? Simple. Cooper would be automatically immune to most attacks from the Whatley GOP campaign. A lot of the stuff Cooper could be attacked for, the Democrats could point to Whatley and say: “You did it, too.”
It would inoculate Cooper from charges he’s a Raleigh-DC insider. Whatley’s whole professional life has centered around government and politics in DC and Raleigh. (Don Brown has actually had jobs out in the real world.)
It would inoculate Cooper against his decision to march with Black Lives Matter. During Whatley’s first year as NCGOP chairman, Whatley allowed the Young Republicans to partner with BLM in a solidarity march at and near NCGOP HQ.
Nominee Whatley will not fire up the MAGA base in the NCGOP. He’s spent so long working with his mentor Thom Tillis to stomp on those people. From bad-mouthing the January 6 protesters to remaining conspicuously silent as Tillis makes his rounds of the drive-by media bashing Trump, his people, and his agenda.
It will be tough for Whatley to credibly separate himself from Thom Tillis. Thom and Susan Tillis plucked him out of obscurity and got him elected NCGOP chairman. When Whatley announced his final run for reelection to the NCGOP chairmanship, he got Thom Tillis to appear at a press conference, make a speech, and formally endorse him. Mike Whatley is Thom Tillis 2.0. We’ve seen the damage version 1.0 has done in DC. Do the Trump people really want to spend the rest of their term dealing with version 2.0?
There is not one single piece of publicly-available evidence that Whatley can compete with Roy Cooper. Every poll out there shows Whatley losing by at least five points. In a statewide race, five points is a rout. *Ask Dan Forest about that.*
Interestingly, someone slipped up and tested Don Brown against Cooper. Brown and Whatley were performing about the same against Cooper. *Even though Whatley had all the money and all the help from the GOPe and the drive-bys. *
It makes you wonder how Don Brown would have performed thus far if the spigot had not been aggressively and forcefully shut off for him.
One of the DEI hires over at McClatchy’s N&O did her part today to build up Whatley and finally mention that Whatley actually has primary opponents:
[…] Holding North Carolina would help Republicans make sure they maintain their majority in the Senate, which they currently hold by a margin of six votes. The late Sen. Kay Hagan was the last Democrat from North Carolina to hold a seat in the Senate, and her term expired at the beginning of 2015.[…]
It’s actually a margin of FOUR. Losing THREE GOP seats would require JD Vance to practically move into the Senate chamber and act as a full-time tiebreaker. The margin is Republicans by 53-47. Lose four seats, and it becomes a Democrat 51-49 majority.
MORE:
[…] Tillis, the Republican who defeated Hagan, had planned to run for a third term. In December 2024, Tillis announced plans to seek reelection. But over the summer, Trump and Tillis got into a public sparring match over Medicaid coverage for more than 600,000 North Carolinians.
Tillis voted against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a tax and spending package looking to fulfill much of Trump’s 2024 campaign promises, saying it would jeopardize North Carolina’s Medicaid coverage.
And with any Republican who opposed Trump’s signature bill in danger of losing their seat, Tillis chose not to seek reelection after all. […]
Again, he was running full-steam-ahead for reelection until the RNC showed him polls losing by NINE to just about EVERYBODY.
MORE:
[…] “You can’t find where Whatley stands on anything,” said Don Brown, one of the other Republican candidates.
In a Carolina Forward poll published last month, Whatley outperformed Brown, the closest contender, 36% to 6%. […]
The writer neglects to mention that the TOP VOTE-GETTER in that poll was someone called UNSURE with 54 percent of the vote. *If that poll is valid and true, ol’ Roy will be facing a Republican named UNSURE in November.*
Republicans have a choice in this Senate primary between Don Brown – a military veteran who has been fighting for the principles behind MAGA every single day – and Michael Whatley – a career lobbyist, political hack and disciple of Thom Tillis.
Donald Trump got fooled by Michael Whatley. It doesn’t mean YOU have to.
