When Mikey met Harvey
I swear I could almost see this coming. The NCGOP – on behalf of the Whatley campaign – had been beating on Roy Cooper for attending a fundraiser where a convicted sex offender was also in attendance. Meanwhile, Republican US Senate candidate Michael Whatley – while state GOP chairman — had an interesting relationship with a fellow named Harvey West, which is now national news:
For the past six years, conservatives in North Carolina have made the Down East Judicial Picnic a crucial stop on the fundraising circuit. Attendees pay up to $1,500 to chow down on hors d’oeuvres and rub shoulders with state supreme court justices and officeholders.
What some of the attendees knew was that the host, Harvey L. West, had a dark past.
In 1999, West was a police officer in a small town near the Outer Banks when he was arrested and charged with the statutory rape of three girls — two were aged 14 and one was 16. He eventually took a deal, pleading guilty to a string of lesser charges of “taking indecent liberties with a child.” After six years in prison, his name went on to the state’s sex-offender register, where it stayed until 2018.
Now, Michael Whatley, North Carolina’s Republican candidate for Senate, who attended these fundraisers, finds himself embroiled in a scandal that couldn’t have come at a worse time. He is under pressure to answer why he twice appointed West to one of the state party’s top rule-making bodies and allowed him to hold such a central role.
The matter casts a cloud not just over Republican efforts to hold the Senate seat being vacated by Thom Tillis, one of the key targets for Democrats hoping to flip the upper chamber, but all sorts of downballot races.
Democrats have been running their eye over photographs from the picnic, dripping out attacks on anyone who attended. Not to mention that it was a fundraiser for judicial candidates, for whom any sense of rubbing shoulders with felons might be a career ender.
But it’s not just Democrats who are asking questions. It is infuriating to people such as Michele Woodhouse, a GOP stalwart in the state’s 11th District, where she ran for Congress in 2021.
“There have been quite a few of us who have been ringing the bell on this for years,” she told Secrets. “We were just met with kind of ‘the good old boys network’ resistance and told it was no big deal. ‘Nothing to see here.’”
The result, she added, was that any official or candidate who attended the picnic is facing “blowback.”
“And you know, Michael Whatley has not denounced this at all,” she added.
West launched his picnic in 2020, two years after coming off the sex offenders’ register. At the time, he was chairman of the 1st Congressional District committee.
His status only grew as the picnic went from strength to strength.
When Whatley took over as state party chairman in 2019, he twice appointed West to one of its most important bodies, the Plan of Organization Committee.
“Why did Michael appoint him to the Plan of Organization Committee … twice? And then kind of doubling down on the picnic,” said Woodhouse, pointing out it had been renamed the North Carolina Judicial Picnic to mark its statewide impact.
“Those are questions that Michael Whatley really should answer.”
So far, Whatley has declined to answer. His campaign did not respond to Secrets’s questions about how long he had known about West’s past or whether he regrets being involved with a convicted sex offender.
For his part, West resigned as chairman of the Republican 1st District Congressional as the controversy grew.
“People make mistakes, they serve their time, and they come back,” West told WRAL. “Isn’t that the whole point of rehabilitation, so they can go back into the community and serve?”
Back in 2012, West said he didn’t commit the crimes and only pleaded guilty to avoid spending decades in jail.
The state party is unrepentant about West’s role and has gone on the attack.
Matt Mercer, a spokesman for the state GOP, said: “People in glass houses should be very careful when it comes to working with and taking photos with and doing things with convicted child sex offenders.”
Last week, the party sent out a press release asking whether Roy Cooper, the former governor and the 2026 Democratic candidate for Senate, had promoted a child sex offender. It offered photographs of him at a 2018 LGBT awards gala, which was hosted by Chad Sevearance-Turner, a former youth minister who served a two-year sentence for lewd conduct with a child under the age of 16 in 2000.
None of it seems to be helping. Poll after poll puts Whatley behind Cooper in their race.
[…]
Here’s a snippet of an interview on WFAE radio about this story with WRAL political reporter Paul Specht:
[…] Terry: Last week, the GOP accused Whatley’s opponent in this year’s Senate race, Democrat and former Gov. Roy Cooper, of “hanging out” with a convicted sex offender named Chad Turner. What are they referring to there?
Specht: That was one of the things that the North Carolina Republican Party responded with when I reached out to them. They said there is a man named Chad Turner. He leads a LGBTQ+ chamber of commerce in Charlotte and Cooper at one point attended the organization’s end-of-year party and is seen in a photo with Mr. Turner, who we also reached out to and didn’t receive a response from. The Cooper campaign responded and said we don’t view these two as the same. They said, I’m paraphrasing, attending an event where someone else is is not the same as appointing someone to a party committee.
Terry: Normally, I ask you how you rated these claims, but you didn’t assign a rating this time. Why not?
Specht: We felt it was more important to just lay out what we knew. We reached out to all these people involved. Here’s what they told us, and people can read and decide for themselves what they think. […]
And, of course, the North Carolina Democrat Party is having a field day with the West-Whatley story.
I want to formally place the following on the record:
For years, Harvey West has responded to those raising concerns by engaging in or enabling threatening and defamatory conduct. Individuals associated with him have issued threats, including threats of violence, and have published false and inappropriate statements about me. In his resignation remarks, he stated that “those people will be dealt with,” which further reflects this pattern. At no point has he expressed remorse or accountability for his actions; instead, he has repeatedly asserted that he was “set up,” with others echoing and defending that narrative.
Additionally, when his status as a convicted sex offender is accurately referenced, the response has been to attack those stating the truth rather than address the underlying issue. There has been no acknowledgment of wrongdoing, nor any indication of regret. This has led to a broader and legitimate question: how such conduct aligns with the standards expected of leadership within the party.
It is also important to note a key omission in the broader discussion: while serving on the Plan of Organization Committee, multiple counties advocated for a clear and specific felony disqualification provision to prevent precisely this type of situation. Harvey West opposed those efforts.
Finally, one of the more concerning aspects of this situation has been the number of individuals, particularly women, who have publicly defended him even after the underlying facts have been brought to light. The consistency of that support, despite the seriousness of the conduct, raises broader questions about judgment, accountability, and the internal dynamics at play within certain factions of the party.
Keep hearing the same conversations in certain circles. Strategy talk. Inside baseball. Who said what. Who’s aligned with who. Whether Harvey West helps or hurts Michael Whatley.
But here’s the problem…
Most voters don’t care about any of that.
Go Outside
Seriously—go outside.
Talk to people who aren’t plugged into politics every day. Not the ones in your group chats. Not the ones who show up to every meeting. Go talk to your neighbor, the person at the gas station, the small business owner trying to keep the lights on.
Ask them what they’re worried about.
You’re not going to hear about party strategy.
You’re going to hear this:
Gas is pushing $4 a gallon
Groceries are still high
There’s uncertainty in the world
People feel like things are unstable
And whether we want to admit it or not—when people feel uneasy, they vote based on that feeling. Harvey West is going to help with clicks, but no one cares.
You are full of it SandyM. The sycophants surrounding West and Whatley are the only ones that don’t care. Guess who does care? The Dems. So hype up all your self-righteousness as Ms Ackiss said above. The cows have come home to be milked and the likes of all the E-GOPers are now seeing what their sawing yields. Its going to cost us the Senate seat and CD1. But hey keep up with your woe is me bs by marginalizing how the guy raped a 14 year old girl. Any yet people like you blow it off. The grassroots are done. Need proof? Sam Page. If this party doesnt get its head on straight it will be worse than Robinson.
I actually think the GOP has gerrymandered CD1 sufficiently to win it. Mores the pity because Buckhout is as much a swamp creature as is Whatley. That said, Whatley would be sinking anyway, even without the questionable character of his acquaintances. Too many current and former county party officers don’t like him and that should have been the first clue. He’s had his ticket punched so automatically in the course of his career, that he never bothered to build the relationships within the Party that he’d need for an election like this one. And too many real conservatives won’t stand for another Thom Tillis, he’s not worth the investment of their time and money.
What’s the end game? This comes up a few times a year.
Do the trolls not want this guy involved in anything?
And let’s not forget, he went to jail for this…
And Margo has called on her people to attack West. So let’s not plan these games.
HE RAPED A 14 YEAR OLD Girl! Would you be so forgiving if he raped your daughter? You are the type of people who give the Dems the ammo to beat us yet again. I haven’t forgotten he went to jail. He did go to jail for raping three little girls. I don’t want a guy around who raped a 14-year-old girl and then claims EVERYONE MAKES MISTAKES. I could give two sandwiches to what Ms. Ackiss is doing. I am embarrassed that you are even justifying this guy’s existence. Where we go from here is to try to recover from yet another sex scandal that befell the republicans. But you people don’t learn, do you? Where we head from here is because of people like you, who can’t stand up for morality, are leading us down a primrose path that ends up with Trump being impeached multiple times. But hey, West went to jail. West is a nice guy. The Dems don’t care. You, sir, are despicable.
A side note to Harry Jimmy, winning an argument? This is the belittling of the topic at hand by diverting the root of the argument, THE PEDOPHILE, to attempt to start another discussion about winning an argument. It actually is about winning an argument. Versus the dems, in November. With West gone, perhaps Whatley can recoup from this injury.
To Mountain Joe
I’ve never called on anyone to attack him and you cannot find that on any post I have ever made.
I’ve also never asked anyone to join me in telling the truth about the situation.
To you, telling the truth is more inflammatory than the optics placed on the party-which weren’t my doing. But, you know ant to blame someone, as if I am the only that has spoken about this in the public.
What a pathetic parent you must be.
Did you your children to tell the truth and beat them for doing so?
Margo
I think you are talking about your kid.
Look, he’s gone.
Where do we go from here?
I follow what was said before
I’ll place in the record.
West is gone now. Where do we move from here?
Is this about winning an argument? How do we move on?
I met him a few times and liked the guy.
Apparently, West’s defenders have already forgotten the abysmal mess Mark Robinson found himself in simply for behaving like a goofball on porn sites. If something like that can sink a candidate, won’t close association with a sex offender be at least as devastating to Whatley’s support?