Will Roy Cooper inflict the worst beat-down on a NCGOP Senate nominee in more than 50 years?

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If the trends showing up in recent polling hold – THAT is quite possible. The most recent polling we have on the 2026 Roy Cooper-Mike Whatley race shows leads of eleven and fourteen for Cooper.  (Tillis would have lost by at least NINE if he had stayed in.) 

The most recent GOP nominees to lose a US Senate race have been Elizabeth Dole (2008), Lauch Faircloth (1998) and Jim Broyhill (1986).

Elizabeth Dole lost to Kay Hagan 53% to 44% (nine points).  (Dole won by 9 points over Erskine Bowles in 2002.)

Lauch Faircloth lost to John Edwards by four points.  Jim Broyhill lost to Terry Sanford by two points.  

Despite all the junk talked by the radical left and their media comrades, Jesse Helms (R) had a 30-year undefeated streak in US Senate elections. 

The worst beatdown for a Democrat?  Elaine Marshall lost by 12 to Richard Burr in 2010.

With a few exceptions, most US Senate races in North Carolina finish with a spread under the ten percent threshold.

But if you look back to the 1970s and earlier, things got pretty ugly for Republicans in US Senate races in North Carolina.   In 1974,  Robert Morgan (D) beat his GOP opponent by a spread of 62% to 38%.

In 1968, Sam Ervin (D) beat his GOP opponent 61-39 percent.  In 1966, Everette Jordan (D) beat his GOP opponent 56-44 percent. 

(1966 also featured a stunning post-Goldwater election performance by an up-and-coming GOP conservative star named Jim Gardner, who upset a powerful incumbent Democrat congressman that year.)

In 1960, Jordan (D) won over his GOP opponent by 61-39 percent.   In 1962, Ervin (D) won 60-40 percent over his GOP opponent. 

So, if Cooper’s current lead holds or grows, you’d have to travel back in time to at least 1974 to find a comparable beating of a NCGOP nominee in a US Senate race.  

That’s 52 years, folks.