North Carolina U.S. Senate Primary
In the state’s U.S. Senate primaries, both the former Democratic governor Roy Cooper and the Republican strategist Michael Whatley are expected to easily win their respective races. North Carolina has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, but Cooper, a moderate who’d been in elected office for more than three decades, left the governor’s office with an approval rating of over fifty per cent. Whatley, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee who has never been elected to public office, declared his candidacy last summer, shortly after the incumbent, the Republican senator Thom Tillis, announced that he would not seek reëlection. A perennial battleground state, North Carolina was carried by Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential election by three percentage points, while Josh Stein, a Democrat, won the gubernatorial race that year by more than fourteen points.
North Carolina U.S. House Primaries
In North Carolina’s First Congressional District, the incumbent Don Davis, a Democrat, is waiting to see which of five G.O.P. primary candidates he will face in November. Davis was reëlected in 2024 by less than two points; the following year, Republican lawmakers in Raleigh redrew the state’s electoral maps to make the district more favorable to their own party. If the G.O.P. manages to flip the district in the general election, the seat would be held by a Republican for the first time since 1883. In the Democratic stronghold of North Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District, meanwhile, the incumbent, Valerie Foushee, is facing a primary rematch against Durham County commissioner Nida Allam, who is backed by prominent progressive Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
