In CPAC speech, Whatley doesn’t answer the biggest question about him | Opinion
U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley has a problem: nobody really knows who Michael Whatley is. Nor does he really seem to be trying to show them.
A Thursday appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference gave Whatley the opportunity to define who he is as a candidate and deliver a campaign pitch that gives him an identity of his own.
But as usual, Whatley opted to frame himself as an extension of Donald Trump and the antithesis of Roy Cooper.
“We need to make sure that we have an ally for Donald Trump in the United States Senate. That’s what I’m going to be when I beat Roy Cooper,” Whatley said, noting that Cooper is “absolutely a card-carrying member of the woke mob.”
Whatley also admitted that he’s “running on President Trump’s agenda.”
While that may have landed well with this conservative audience, it’s not going to be enough to win over voters in North Carolina. Polls suggest Whatley lacks name recognition with more than a third of the electorate. He’s going in with a blank slate. While that gives Whatley’s campaign the chance to shape his image, it also gives his opponents ample opportunity to define him in negative terms.
Whatley doesn’t have a record of his own to run on. He’s never run for, let alone held, any public office, which is why the only accomplishments he tends to speak of technically belong to someone else. Now, that’s fairly standard in politics, especially these days when so many local and state races are nationalized. Cooper, for his part, has also sought to contrast himself from Whatley, who Democrats have characterized as an out-of-touch D.C. insider and MAGA extremist. But Cooper is a two-term governor and held statewide office for years prior to that. He has his own brand and identity, and it resonates well with voters. It’s for that reason that Republican attempts to link their opponents to more unpopular Democratic figures like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi don’t work as well on Cooper, because voters already know who he is.
Whatley doesn’t have that luxury. When few voters know who he is, Democrats can take advantage of the negative perception many voters currently have of the Republican Party and project that onto him. It doesn’t help that Whatley is earnest in his support of Trump and does not publicly criticize him or his policies — which is a somewhat dubious strategy in a critical battleground state where Trump’s approval rating is sinking.
We have seen candidates, especially Democrats, struggle when they fail to define themselves as anything other than “not my opponent.” It’s partly why Kamala Harris lost in 2024 — it’s hard to form a salient identity based solely off of what you oppose. At the same time, we’ve seen Republicans cruise to victory simply by virtue of their connection to Trump. In 2022, for example, Ted Budd managed to ride Trump’s coattails all the way to a Senate seat, despite running a relatively quiet general election campaign himself. He didn’t have much name recognition of his own then, and even now, there are a lot of North Carolinians who hardly know who Budd is. But he had been a congressman, and he had a record that proved he was who he said he was.
2026, however, will not be the same as 2022. Four years ago, the midterm environment favored Republicans, and Democrats struggled, particularly in North Carolina. President Joe Biden wasn’t very popular, so his party wasn’t, either. Now, the reverse is true, and it’s Republicans who are in the hot seat. Running on Trump’s agenda is not much of a winning strategy if that agenda is unpopular.
CPAC might not have been the greatest stage for Whatley to sing a different tune, but it’s one of the few public appearances he’s made recently. A poll released Thursday shows him trailing Cooper by nearly eight percentage points, and the margin is even wider among independent voters. He doesn’t have unlimited time to make a name for himself.
Democrats are finally starting to learn that they need to run on something besides how much they hate Donald Trump. But Republicans can’t always run on how much they love him, either, especially if the voters don’t agree. The sooner Whatley realizes that, the better.
Deputy Opinion Editor Paige Masten is covering politics and the 2026 elections for The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer.
This story was originally published March 27, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
