In NC’s Senate race, Republican lies about Cooper hit an appalling new low | Opinion
In North Carolina’s U.S. Senate race, the truth rarely seems to be on Michael Whatley’s side. Perhaps that’s why Republicans simply aren’t bothering with it.
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It’s unfortunately common for politicians to sugarcoat or cherry-pick information to their benefit. But even by today’s standards, Whatley and his fellow Republicans are running an egregiously dishonest campaign, creating narratives that ignore established facts and invent new ones out of whole cloth.
The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with top Senate Republicans, recently launched an ad featuring the father of a North Carolina woman who was tragically murdered by a man with a lengthy criminal record. The ad strongly implies that former Gov. Roy Cooper bears responsibility for the murder because he released the alleged killer. Except the crime occurred in South Carolina, as did the many other crimes committed by the alleged killer. There is no connection to Cooper or North Carolina at all.
Another ad, also from the Senate Leadership Fund, attempts to link Cooper to the murder of 23-year-old Shemar Hayes in Charlotte in 2024. Again, the ad implies that Cooper’s policies allowed the killer back onto the streets, except he had no prior record and had never been in prison. Worse, Hayes’ father was featured in the ad, but he was told it was for an advertisement to bring awareness to gun violence, not for a political attack ad. He called it “deceitful, conniving and sneaky,” and said he would not have participated had he known the true purpose.
In another remarkably disingenuous effort, the Senate Leadership Fund has funded a network of fake news websites in several swing states, including North Carolina. The so-called news outlet calls itself The North Carolinian, and claims to be providing “independent journalism for North Carolina.” The site runs negative articles about Cooper — or positive ones about Whatley — that look like legitimate news stories until you read the fine print.
Meanwhile, Whatley himself has repeatedly made false statements on social media and the campaign trail. In a recent social media post, Whatley said Cooper is lying about not owning stocks, because he owns stock in Duke Energy, ExxonMobil and other energy companies. This is not true. Federal financial disclosures show that Cooper does not own any individual stocks, only mutual funds and index funds. They are not the same thing.
On another recent occasion, Whatley falsely claimed that the Biden administration “facilitated” the arrival of millions of unauthorized immigrants by “[putting] them on airplanes and [flying] them into the interior of this country.” This claim has been made before by President Donald Trump and others, and it has been debunked. Whatley also continues to shamelessly echo the lie that Cooper was responsible for the murder of Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail last year, supposedly because his “dangerous soft on crime policies” allowed her killer to “walk free,” which is demonstrably false. His campaign often circulates footage of Zarutska’s murder, against her family’s wishes.
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This isn’t to say that Cooper is the perfect picture of truth. Like most politicians, he’s no stranger to spin and half-truths. Cooper, for example, has criticized Whatley for owning Duke Energy stock, when technically that stock is owned by his wife and children. He was also sued for airing an untruthful ad about his opponent when running for attorney general in 2000. That’s wrong, too.
But Whatley and his allies often fail to meet even the lowest standards of honesty. It’s yet another sign of a desperate, flailing campaign — and a sign that Whatley’s party has little faith that he can succeed on his own. The facts don’t give Whatley much to work with, and his defining characteristic is his unyielding loyalty to the president, so he has to resort to fictions about his opponent as he continues to trail in the polls.
These falsehoods are effective because they play to powerful emotions like fear and anger. That’s also what makes them so frustrating, because it feels nearly impossible to combat them. Even when confronted with facts that contradict their claims, Republicans have not backed down. And when repeated often enough, these narratives take on a life of their own. They spread so quickly and widely that extinguishing them becomes futile.
So far, these false attacks haven’t significantly cut into Cooper’s lead or his popularity with voters. That doesn’t make them any less wrong — or damaging. Disinformation fractures trust in our institutions, sows division, and makes it harder to solve real problems. Because if we can’t even agree on basic facts, what can we agree on?
Deputy Opinion Editor Paige Masten covers politics and the 2026 elections for The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer.
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