Donald Trump personally picked Michael Whatley to hold onto one of North Carolina's Senate seats for the GOP. Now Republicans are quietly writing it off as a definite loss, the Washington Post reported.
Party insiders are privately conceding the seat is all but gone unless Trump's cratering approval ratings — and the high prices fueling them — "improve dramatically."
North Carolina is one of "nine battlegrounds that probably will determine control of the Senate," where Republicans currently hold a slim 53-47 majority.
Former RNC chair Whatley has trailed Democrat and former Gov. Roy Cooper in nearly every poll by wider margins than GOP nominees are seeing almost anywhere else this cycle.
The financial signals are ugly too: a Republican super PAC, Old North Action, recently yanked $6.5 million in October ad reservations from the race, stoking fears other national GOP groups could bail next -- so far, none have.
"He's not in a left-for-dead situation," one senior Republican strategist with close knowledge of Senate races told the Post before offering the weak hope that " ... there will be a pulse until election day."
Longtime Republican strategist Paul Shumaker, who ran Sen. Thom Tillis' winning campaigns, laid out Whatley's core problem:
"He has to fix the voter enthusiasm turnout gap, and he has to be able to show the ability to win a majority of unaffiliated voters at a time when the president's approval rating is at an all-time low with that universe of voters," Shumaker elaborated.
According to the Post report, "Republican operatives, including some close to Trump, conceded privately to The Post that Whatley has been hampered by his reluctance to distance himself from the president. Whatley, a former state party chair, won Trump’s endorsement to lead the national party in 2024 in part because he boosted Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen."
