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Cooper more vulnerable than it might appear

By JOHN HOOD, Published: August 4, 2025

I don’t know for certain who will win North Carolina’s U.S. Senate race next year — and neither do you.

The likely Democratic nominee, Roy Cooper, has never lost a primary or general election. He’s won statewide office six times, four terms as attorney general and two as governor, plus a series of legislative contests in the late 1980s and 1990s. But these were state races, not federal ones. When sending senators or representatives to Washington, voters prioritize different issues and are more likely to stick with their party preferences. And Cooper’s likely Republican opponent, Michael Whatley, chairs the Republican National Committee. He’ll be well-funded. Cooper is favored at the moment, I think, but hardly a shoo-in.

Moreover, none of us knows for certain which way the midterm breezes will blow. The party holding the White House usually loses congressional and legislative seats, but not always.

Rather than speculate about Cooper and his party’s electoral prospects in the short term, then, let me describe the Democrats’ longer-term problem. It’s about policy, not politics. On at least three sets of issues of great importance to persuadable voters — economic, educational and social — progressives have yanked the party far away from reality and common sense.

The first policy trend will be a familiar one to longtime readers of this column. In recent years, Republican-governed states have generally been cutting taxes and regulations, restraining the growth of public expenditures, and applying market mechanisms to public services. Democratic-governed states have generally pursued a rather different mix of fiscal and regulatory strategies, sometimes for ideological reasons, sometimes to placate labor unions and other interest groups.

During the same period, Republican-governed states have, on average, grown faster than Democratic-governed ones, in part because Americans are “footing with the feet” by leaving tightly regulated states for freer ones in search of employment, opportunity, and a better quality of life.

Since 2020, for example, only one of the 10 states with the fastest-growing economies, Washington, was consistently governed by a Democratic legislature. Eight (including North Carolina) had Republican majorities, with the Arizona legislature exhibiting more partisan churn. Similarly, most states with significant gains in population since 2020 are conservatively governed. Most of the states with shrinking populations are progressively governed.

Do these trends in and of themselves conclusively prove that conservative policies, typically enacted by Republican lawmakers, yield better economic results than progressive ones? No. Correlation and causation aren’t synonymous. As I have long argued, public policy is only one of many factors shaping economic outcomes.

But let’s face it: progressive Democrats in North Carolina and elsewhere have a Chicken Little problem. They’ve predicted doom for states with conservative policies and boom for states with progressive policies. They’ve been wrong.

On education, many of the same folks resisted what proved to be a steady expansion of parental choice and school competition. Again they predicted doom and were mistaken. Choice-friendly states such as Florida, Indiana, and Louisiana currently boast some of America’s top-performing public schools. According to several recent studies, states with more school competition tend to post higher test scores and other educational outcomes, not lower ones.

And on social policy, Democrats in North Carolina and elsewhere spent decades defending pervasive racial discrimination by colleges and universities in admissions and employment. Such abuses of the concept of “affirmative action” were never popular — and in the case of hiring practices, were never even arguably legal. It shouldn’t have taken litigation to restore equal protection under the law.

In all three cases, progressivism proved to be politically costly. Given more room to maneuver, Democratic politicians could have adjusted to these entirely predictable trends — championing some tax cuts and deregulatory efforts, for example, and compromising rather than resisting on school choice and equal protection. Indeed, nimble Democratic governors such as Jared Polis in Colorado and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania have sometimes done just that, conferring political benefits not only on themselves but on their legislative allies.

Roy Cooper? Not so much.

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John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).