Excerpts:

There are politicians who traffic in impassioned oratory or contagious fervor or ingenious catchphrases. Then there’s Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee in the crucial U.S. Senate contest in North Carolina. His campaign slogan is so prosaic, so blunt, so gruff that every time I see it, I do a double take, wondering if it’s some parody or I’m hallucinating.

Make Stuff Cost Less. That’s it. He even calls his campaign schedule the Make Stuff Cost Less tour, as if he’s Bon Jovi or Bad Bunny, poised to perform his greatest hits. Except he’s going to talk about, you know, stuff. And making it cost less. Because who’s not in favor of that?

I actually love what Cooper, a former two-term governor of North Carolina, is doing. And I love that while there was or still is so much Democratic drama in Maine and Michigan and Texas and other states with midterm races on which control of the Senate hinges, we here in purple, swing-y, all-important North Carolina are shuffling through a relative snoozefest. No big scandals. No six genders. No visits from Hasan Piker. Just an unquestionably decent, deeply familiar Democratic nominee with a folksy affect, a focused message and, maybe, a lesson about the effectiveness of politicians who don’t fashion themselves as revolutionaries, don’t dance along the culture’s fault lines and don’t have any big surprises in store.

Already, Democrats are painting Whatley as a slick plutocrat utterly beholden to Trump, whose support is indeed the main force propelling Whatley’s candidacy. Meantime, Republicans are selectively alluding to various measures and developments during Cooper’s years as governor to charge him with being soft on crime, a reflexive accusation hurled at almost every Democrat. It doesn’t quite square with Cooper’s moderate record and centrist image.

By nature and by design, he isn’t an easy target — he’s so assiduously affable, so determinedly reasonable, so emphatically low-key, to coin an oxymoron. He grew up working on a North Carolina farm, which he mentions more than a little. The first of three campaign ads that he has released so far begins with images of those bucolic acres. “Mom was a teacher, Dad a small-town lawyer and farmer,” Cooper says as black-and-white pictures of his parents from the olden days flash on the screen. “Fridays were football. Sunday was church.” That’s from the ad’s first 10 seconds. In the remaining 20, Cooper mentions insurance rates and other working-class worries, but not, say, ICE raids or the Iran war.

I listened to two Make Stuff Cost Less speeches that he gave over the past week and a half. In neither did he utter Trump’s name. He did refer to the “chaos and horror” in Washington and accused Whatley of being poised to do “whatever this president tells him to do and say, regardless of whether it’s good for the people of North Carolina.” But Cooper quickly pivoted from that dig to a vow to “work with this president when I can,” adding: “I’m going to put the people before power, the people before party, the people before politics.”

Such alliteration is about as fancy and sexy as any of Cooper’s remarks. He indulges in a favorite refrain that falls groaningly short of being a rallying cry: “For so many North Carolina families, there’s just too much month at the end of the money.”

The policy section of the Cooper campaign’s website is devoted entirely to dozens of measures that he proposes for bringing down prices. He wants to repeal many tariffs, strengthen enforcement of antitrust laws, ban algorithmic grocery pricing. The list goes on and on, and above it, in large type, hover four words you’ll never guess: Make Stuff Cost Less.

“Democrats should spend more time asking themselves what a guy like Roy Cooper — currently poll-mogging his Republican opponent in North Carolina — is doing right than marveling at D.S.A. candidates in extremely blue districts,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of The Bulwark, wrote in a column early this month.

Amen. And what Cooper is doing is keeping his head down, his words measured and his message simple. In a battleground state in a bonkers era, that’s the right stuff.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/opinion/roy-cooper-senate-election.html