Roy Cooper

Roy Cooper is the Democratic candidate for the open U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina in 2026, running to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis in one of the most closely watched contests in the country. A former two-term Governor, Cooper has built his campaign around lowering costs for working families, from groceries and health care to housing and child care.

Cooper was born and raised in Nash County, North Carolina, where he attended public schools and worked summers on his family's farm. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then practiced law for 18 years in Rocky Mount, representing everyday people and small businesses. He and his wife, Kristin, raised three daughters there; his mother's career as a public-school teacher helped shape his lifelong commitment to public education.

Cooper's public service began in the North Carolina legislature, where he worked to raise teacher pay and wrote the state's first children's health insurance initiative. He then served four terms as Attorney General, taking on scammers and predatory lenders and helping return billions of dollars to North Carolinians. As Governor from 2017 to 2025, he struck a bipartisan deal to expand Medicaid to more than 650,000 people and worked with both parties to pass hundreds of bills. He was elected governor twice — in 2016 and 2020 — both years Donald Trump carried North Carolina — and has never lost an election.

Roy Cooper is running for U.S. Senate to make life more affordable for North Carolina families. He has pledged to:

• Support North Carolina farmers and roll back the tariffs driving up costs for growers and grocery shoppers alike.
• Block anti-competitive grocery mergers and stop companies from using pricing algorithms to drive up grocery costs.
• Let doctors, not insurance bureaucrats, decide what health care coverage patients need.
• Reinstate Affordable Care Act tax credits and reverse Medicaid cuts so families don't lose their coverage.
• Expand Medicare's power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices and cap consumers' annual out-of-pocket drug costs.
• Crack down on pharmacy benefit managers and curb surprise medical billing, including for emergency ambulance transport.
• Lower energy bills by making data centers pay their fair share of power costs and modernizing the electric grid.
• Expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit and invest in the child care workforce.
• Stop big corporations and investment funds from buying up single-family homes and ban algorithm-driven rent-setting that drives up rents.

Across every issue, Cooper points to his record of bipartisan, practical results as governor — from expanding Medicaid to balancing budgets — as evidence he can deliver the same results for North Carolina in the Senate.