Within the Margin

For today’s second post, we call upon the Sun Belt Conference, which lets us group together North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia: one of the swingiest states, a former swing state that leans blue, and a former blue state that quickly became one of the reddest.

I’ll summarize each race in a sentence first, then link to the longer write-up further down the page.

Previous posts in this series:
Senate Week Overview
The Big 10 (Great Lakes/Midwest)
The SEC (East)
The SEC (West)
The Great Northwest
America East*

North Carolina
Incumbent: Thom Tillis (R – retiring)
2026 matchup: Roy Cooper (D) vs. Michael Whatley (R)
In a sentence: This state has bedeviled Democrats for over a decade when it comes to Senate elections, but it appears there wait will soon be over. Read more.

Virginia
Incumbent: Mark Warner (D – elected 2008)
2026 matchup: Mark Warner (D) vs. Bert Mizusawa (R)
In a sentence: You’re not gonna believe this, but states with huge federal workforces prefer not to have the federal workforce impugned by the people in charge of it. Read more.

West Virginia
Incumbent: Shelley Moore Capito (R – elected 2014)
2026 matchup: Rachel Fetty Anderson (D) vs. Shelley Moore Capito (R)
In a sentence: Mother Jones, who organized miners in the West Virginia coalfields, taught us to “pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

North Carolina: For over a decade, the Tar Heel State has exasperated Democrats in federal races. It is always contested at the presidential level: but after Barack Obama flipped it in 2008, the Democratic nominees since have fallen short and usually by tantalizing margins. Senate races have also proven narrowly elusive for Dems: Kay Hagan was defeated after one term in the annus horribilis of 2014, with Thom Tillis winning…but only by a point and a half. Six years later, Tillis seemed in grave danger but Cal Cunningham’s sexting scandal in the closing weeks of the election saved the Republican…by less than two points. In 2022, an open seat race looked promising, but Ted Budd held the seat for the GOP…by just over three points.

Where Democrats have succeeded in North Carolina is in non-federal statewide offices. They currently hold five out of ten row offices (excluding the state Supreme Court), including their third consecutive term as governor. Democrats have not lost an election for attorney general or secretary of state since 1896. One of those attorneys general, Roy Cooper, was elected governor in 2016 and re-elected in 2020; he left office with reasonable popularity despite a difficult dynamic with the GOP-dominated state legislature. Coming into this election cycle, Cooper was one of the most obvious recruits the party has had for a Senate race in some time…and they got him. Republicans, meanwhile, seemed at a loss for how to recruit here once Thom Tillis opted to retire: despite a set of proven officeholders, much attention was given to Lara Trump, as had been the case in the 2022 cycle. When she ultimately decided – again – not to run, the party seemingly defaulted into running lobbyist and state (and later national) GOP chairman Michael Whatley. He’s certainly connected politically and can raise funds, but even in a more favorable political environmental for Republicans, I’m not sure what the “story” is that he brings to the table. The idea seems to have been that people voted Republican in recent years when he was running the party, so people will vote for him now, too? But as I keep noting in conversation and in writing: it’s not 2024 anymore. Aligning with Trump is not so politically advantageous right now and Whatley has not found ways to put daylight between them on the issues driving this election. It’s unclear he even wants to. He also seems unable to land blows against Cooper, with Republicans relying instead on flimsy attempts to connect Cooper – the former governor of North Carolina – with crimes committed in South Carolina by a South Carolina resident. Another Senate Leadership Fund ad on Cooper’s behalf, meanwhile, utilized another grieving parent under false pretenses. Many, if not most, political campaigns engage in hyperbole; what the GOP is doing in North Carolina is next-level “we can just say anything” stuff.

Polling indicates voters are not falling for it, though. And it’s important to remember that if Republicans had to defend a Senate seat here in 2018, a Democratic wave year as this one is shaping up to be, they probably would have lost. This year looks like 2018 in some ways, and I haven’t seen anything yet to demonstrate that Whatley brings anything special to the table…or that Cooper, whose relative moderation without alienating base voters helps make him just about the safest pair of hands Democrats could run for a theoretically competitive Senate seat, is going to make an error. I think we can push the envelope here and go past lean and into likely pickup territory.
Rating: Likely Dem (flip)
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Virginia: By some measures, Virginia was the first state from the old Confederacy to shift from voting for very conservative Democrats to voting for (usually very conservative) Republicans. It stuck with Truman in ’48 but voted for Eisenhower twice, Nixon all three times, and even Ford in ’76 when the rest of the South went with native son Jimmy Carter. At the Senate level, one seat fell to the Republicans in 1972; the other was held by a pair of nominally-Democratic Harry Byrds until 1982 when it, too, elected a Republican. That seat was soon recaptured, for two terms, by a Democrat – but by the time the 21st century dawned, Virginia was back to having two Republican senators, had voted for the GOP nominee in nine consecutive presidential elections, had a majority-GOP delegation in the House, held all three statewide offices (governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general) and held majorities in both houses of the state legislature. The modern era Democratic ascent began with Mark Warner’s victory for governor in 2001, and continued with the election of Jim Webb as a senator in the Democratic wave year of 2006. Two years later, Warner captured the other Senate seat, Dems flipped three House seats, and Barack Obama became the first Democrat to take the sate’s electoral votes since Lyndon Johnson in ’64.

I introduce that history not only because it’s interesting from the standpoint of Southern political history, but because the man at the start of that process – Warner, with his 2001 gubernatorial win – is running for re-election here this year. Obviously, the story here is about much more than one man’s political talents. Warner undoubtedly knows ball, but Virginia Democrats were well-primed to benefit from changes in the national party coalitions. Virginia ranks in the top ten for residents with a bachelor’s degree, and politics in the 21st century increasingly breaks along those lines. That’s a Beltway story, yes – federal workers – but also a story about the Richmond and Norfolk/Hampton Roads metro areas, and on a smaller scale, university towns like Charlottesville and Harrisonburg. Virginia has voted for the Democratic candidate in five consecutive presidential elections and while Republicans have had breakthroughs in statewide races, sustaining them has proven difficult. And then came the return of Trump to power, which quickly proved ruinous for Virginia Republicans in the 2025 state elections.

Warner won his first Senate election in a landslide in 2008, then barely held on against Ed Gillespie in a 2014 contest that tricked Republicans into thinking Gillespie was a hot prospect. Things returned to normal with Warner’s 12-point over an unfunded and unheralded challenger. This year is shaping up similarly. He faces Bert Mizusawa, a retired Army major general who unsuccessfully sought his party’s nomination for the other Senate seat back in 2018. Mizusawa had a decorated military career and earned a Harvard Law degree along the way. A Trump endorser during the 2016 primaries, he served the campaign as a foreign policy advisor. Ten years later, being associated with Trump’s foreign policy is probably not much of a virtue, especially in a bluish-purple state, and it shows in his messaging. Mizusawa’s talking a lot about regionalism (Warner focuses too much on northern Virginia, he claims) and Abigail Spanberger (the new governor of Virginia, whose popularity has slipped in her first year). Those are logical beats to hit, but I’m not sure they really get him into the conversation in a state that thinks an awful lot about how presidents are managing the federal government, its military, and the rest of its workforce.
Rating: Safe Dem (hold)
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West Virginia: The Mountain State was one of only six to vote for Jimmy Carter in his 1980 re-election bid; in 1988, it was one of only ten carried by Mike Dukakis. Things have changed, to say the least. In 2024 it trailed only Wyoming in Trump’s share of the vote (just under 70%). At the Senate level, West Virginia had two Democratic senators from 1958 through 2014, when Jay Rockefeller retired. His departure essentially guaranteed a flip, and Congressmember Shelley Moore Capito dutifully defeated Natalie Tennant in a landslide. Tennant herself was a successful Democratic rising star, with dominant statewide victories for Secretary of State in 2008 and 2012 even as Barack Obama was losing the state at the top of the ballot. But 2014 was the year West Virginia’s realignment to the GOP accelerated from gradual to rapid, in no small part due to sharpening party divides over extractive industries like coal and oil/gas fracking. And where Rockefeller in 2008 had carried all but three of the state’s 55 counties in his re-election, by 2014 Capito was carrying every single one. For her part, Tennant went on to lose re-election as Secretary of State in 2016 as the takeover continued apace; by the start of 2021, every statewide office in West Virginia was held by Republicans except for Joe Manchin’s Senate seat (he would retire in 2024, and Republicans easily flipped the seat that year).

Capito was re-elected easily in 2020, defeating Paula Jean Swearengin by a 70%-27% margin – the worst margin of defeat for any Democratic Senate candidate in West Virginia history. Swearengin was a Bernie Sanders supporter running a leftist campaign in a deeply conservative state. These voters aren’t so conservative on economic issues, or so she suggested; they’ll vote for a progressive economic platform. They did not. This year, Capito faces Rachel Fetty Anderson, a public interest attorney who previously served on the Morgantown city council. Anderson presents a more serious image than Swearengin – and she has an awesome backroad/forest picture on her website’s landing page. I imagine she will fare a little bit better than Swearengin, too, but Democrats are a long, long way from competing in federal races in West Virginia.
Rating: Safe Rep (hold)
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