- The Cooper-Whatley U.S.

Senate race heats up with millions raised, millions spent, and polls apparently tightening.

And new scrutiny on local elections and elections integrity.

This is State Lines.

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♪ - Hello again, welcome to State Lines.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

Joining me today, a great panel of analysts to kick off mid-July, Skye David of New Frame Incorporated.

Wake County Representative Phil Rubin to her right and to his right in more ways than one.

Senator Ben Sawrey of Johnston County.

[laughter] Professor, Doctor Chris Cooper of Western Carolina University, political scientist.

You've seen him on a few TV stations, books, and magazines.

Welcome everyone.

- Thank you for having us.

- Well, you got golf in this week.

Are you relaxed now?

Legislature's largely ramped down.

- Quieted fast.

- Well, this practical conclusion of the 2026 legislative session allowed them, media, you, me to pivot towards election 2026.

That Roy Cooper-Michael Whatley Senate race is showing some seesaw effects in the polls.

Early July polls showed Roy Cooper leading Mr.

Whatley by double digits.

Now a new poll's out this week.

By public policy polling has Mr.

Cooper leading by four points.

The Cooper campaign has been actively buying advertising for a few months.

He's out there.

But we're seeing the Whatley team now drop seven figure digital advertising buys and say Mr.

Whatley has visited all 100 North Carolina counties.

Chris, here we go.

And a little money, or a lot of money, goes a long way for that GOP ticket it appears.

Four points.

- Yeah, four points, at least according to PPP.

We can just sort of contrast that for a second, right?

I think a lot of folks made a big deal about that movement to the four points from the kinds of numbers we were seeing from Catawba and some other folks who were more like 10 and 12.

And I think the difference there is really in kind of how these pollsters do what they do.

So if you actually look, sort of break down the cross tabs here, what we see, PPP, Catawba, the Locke Foundation, Carolina Ford, everybody has Roy Cooper about 48, 49%.

The only difference is really what the Whatley numbers are.

And that seems to be a function of two things.

One, do those pollsters ask about third party candidate Shannon Bray?

PPP did not.

And two, what the heck do they do with these sort of undecided voters?

And so there's a lot fewer of those undecided on PPP than on these other polls.

- What happens when you don't ask about the Libertarians or the Greens if they have a candidate?

- The Libertarians, or if you don't ask about them, is probably gonna help the Republicans.

Not surprisingly, the Republican candidate.

Don't ask about the Greens.

Guess who gets that Green vote?

Those tend to be the Democrats.

- Senator Sawrey, what do you make of polls?

I mean, when you go from a public policy polling to a Carolina Ford to a John Locke, I mean, there's a lean in these organizations by design.

Do you buy the polls?

- Well, yeah.

I mean, certainly the polls tell a story.

And I think the really interesting story is that Cooper is topping out at 48, 49%.

He's been on a ballot in North Carolina for the better part of two decades.

He's well known.

The voters know who he is.

And yet 50% of the voters still aren't convinced he needs to be the next United States senator representing North Carolina.

If I'm Cooper, I'm concerned about that.

If I'm Whatley, I'm in a great spot.

Because what he has the opportunity to do now is to spend the next several months telling the voters about why Cooper's record is not right for North Carolina.

He's got a track record during the COVID era with schools and the bars and the small businesses.

I think people have somewhat put it out of mind recently, but they're going to be told about soon with hurricane relief and recovery process, especially in Eastern North Carolina, that people are probably going to hear about.

And it is really, really going to be something on his record that he does not want the voters and the rest of the state to know about.

Whatley's in a great spot.

The money's there.

The money's going to come in.

It's going to be a tight race down the finish line.

I don't buy the 10 to 12 point record at all.

He's not, it's not that type of race.

I mean, it's going to be the top of the ticket and drive it.

- So says the Republican.

How about the Democratic side of this?

- I have a little different view, but I think there are some things that we agree on.

Senate race in North Carolina is going to be tight, right?

Historically, that's what we know it looks like.

And so those 14 point polls, I think most people always knew that was going to tighten up.

But if you're a campaign and you're getting around 50% in polls this far back from the election, you're already where most campaigns would want to be.

But now it's going to be about Whatley trying to get name recognition because a lot of people still don't even know who he is.

And that really is the contrast in this election.

Whatley for him, North Carolina is like a line in his bio, but his career is Washington politics and lobbying.

And meanwhile, Governor Cooper spent 40 years serving the state of North Carolina.

And so that contrast as a seven digit ad buy is going to let you get more name recognition.

It's not going to change that 40 year difference in service to the state.

- Name recognition for Michael Whatley going up, you think?

I think it's going to have to.

And with as much spending is going to come in for this race, he will have name recognition.

By November, we're all going to know his name and everybody we know is going to know his name as well.

- Chris, how will this affect down ballot if voters do dial in and all of a sudden the Cooper-Whatley race is indeed a four, one to four point race.

Take me down to Supreme Court, legislature especially.

- Right.

And you have these just all these polls, even the PPP poll that had some different numbers here.

They're pretty consistent, actually, on the Supreme Court within the margin of error with Earls, maybe up a hair, but again, within the margin of error, which in real speak means essentially tied.

And so, yeah, look, it's going to drive, I think, like Senator Sawrey said very well, the top of the ticket is going to drive what's going to happen down ballot.

If the Republicans are not excited, motivated to turn out, it's going to be worse here for the Republicans.

And they of course know party of the president, unless it's just after 9/11, loses seats in the first midterm.

Right.

So nationally, it's going to be a better year for the Democratic Party.

The question is just how much better does it affect things like congressional district one, congressional district 11 in my neck of the woods out west, and then some of these legislative races as well.

- Now you guys were talking about the campaign materials and things you print and stickers and hats and things.

How do you, how do you elevate your own races to make voters pay attention as much to you as to a state Supreme Court, court of appeals or a US Senate race?

- Well, you know, the difference is, is I have 250,000 constituents, right?

So I have an opportunity to really engage with folks locally in my community in a way that Whatley and Cooper might not be able to.

So you've seen, you know, historically over the past several years that candidates for North Carolina Senate, North Carolina House on the Republican side overperformed the top of the ticket just because there's that very personal relationship there.

But we still need people to get out and vote and be excited to do so.

You know, Whatley running a strong race, spending this money, engaging, you know, to professor's point, I mean, it helps, you know, the Supreme Court race and it helps our general assembly seats as well.

- Representative Rubin, with these strong candidates, if they're both very strong and you're down to, you know, just down balance the nature of the beast for your race, when do you know when to cling on to a Roy Cooper type candidacy versus I need to run as Rubin, let's let other races be what they may?

I think that's actually something you kind of know now.

Like we're, you know, we're really excited about Roy Cooper's race.

I'm thrilled that he's running.

I was thrilled when he announced, I'm thrilled to have my name tied to his.

But I do think, and to your point, there is this sort of bottom up approach that can be really effective in campaigning.

Our campaigns are on the ground and folks that show up to vote for me are very likely to vote for Roy Cooper for Senate and for Anita Earls for Supreme Court.

Not automatic, but very likely.

And so when you think about campaigning, obviously a lot of the money is top down, but there was really an argument to be made for spending that money bottom up to get those people out to the polls.

- Folks, we have three attorneys and one political scientist.

I'm going to tap your legal mind on probably the most wonky topic of this show this week.

It's WUNC News' Colin Campbell and others are tracking changes in the state auditor's office related to local elections and communications between the state and local levels.

Dallas Woodhouse resigned as Auditor Dave Bullock's liaison to local county boards of elections across our state.

Carolina Public Press and NC Local, two media outlets, released some public records showing that Mr.

Woodhouse was giving advice, maybe directions to county elections officials regarding the approval and rejection of some early voting sites.

Jackson County's Board of Elections out in the mountains, the chair there reportedly said he felt pressured.

Governor Stein says having a former NCGOP executive director as a elections liaison smacks of partisan influence.

This was a role that answered directly to the state auditor's Skye.

State Board of Elections says it had no role in that work structure.

The auditor appoints local boards of elections members, a role that was taken away from the governor so the governor would have a reason to have a beef about this process.

I'm trying to figure out, is this something new or is the governor just pointing out how the sausage is made with local boards because he can't appoint people to those boards anymore?

- Well, first, this position is a new position and it makes sense.

Other agencies have liaisons to the General Assembly and all of these folks were appointed last year so it makes sense to have someone who is their point person to go to from the local board's perspective.

But then once these stories came out, I think what ultimately happened is it created a question mark about that role and voters maybe don't have as much trust in that process so he had to go.

- How does this affect local boards of elections?

Now they are now partisan but haven't they always been really partisan if not in name?

- They've been appointed in a partisan way for sure but I want to just say I think this is fundamentally different than what we've seen before and there's a couple points that matter for this.

One is when the legislature moved appointment power to the auditor, that law says that the state board of elections will exercise its authority independently of the state auditor.

The state auditor has no business having an election liaison.

The only election thing he is allowed to do under statute is he appoints the state board and he does their budget.

This is neither of those things.

He has no business having that.

And it wasn't expressing an opinion.

There were threats.

We had Republican board members saying they were threatened with their position if they didn't do what they were told.

And that is really serious and there's not a historical analog to that with previous governors.

No one has come forward with the text message, with the emails, with the position.

That is new and it is wrong and it is going to take a partisan tinge on election administration that's going to harm voter confidence.

It's really wrong.

- Your perspective, Senator Sawrey?

- I think it's finally seeing how the sausage is made.

I think there are a few very important distinctions to make here.

Dallas Woodhouse did not work for the state board of elections.

He worked for the auditor's office.

State board of elections is an independent agency that's housed under the auditor's agency for purposes of budgeting and administration and things such as that.

They're very technical and ministerial.

You talked about this being a wonky topic.

It is.

It's a separation of powers issue.

So when the governor, Governor Stein and Governor Cooper, have litigated separation of power issues previously, they have taken the position that the power to appoint is the power to control.

Just because you're seeing it here does not mean it didn't happen in other instances.

I can go back and I can talk about some of the settlements that were made during some of the lawsuits during the COVID era.

I can give you anecdotal issues with the Bobby Haney race where the residency challenge was made against his Democrat opponent at the Currituck level and then the state board almost having a summary rejection of that residency challenge at their level.

After hours of hearing, they had the decision almost in their hand, ready to go within 30 seconds.

The governors have similar liaisons that have done this.

Maybe Dallas Woodhouse did not do it in the most discreet way.

It might have been a little ham handed or something in that nature.

But what the voters are seeing is what has always happened for decades and decades in North Carolina with respect to how influence is exercised over these boards of appointments.

- What's the difference in being discreet versus he was just transparent and openly communicated?

- I think that's likely what the issue is and what people are seeing here.

Rather than a phone call being made, a text message was sent.

I think that's probably what's occurred in this instance.

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but purely what you're seeing is what has happened in politics and what Republicans have been screaming about with the Democrats in control of the board of elections over time that you're finally seeing, I think, the Democrats complain about what the Republicans are doing in this instance.

- Chris, what does this do for elections?

Now, if you're one of these folks that worries about elections in North Carolina and Republicans have kept election integrity right there at the top of the agenda list, sort this for me because I hear different opinions.

- Yeah, and both fairly reasonable opinions, I would argue.

But I think one thing we need to say about this position that was a new position, never existed before, this was not a liaison to the election directors.

This was a liaison to the chairs of the boards of elections.

These are the partisan folks, I think, that Senator Sawrey was talking about.

As to whether it was sort of open or sort of in public is where it wasn't before, I mean, these were gathered by FOIA, so it's not like they came out in sort of the normal course of doing business.

This was journalists doing what journalists do.

As for what it means for election integrity in the state, I still feel very, very confident in our election process in our state.

We have 101 boards of elections to try to do anything to monkey with our elections.

It isn't just going into one place.

It's going into 101 different boards of elections, 100 counties plus the state board.

So I think this is not good for how folks view elections, but I don't think people should take away from this.

They can't trust elections.

Our elections aren't professional.

They are.

- If I'm appointed to a job or hired for a job, why would I expect to have complete independence from the person who hired me in terms of receiving advice, whether I wanted that advice or not?

- That's a great question.

I don't-- - Look at him, yeah.

- Yeah, I mean, my answer to that is because, one, the General Assembly wrote in a state law that said that.

It said they will exercise their authority independently of the state auditor.

I think if the auditor was auditing somebody and found them flouting authority like that, we'd see a giant 90-page audit report with recommendations for how they need to follow up.

- The state board says they are independent.

It's the liaison position that works for the auditor.

That, but Boliek is appointing those people.

- He has no authority over elections, and so there's a difference between stating an opinion and exerting authority.

You'll get removed from the county board if you don't do what we say is exerting authority.

If Dallas Woodhouse wants to file a public comment about early voting sites, he is as much right as anyone else.

But what happened in Granville, and I do want to talk about this, in Granville County, they took the sites away from where minority voters had historically voted.

They moved the early voting sites out so we can't afford it.

The county came back and said, "Here's the money.

You can do it now.

We'll give you the money."

And they said, "No, still no."

- So it's interesting to hear Representative Rubin's position, because it's directly contrary to what Governor Stein and Governor Cooper have suggested in their separation of power lawsuits where, again, the power to appoint is the power to control the decision-making authority of their appointees on this board.

It's fundamental to their argument on this with the nonunitary executive theories that we've been talking about with our boards of appointment.

And to your point about the early voting boards, that requires a unanimous decision by the board with respect to where those are made.

And then if there's not a unanimous decision, it gets kicked up to the independent state board of elections.

So we have, to your point, Professor, we've got a great board of elections.

I have confidence in our election system, and I think it's gonna play out in 2026.

- On the Democrat, Republican, you're not worried about statewide elections, or even with this dust up and it's politics and it's a news cycle, are you, any worries at all?

- I share Chris's faith in our system of elections.

In fact, I have really strong faith in our system of elections.

But I do think that making sure elections are administered fairly, right?

Early voting sites shouldn't be picked to benefit a political party over another one, right?

They should be picked to benefit all voters who wanna vote regardless of where they are.

But I think ultimately, I just wanna just respond to the point about the state board is also not operating independently.

You're seeing them hire people and you're seeing Auditor Boliek show up to announce the hiring of staff at the state board of elections that he has nothing to do with if they're independent.

You're seeing press releases being issued jointly by them.

He's chairing the revamp of all their technology.

It's not an independent state board of elections, and that is different than governors, very different.

- So just one more point, it's a wonky point.

I'm Professor, I gotta weigh in on it one more time, right?

So I just think folks need to remember, none of these decisions are final, right?

So right now, all these county boards are making these decisions.

Anything that is non-unanimous, I think as both folks have mentioned, is going to go to the state board.

And so we're gonna get a real test of this theory, right?

Who is the state board listening to?

Are they just following with the majority in each one of these counties?

Or sometimes they're able to exert their own opinion.

Are they gonna follow what Dallas suggested in these texts?

They do something different?

I don't know the answer, it hasn't happened yet.

It will in a couple of months.

- Yeah, I wanna pivot to the North Carolina Board of Elections.

It approved some new rules that could change the threshold for disqualifying controversial ballots.

The rules address voters who cast ballots, but can't show photo ID.

These voters could, can get an exemption and have their ballot counted, unless a unanimous county board of elections denies the request.

The new rule would allow for a simple majority vote of that same local elections board.

I've been told local elections board members would need to practically know, Senator Sawrey, that a voter is lying about their photo ID status to invalidate their ballot.

But the new rules would also allow poll workers to evict people for being disruptive or noisy as well.

That's gotten some free speech folks on the right kind of flared up.

We're just touching that third rail again.

What do you make of the new rule?

Now we're going from unanimous to simple board majority to throw out ballots that might be in question, but the threshold is you really better be sure that ballot's bad.

- Yeah, so I mean, I think it's important to know this is a conforming change of North Carolina statute, right?

So North Carolina law talks, and we'll get back to the early voting plan, it requires the early voting plans to be adopted by unanimous vote.

It's in black and white in the statute.

It says unanimous vote by the board.

In this case, we're talking about reasonable impediment issues when somebody can't present a photo ID.

It does not say unanimous consent.

It implies majority by the board in order to make it happen.

The unanimous provision was an expansion and interpretation of the rule by a prior board, which made it very hard to come to a conclusion about whether there was some falsity with that reasonable impediment exception.

So and it's also important, okay, so we've got the statutory issue, and then we've got the threshold of the evidence needed to throw out that ballot.

You have to find falsity with the reasonable impediment affidavit that goes along with the lack of the photo ID.

- Hold on, you gotta make this simple for us around the kitchen table.

We don't have legal degrees.

Break it down for me and the family at the kitchen table.

What happens?

- So the board has to make a determination that the reason giving for the impediment, it's false, it's wrong.

I mean, there's no truthfulness to that statement in the affidavits.

I mean, keep in mind, when you don't have a photo ID, you can file an affidavit for a reasonable impediment.

If that impediment is determined to be false, then the board by majority vote can throw it out.

So it is a very technical wonky issue.

People are gonna make a big deal about this, but again, it is a statutory and conforming change from a prior board's expansive interpretation.

- Representative people do, they don't like these bad ballots being cast.

They want every ballot to count, but they also want every ballot to be pure.

- Yeah, let me try and simplify this, 'cause I don't think it has to be that wonky.

So the statute is silent on whether it requires a majority or not.

The board can have a rule that could go unanimous or majority.

That's a policy decision the board is making.

But there was a two hour meeting yesterday on this rule.

And if you listen to that whole meeting, that's wonky, you would notice that not a single piece of evidence was offered of a single time ever where this unanimous rule caused a problem, where a ballot that we thought was actually shouldn't have been counted, got counted because one person wouldn't vote to remove it.

Zero pieces of evidence, none.

And now what you'll have is a ballot can be thrown out by a purely partisan vote, which before, what the unanimity rule did was protect the right to vote, because it made sure that if we are going to decide that this person lied on their affidavit, that was a bipartisan decision.

And now with zero evidence, it will now be allowed for Republican majorities in all 100 counties to throw out ballots, even if there's a 3-2 dispute over whether that person lied.

I think that's serious.

- It has to be based on fact, not speculation.

So it has to have a fact behind it that proves to the falsity.

And I don't know how many of these challenges we have had previously and how many we're going to have here.

But I would guess that this is not a lot of ballots that we're talking about.

- I do have a concern with some of the messaging on this.

I do want to be clear about this.

It's not going to create a situation where Republican majorities can throw out any ballot.

It's a very limited subset of people who cannot show any of the vast list of photo identification examples that are showing up saying, "I have no identification.

I can't show my identification otherwise."

It is a very small group of people that are coming in and say, "Just trust me.

Trust who I am."

You still have the falsity element here at all.

And also take issue with the presumption that it would be a 3-2 majority vote.

We've seen any number of instances of bipartisan majorities forming decisions on county levels, at the state level, in any other example.

But just to say that Republicans would go there on a 3-2 vote and do something, I mean, that requires a degree of cynicism.

That just don't buy.

I mean, I think our election process is strong.

It's good.

And we're going to have a great election this upcoming cycle in 2026 because of the rules we've got in place.

- I don't think that's cynical, especially since this topic is not unrelated to the topic that we were just talking about on political exertion over election administration.

And what I said was that you could have a 3-2 majority who could do that, which is a fact.

That's what it means with the change in the rule.

We'll see what happens in November.

And you're right.

It's probably a lower number of ballots that are even cast using these affidavits.

But the reality is, boards do make bipartisan decisions.

That's what the old rule leaned on.

And that's what we should have.

- Chris, the election integrity debate versus protecting democracy, which would poll better?

Would we rather have a partisan majority tossing ballots that could be bad, or is this bad that we have a partisan majority tossing ballots?

- I mean, this is an essential tension.

But I think one thing I'd like to remind us of, we've been talking, as we should in the short run, right, Republicans who have the majority, Democrats who don't.

That's not in statute.

What is in statute is the party of the auditor.

And there is no law that I've ever seen that says the auditor has to be a Republican, or the governor has to be a Democrat.

At one point, the shoes are going to be back on the other foot, and I think we need to remember that.

This is a conversation about the party of the auditor.

Yes, it's Republican now.

In the future, I think both parties need to think, how would you feel about this when the shoe will inevitably be on the other foot?

- Got time for one more topic.

Four minutes left in the show.

WRAL News, where I saw this report that North Carolina County governments are collectively facing a nine-figure cost to administer food stamp programs really soon.

If you're a taxpayer, pay attention.

Federal law is reducing federal reimbursement of program expenses from 50 percent to 25 percent, but the state budget law did not increase food program administration funding for this year.

It's a funding gap the report says could cost 52 million county dollars.

County Commissioner Association lobbyists told WRAL the organization tried to get funding support, never could materialize among all the hubbub of the state budget.

Representative Rubin, Wake County represent, they seem to have plenty of money.

A lot of rural counties out there don't.

- Yeah.

I mean, first of all, Wake County doesn't have plenty of money, but it continues this process of passing money down from, or costs down from the state to the counties.

And now it's actually three layers, right?

Because you had the federal government that has now passed these millions of dollars in costs down to the state, and the state budget, the state took the bill and handed it to the counties.

If you take somewhere like Halifax, it's going to be three percent of their entire budget is now paying for what the state legislature failed to fund.

And the counties asked for that.

Meanwhile, the same folks are saying property taxes are too high.

But how do these counties pay for this?

They pay for it with property taxes.

- So I disagree with that.

So you have to keep in mind, it's not the state government failing to fund an obligation.

We funded our obligations under the changes from HR 1.

The counties have actively advocated for and lobbied to have a county-administered, state-supervised DSS system that administers these programs.

They're having to make some choices now because of what's happened at the federal level, because the federal legislation has changed that allocation formula, not the state system.

In 696, the first bill we passed this year, we included a study provision in there that would look at taking away this function from the counties and moving it to a regional system like other states have done around the nation.

There's efficiencies there.

They don't have to deal with this cost issue that you're talking about.

And then we can also work on reducing the error rate in some of these systems, which are where the problems really lie.

- Skye, voters voted for a lot of this at the federal level, and now here all that cost comes down to the county.

Will this spur reform, in your opinion?

- don't know that it'll spur reform, but I think it's going to be something that the legislature will consider and talk with the county commissioners about.

And ultimately, that decision is going to be up to the counties what they're going to do.

And they certainly have to make some funding choices, policy choices to shift funding from other things.

But I'm not sure if it'll spur reform.

- Chris, voters voted for people that then passed the big, beautiful bill, who then passed the cost down to the local level, and now they don't want to pay for it.

They don't want to pay more taxes.

We have a chance to cap taxes for Pete's sake.

What happens?

- What happens from here?

I don't know.

But I think it represents this tension we're seeing increasingly.

Think about how power is distributed.

We had a good conversation about horizontal power, right?

Is it the auditor's office, the governor's office, the general assembly?

This is ultimately a fight about vertical power, right?

Is it going to go to the lower level?

Who's going to pay the bill at the end of the day?

And I think that, in some ways, is the new tension that is defining our state's politics.

- It's one of the few issues I've seen where we can see federal money affecting the local government.

So local votes count, too.

Well, that's it for this show.

If you have any opinion, I'm sure you do, we have an email address.

I'll share it with this crowd.

They might write you back if you ask nicely.

StateLines@PBSNC.org.

I do read every email.

Thank you, Skye, Representative, Senator, Chris, good to have you.

And more importantly, I'm so thankful you watch us each and every week.

Can't wait to see you next time.

Bye bye.

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