Do we like Roy Cooper?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent and on the right side for years, held back by a messy compromise on the bathroom law and partisan fights over his disaster response.
Roy Cooper is a career North Carolina lawmaker. He sat in the state House and Senate, spent years as attorney general, then served two terms as governor from 2017 to 2025. By the AP's count he has never lost a state office race, including a roughly 10,000-vote squeak past Pat McCrory in 2016.
That 2016 win came in the wake of the 'bathroom bill', HB2, which left the state's reputation in tatters in Cooper's own words. He worked with lawmakers to partly repeal it early in his term. PolitiFact noted in 2019 that when Cooper said the law was gone, it was 'not entirely gone', so the repeal was a compromise, not a clean win.
On the harm test, his record is the strong part. In 2023 he vetoed three bills aimed at LGBTQ+ youth: a ban on gender-affirming care for under-18s, a ban on trans girls in girls' sports, and a parents' rights bill. He called them “a triple threat of political culture wars”. The Republican supermajority was positioned to override him, and the vetoes did not hold.
He also vetoed the 2024 HB10, which bundled more private school voucher money with a requirement that sheriffs cooperate with ICE. In January 2026 he said the federal government should deport violent criminals but argued it had killed American citizens in Minneapolis, and he wants reforms before more ICE funding. On health and the planet, he got Medicaid expansion across the line (about 600,000 people enrolled) and signed on to a 2021 bipartisan law cutting power-plant emissions.
The criticism is mostly about management. Republicans cite Department of Transportation overruns, slow hurricane recovery in eastern North Carolina and pandemic orders that dragged on. In 2026 the Whatley campaign called him “a complete failure at helping western North Carolina recover” from Helene, while Cooper hit back that Whatley hadn't convinced the Trump administration to send more aid. That's a partisan stoush, and where you land depends on whose recovery maths you trust.
His own words on why he ran were plain: he said he decided after prayer, and that the country faces “a moment as fragile as any I can remember”. In his victory speech he promised to protect Medicaid expansion and take on special interests. There's no Senate voting record yet, so the promises are all we've got to judge on.