CHARLOTTE — Democratic US Senate candidate Roy Cooper holds a comfortable lead over Republican Michael Whatley in a new poll conducted by WSOC-TV and WRAL-TV. The poll administered by SurveyUSA shows former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper defeating former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley by a 14-point margin if the election for U.S. Senate were held today.
The poll shows Cooper takes 54 percent of the vote today and Whatley 40 percent. It found 1% of likely voters are backing another candidate and 5% are undecided. The poll has a credibility interval of five points. A credibility interval is similar to a margin of error, accounting for uncertainty in the poll and showing the range where the true result is likely to fall.
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“No part of me is surprised that every poll is going to show Roy Cooper up and Roy Cooper up beyond the margin of error,” Western Carolina Professor Chris Cooper said. “Double digits still starts to make me raise an eyebrow a little bit. Fourteen is an awful big number; I’d be surprised if that’s where we come in in the end.”
The WSOC-TV and WRAL-TV poll found Whatley leading by 80 points among Republicans and Cooper leading by 91 points among Democrats. Independents break for Cooper by 31 points, 59 percent to 28 percent.
The poll found Whatley leads by eight points among gun owners, by five in rural parts of the state, and by three points among white voters. Cooper leads by 62 points among Black voters, by 34 points among Latinos, and by 34 points among the youngest voters. Cooper leads by 37 points in urban parts of the state and by 20 in the suburbs. Cooper also leads by 29 points in greater Raleigh, 16 points in the Greensboro area, eight points in Western NC, and six points in greater Charlotte.
As in-person early voting approaches, the Senate Leadership Fund is discontinuing ads for Whatley. Cooper says this move was likely dictated by polling.
“Both parties have their own internal polls that they do not release to us and just given the consistency we’ve seen in the public polls, I’ve got to figure the internal polls look similar,” he said. “In this increasingly competitive environment, this just makes sense. If you’re the Republican Party, why put good money in North Carolina when you could still win Kansas, you could still win Alaska, you could possibly still win Texas.”
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The poll found 85 percent of voters have confidence votes will be counted accurately. It found President Donald Trump’s approval rating in North Carolina is 37 percent and Governor Josh Stein’s approval rating is 46 percent.
The poll was conducted from October 7-11.