North Carolina’s U.S. Senate Race Just Took Center Stage

Part 3 of The Republicans Bounce Back (A Little) in the Battle for the U.S. Senate

In my last two columns regarding the 2026 Senate midterm elections, I didn’t include the North Carolina race, where nothing of consequence had happened since my previous Senate update.

The Big Senate Brawl in the Lone Star State

Unfortunately, things have changed there, in a big way. And there is no question in my mind that the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a schizophrenic career criminal will alter the fundamentals of the 2026 U.S. Senate race in that state.

North Carolina: Thom Tillis (retiring) / Tilt D

As I wrote before, former Gov. Roy Cooper’s entrance into the race had given the Democrats a slight edge. He has been elected twice as governor and, before that, for four terms as the state attorney general. On the other side, Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley announced he would run and got President Trump’s endorsement. It is unclear how good of candidate Whatley will be, as he has never stood for office before, but he will certainly be able to raise money.

The RCP average has the universally known Cooper ahead of the largely unknown Whatley 46% to 41.3%. Overall, this is good for Whatley.

As I saw it, Cooper’s slight edge comes from the normal GOP advantage in federal races being counterbalanced by Cooper’s political strength in the state and the fact that the Democrats should have a slight edge nationally as the “out party.”

But now things may change, bigly. The murder of this poor woman, a Ukrainian immigrant who fled her own nation’s brutal war to escape to what she hoped was safety in the U.S., will presumably tilt the Senate race to Whatley.

As the North Carolina governor for the past eight years, Roy Cooper was the chief law enforcement official in the state during the majority of Decarlos Brown Jr.’s criminal career. Cooper pushed the recommendations of a task force of “extreme leftists which introduced weak-on-crime policies to North Carolina's justice system regarding 'pretrial release, fees, and fines.'" And Brown was a repeat criminal offender with 14 prior arrests, who, as a diagnosed schizophrenic, should never have been allowed to roam free. He already had been convicted for felony larceny, robbery with a dangerous weapon, and for communicating threats. Just after his release from prison, Brown was charged with assaulting his sister, and even his mother has blamed the courts for not controlling her son.

There are really two issues here, intertwined. Brown had been convicted of serious crimes, which he should have been punished more fully for. But also, as a diagnosed schizophrenic who had acted violently in the past and was an obvious current danger, even if he wasn’t in jail for a crime, he should have been undergoing some sort of treatment and supervision to keep him from harming himself or someone else. But Democrats, enthralled with the idea that criminals and mentally disturbed people are simply misunderstood and disadvantaged people who deserve freedom, assistance, and protection, refuse to allow for this.

This is a position that is not popular with most of the voting public. And it never has been.

Basically, we are experiencing “deja vu all over again.” As I mentioned before, in the 1988 election, flag burning was a “wedge issue” that helped turn Democrat Gov. Michael Dukakis’s initial big polling lead into a near landslide loss to Republican Vice President George H. W. Bush. Another wedge issue that year, and probably a more important one, involved the Democrats’ leniency towards criminals and Willie Horton. Horton was a career criminal who was serving a life sentence in Massachusetts for murder. However, because Massachusetts was then, and is now, a very left-wing state, the state had a furlough program that allowed Horton to leave prison during the weekends. One time, he didn’t return to his cell, and he was only later captured after committing a vicious assault, armed robbery, and rape in Maryland. After the issue was first raised, ineffectively, in the 1988 Democrat primary by then Sen. (and future Vice President) Al Gore, the Bush campaign (and its allies) was more successfully able to hang this ridiculously lenient policy around the neck of Dukakis with some very hard-hitting commercials.

Of course, for the next decade, the Democrats and the MSM (but I repeat myself) argued incessantly that the Horton attacks were “dirty pool” by the Bush campaign and were “dog whistles” to anti-black racists. Despite, you know, the fact that the policy of letting convicted violent felons out of prison for the weekends was both objectively stupid and dangerous.

And despite the fact that it should be obvious that this policy would be unpopular with normal non-criminals.

In 2026, for the remainder of the North Carolina campaign, I suspect we are going to see a one-issue wedge issue campaign from Michael Whatley on this incident. Likewise, it should be expected that nationally, the Democrats’ soft-on-crime agenda will find itself in the crosshairs of the Trump team — and the GOP groups, in general. President Trump has already started to raise this issue.

What is amazing is that the Democrats have been pushing these kinds of left-wing soft-on-crime policies since the 1960s. They have harmed their presidential candidates in multiple elections, including several presidential elections. And they are such well-known policies that even "The Simpsons" cartoon has made fun of the Democrats for pushing them.

But the Democrats are committed to their leftism, and they seemingly never remember that things are not going to end well for them if they actually implement their policies. And we all know that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

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