The 68-year-old former two-term governor, four-term attorney general and 14-year state lawmaker indicated Saturday night he will file in December to succeed Republican Sen. Thom Tillis. The state’s senior senator on June 29 said he would not seek a third term.
As he took the stage at the party’s state convention, he quickly asked for those running in 2026 to stand. And then he said, “Hey, I’m not sitting down am I?”
Cooper went on to laud his accomplishments. He introduced the keynote speaker, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who in turn said, “Let’s hear it for Sen. Cooper.”
Cooper is expected to make a more formal announcement on Monday.
Former U.S. Rep. Wiley Nickel since April had been the leading name for Democrats, even as Tillis was not showing intent to exit. Nickel this week said he is choosing another office to seek and will support Cooper.
Sen. Kay Hagan in 2008 was the last Democrat to win a Senate seat in the state. The last Democrats to win midterms were John Edwards in 1998 and Terry Sanford in 1986. Republicans are 5-0 in Senate elections since Hagan’s triumph.
Cooper’s intent was no surprise, and it is likely to mean no serious primary for Democrats in March.
Michael Whatley, the Republican National Committee chairman, is expected to announce his candidacy within days. President Donald Trump has already given his endorsement.
Even before Tillis’ retirement announcement, the seat was one of two for Republicans considered most vulnerable to change in the midterms either within party or to flip blue. Rep. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is in the other.
Cooper, born and raised in the Nash County community of Nashville, claimed gubernatorial wins of Medicaid expansion, cumulative raises of 19% for teachers, and dismantling of the infamous bathroom bill, also known as House Bill 2, that now appears about eight years ahead of its time. The legislation didn’t allow boys and men to enter private spaces of the opposite sex by saying they were girls or women.
His losses are led by universal school choice, photo identification for voting, deregulation and abortion. The national move on the protection of women’s spaces is poised to erode a similar battle he won on HB2.
A lawyer by trade, his “sue until it’s blue” approach put many decisions in courtrooms rather than the Capitol or Legislative Building. The tactic garnered success when the state Supreme Court grew to 6-1 majority Democrats, but lost steam during and after the COVID-19 era as it pivoted to 5-2 Republicans.
Cooper is 13-0 in elections for the state Senate, House of Representatives, attorney general and governor. It’s a far different time for his party than when he won a state House seat in 1986, joining Democratic majorities of 40-10 in the Senate and 84-36 in the House.
Today, it’s Republicans 30-20 in the upper chamber and 71-49 in the lower. Democrats that 21 years ago held 47.6% of voter registrations now (30.6%) trail the unaffiliated (38.3%) and are barely ahead of the Grand Old Party (30.4%).
At a time when elected authority has become questioned as kingship, Cooper holds a state record with 104 vetoes – 52 were overridden – and also doled out 328 executive orders over eight years as governor.
Of four state budgets, he vetoed two, signed one, and allowed one to become law without his signature. He long advocated for big pay raises for teachers and state employees and instead wound up with more veto stamps than signatures and adversary Republicans able to claim giving raises more times than he did.
Cooper left the governor’s office with eight years of promises for 17,708 jobs, along with investments of $31.78 billion. There were collective announcements by Toyota, Apple, FujiFilm Diosynth, Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, Wolfspeed, Boom Supersonic, Natron Energy and Boviet Solar.
There was also VinFast, the $1.2 billion taxpayer subsidy recipient with one-time plans for a $4 billion plant in Moncure sporting 7,500 jobs. VinFast is still coming but didn’t start production as intended last summer.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
