QUID · NORTH CAROLINA U.S. SENATE · OCT 5 - OCT 11, 2026
US ELECTIONS2026 NORTH CAROLINA
Roy Cooper leads the polling average by 9 points and loses the conversation in his own state by 40. The reason is visible in the data rather than hidden in it: 56 percent of the posts naming Michael Whatley also name Cooper, because one campaign spent the week producing the material that mentions them both.
TOTAL VOLUMEPosts, articles and comments across all geographies. Only 6% of the U.S. portion is original writing; the rest is reposts and replies.
+20.6
WHATLEY, NATIONALNet sentiment outside North Carolina. +57.1 on posts naming them alone.
-4.5
COOPER, NATIONALNet sentiment outside North Carolina. -20.6 on posts naming them alone.
9K
BIGGEST DAYCoverage framing North Carolina as a decisive Senate battleground ran alongside a report that Whatley had paused television advertising while his campaign reconsidered its strategy.
What The Polls Say
Published polling, shown to set context. A poll asks a sample of voters which candidate they intend to support. Everything else on this page measures something different: the balance of positive and negative labeled posts about each candidate in the captured conversation. A candidate can lead the vote and still take the worse of the argument online, and where the two diverge this page explains the conversation, not the electorate.
Catawba College · field date Sep 30, 2026 · 885 V · margin of error 3.7 points
This is the widest disagreement on the site. Cooper leads the six-poll average by 9.2 points and trails the North Carolina conversation by 40. The gap has a measurable cause: 56 percent of the posts naming Whatley also name Cooper, because one campaign supplied most of the week's text. Whatley's in-state figure nearly triples once those posts are removed.
The Week In One Line
Net sentiment runs on the left axis from −100 to +100. Gold bars carry total daily
volume for both candidates combined; hover any bar for the narratives driving that day. The two lines move together far more than they diverge, which is what a conversation dominated by one campaign's messaging looks like. Both rise sharply on Friday and both fall through the weekend.
Whatley net sentimentCooper net sentimentTotal posts, articles and comments
Inside North Carolina
Both figures cover posts that resolve to North Carolina. Net sentiment runs from -100 to +100 and counts only posts a classifier labeled, about half of the total here, which is unusually high coverage.
NORTH CAROLINA
Whatley
North Carolina
3,290posts
790 positive
470 negative
Hover a segment
1,437 unique authors · 120 original posts
(4% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 1,260 labeled posts, 38.3% of this slice; stored sample behind the labels 126 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
A Campaign That Owns Its Own Feed
POSITIVE DRIVER
Whatley's in-state figure is built on his campaign's own output and the accounts that amplify it. The messaging is consistent and high volume, and it is the single largest reason both candidates' numbers move together on the chart above.
Chuck Schumer said the quiet part out loud. Roy Cooper is a guaranteed yes vote for Schumer's plan.
The strongest affirmative case made for Whatley in state is disaster recovery. Supporters credit him with federal aid to western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, and frame it as something he achieved without holding office.
As a private citizen, Michael Whatley did more for disaster recovery than Roy Cooper did as governor following Hurricane Helene.
The negative in-state material is mostly his own supporters reacting to advertising run against him, which keeps the attack in circulation while disputing it.
I've seen the ads against Senate candidate Whatley about them supposedly supporting sex predators. Are the Democrats serious, right now?
2,054 unique authors · 190 original posts
(4% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 2,370 labeled posts, 48.4% of this slice; stored sample behind the labels 237 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
Four Thousand Two Hundred
NEGATIVE DRIVER
The dominant in-state claim about Cooper is a number: prisoners released during his governorship. It is repeated in close to identical wording across many accounts, and it is the clearest single driver of his negative figure in North Carolina.
Roy Cooper set up a revolving door for criminals and released 4,200 criminals from prison, including 51 serving life sentences.
Against all of that, the in-state posts that are not campaign material mostly treat the result as settled. North Carolinians describing their own race call it a foregone conclusion, which is a kind of support that generates very little text.
Roy Cooper was the perfect candidate. He was a very popular governor and any candidate the Republicans selected would have been in serious trouble.
A second organized line holds Cooper responsible for prices during his time as governor. It runs alongside the prison releases and uses the same construction: a past decision, a present consequence.
Roy Cooper made stuff cost more. My agenda is to let people make more and keep more.
The same week reads differently depending on where you stand. Net sentiment is plotted
from North Carolina on the left to the rest of the country on the right; the solid line counts every post
naming a candidate, the dashed line counts only posts that name that candidate and not the other.
All posts naming the candidate
Posts naming that candidate only
+4.8Michael WhatleyNorth Carolina minus national · +16.2 on single-subject posts
Whatley reads only 4.8 points better in North Carolina than nationally, the narrowest gap on this page, and the single-subject figures widen it only to 16.2. He is discussed the same way everywhere, which is what happens when a campaign supplies most of the text about itself.
-10.2Roy CooperNorth Carolina minus national · -10.1 on single-subject posts
Cooper reads 10.2 points worse at home than nationally, and the gap is identical on single-subject posts at 10.1. That stability matters: it means the difference is not an artifact of posts naming both men, but a real concentration of negative material inside the state his opponent is advertising in.
What each audience actually argues about
Geography, not party. Both columns cover the same week and the same two candidates; what separates them is which arguments actually travel.
IN NORTH CAROLINA
North Carolina Argues About A Governorship
In-state posts are almost entirely about what Cooper did in office: prison releases, vetoes, hurricane relief spending, the cost of living. Whatley is present mostly as the person making the argument rather than as a subject of one.
4,200 releasedRepeated in near-identical wording across many accounts.
$780 million in reliefWith a $297 million bill attached to it.
A foregone conclusionHow North Carolinians themselves describe the result.
REST OF THE U.S.
The Country Argues About The Majority
National posts treat the seat as arithmetic. It appears in counts of what Democrats need and in coverage of a retiring senator's replacement, with the candidates' records a distant second to the question of who ends up with 51.
A net gain of fourThe number that makes this seat matter outside the state.
Eleven billion in aidThe one claim about Whatley that travels on its own.
Doubling downHis campaign answering a polling deficit during the week.
Both columns are shaped by the same advertising. The difference is what surrounds it: in North Carolina the ads land among people who already expect Cooper to win, and nationally they land among people counting seats. Neither audience spent much of the week on what either man would do in the Senate.
The Rest Of The Country
The same two candidates over the same seven days, measured across every state except North Carolina.
NATIONAL
Whatley
Rest of United States
15,486posts
4,306 positive
2,832 negative
Hover a segment
8,026 unique authors · 1,108 original posts
(7% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 7,138 labeled posts, 46.1% of this slice; stored sample behind the labels 1,315 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
Behind, And Saying So
NEGATIVE DRIVER
Nationally Whatley is covered as a candidate trailing. His campaign's own framing during the week was that it was doubling down rather than backing down, which is an answer to a polling deficit rather than a denial of one.
Polling deficit, disapproval of the president, and recent shifts in strategy by super PACs are evolving the race. The campaign says it is doubling down on winning, not backing down.
The disaster aid figure travels further than any other claim about him. It is a specific number attached to a specific event, which is rare in this week's material and part of why his national figure stays positive while coverage of his position does not.
Whatley has helped to deliver more than $11 billion in disaster aid to western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.
The rest of the country discusses North Carolina as an arithmetic problem. The seat appears in counts of what Democrats need, and Whatley appears in those counts as the obstacle rather than the subject.
Can Democrats flip the Senate on Nov 3? Republicans hold 53 seats. Democrats need a net gain of 4.
11,283 unique authors · 1,459 original posts
(7% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 11,664 labeled posts, 53.4% of this slice; stored sample behind the labels 1,964 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
The Same Attacks, Nationally
NEGATIVE DRIVER
Cooper's national figure is made of the same material as his in-state one, carried by accounts outside North Carolina. It reads 10 points less negative than at home, which is the ordinary effect of an attack travelling away from the state paying for it.
Roy Cooper made the most catastrophic decision of any governor in the history of North Carolina, releasing 4,200 hardened criminals out of prison early.
Where the national conversation is not campaign material, it is procedural. The race is covered as the contest to succeed a retiring Republican senator, with the candidates described rather than argued about.
North Carolina's Senate race will determine who will succeed Republican Sen. Thom Tillis and represent the state in Washington.
The positive national material for Cooper is almost entirely other people's arithmetic. He appears in Senate forecasts as a seat Democrats expect to take, which is a favourable mention that says nothing about him.
Can't wait to vote Cooper and kick the GOP out of the majority.
This page is the product of two different kinds of work. One half is data that no public API makes available; the other half is judgment about what the data does and does not support.
What Quid made possible
None of the following could be assembled from public endpoints inside a week.
49K posts split by geographyOne week, separated into a North Carolina half and a rest-of-country half.
Unusually complete sentiment coverageLabels reach about half the posts here, roughly twice the rate on most races measured this way.
An overlap measurement that changed the reading56% of the posts naming Whatley also name Cooper. Without that figure the joint numbers would look like two independent measurements rather than one campaign talking.
3,642 stored documents behind the labelsEnough in all four cells to characterize the argument rather than guess at it.
What Claude was responsible for
The data does not interpret itself, and it arrives with traps in it.
Leading with the overlap, not the headlineWhatley's in-state figure nearly triples under the single-subject test. Publishing +25.4 without that context would have described his advertising, not his standing.
Naming the direction the data cannot explainThe conversation and the polling disagree by a wide margin here. The page says which measure is which and does not resolve it.
Checking the poll against the sourceSix published polls, read off the 270toWin page rather than from any figure circulating in the posts themselves.
Leaving the classifier visibleAttack ads about Cooper are frequently labelled positive toward him. The caveats say so rather than silently discarding them.
Neither half can establish cause. This page measures what was said, how much of it there was, and who said it. It is not a poll, it does not model turnout, and it does not predict the November result.
How to read this
Source. Quid. Each person is defined once, centrally, by a stored definition that uses
primary: sentiment targeting, so the sentiment is scored toward that named figure rather
than toward the post as a whole. Every figure on this page reads that same definition.
Window. Oct 5 - Oct 11, 2026, seven complete day buckets. Quid closes its day at 23:00 UTC and
ignores the timezone parameter, so each bucket covers roughly 23 hours of the labeled calendar day.
Net sentiment is (positive − negative) / (positive + negative) × 100, computed on
labeled posts only. Neutral posts are excluded from the meter but counted in the volume figures.
Sentiment coverage. Sentiment labels cover 38 to 46% of Whatley's posts and 48 to 53% of Cooper's.
No cell on this page is thin. The smallest is Whatley inside North Carolina at 126 stored documents; Cooper's national slice carries 1,964.
Classifier attribution is imperfect. In a two-candidate race most posts name both people, and
the classifier sometimes assigns a post's sentiment to the wrong subject, and several posts attacking one
candidate are labeled positive for them. Every soundbite shown here was read and placed against the narrative
it actually supports, but the donut and meter totals are the classifier's unedited output.
Twitter/X counts are projected ×10 from a 10% sample, so volume figures exceed the number of
individually stored documents. Counts and samples are never mixed inside one ratio.
Sensitivity test. 56% of Whatley's posts and 24% of Cooper's name both candidates, where the classifier can credit sentiment to the wrong one. Re-running every figure on posts that name one
candidate only changes this page more than any other measurement on it. Whatley's in-state figure rises from +25.4 to +73.3 and Cooper's falls from -14.8 to -30.7. With 56 percent of Whatley's posts naming both men, the joint figures are substantially a measure of one campaign's advertising. The single-subject column is the better guide to how each man is discussed on his own terms.
Volume is amplification, not voices. Only 6% of posts are original; the rest are reposts and replies. Unique-author counts
are shown on every panel and are the better measure of how many people are actually talking.
Link integrity. Every source link on this page was checked for liveness at publication.
Exploratory. Figures may not match Quid's own dashboards exactly. Sentiment is a
measure of how people are talking, not a poll, and nothing here projects a November result.
