2026-01-27 04:08:30
About a decade ago, when Doris Tyler was 76, she still had her eyesight. She’d quit driving, but she could see well enough to cook, do laundry, and clean her Central Florida home. But when the treatment for her macular degeneration stopped working, she began exploring other options. Stem cell therapy—whereby patients receive injections of their own stem cells, usually sourced from fat or bone marrow—isn’t approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for her condition, but it sounded “promising,” she says. Representatives at a clinic in Georgia assured her, according to court documents, that injecting stem cells into her eyes would be safe and might even save her vision. After pulling together $8,900 for the procedure, she made an appointment for September 2016. “We were hopeful and very excited at that point,” she recalls. “Until things began to fall apart.”
Within a month of the treatment, Tyler woke up unable to see in one eye—her retina had detached, a doctor would confirm. Soon after, the other one did, too. She tried several surgeries to fix the problem, but by December, she was permanently blind. “I don’t see any shapes or anything,” Tyler, now 85, told me. “All I see is blackness.”
“It’s completely changed my life. And I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
The clinic, part of the Cell Surgical Network, is one of thousands that have cropped up across the United States over the last two decades, touting stem cell treatments for a wide range of conditions: Alzheimer’s, autism, erectile dysfunction, Covid, joint pain, and more. While some stem cell therapies—like bone marrow transplants—are proven, many clinics, experts say, operate in a legal gray area, jumping ahead of the current science. Rather than rein them in, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to end the FDA’s “war” on alternative medicine, which may include unapproved stem cell treatments. (Tyler sued Cell Surgical Network and eventually settled out of court. The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
Some stem cells are like a wild card in the game Uno; the embryonic ones can develop into any tissue type (blood, heart, nerve, etc.), whereas nonembryonic “adult” stem cells are limited by the tissue in which they reside—blood stem cells, for example, produce only red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. It’s “a very promising field,” notes Sean Morrison, who chairs the Public Policy Committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, but scientists are still striving to understand stem cells and evaluate their potential as therapies. “We can’t just skip over the process of testing in clinical trials,” he says. Paul Knoepfler, a professor of cell biology and human anatomy at UC Davis, has read “encouraging” stem cell studies involving Type 1 diabetes, spina bifida, Parkinson’s, and age-related macular degeneration like Tyler’s. But clinics “are prematurely marketing stuff that’s not really ready for primetime yet.” And they are proliferating.
In 2016, Knoepfler and a colleague tallied 570 clinics nationwide offering stem cell treatments. By 2021, there were more than 2,700, with hotspots in California, Florida, and Texas—many promoting stem cells for things like pain relief, sports medicine, and general wellness. That same year, Pew Charitable Trusts identified 360 reports of bacterial infections, blindness, cardiac arrest, organ failure, tumors, and other “adverse events” related to unapproved stem cell and regenerative medicine procedures from 2004 through September 2020. Toronto resident Srini Subramaniam told me he spent $28,000 at a Florida stem cell clinic to treat retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary eye condition, to no avail: “It was just that money down the drain.”
How is this even allowed? Well, the FDA covers drugs, but regulation of medical practice—licensing, exams, surgical procedures—falls to the states. In 2018, the Trump administration sued clinics in Florida and California, along with the Cell Surgical Network, arguing that stem cell treatments are drugs and should be regulated as such. The case made it to the US Supreme Court, which effectively sided with the FDA.
But under RFK Jr., the FDA seems less eager to crack down. Last May, Kennedy told a podcaster—the biologist and wellness influencer Gary Brecka—that he didn’t want to see a stem cell “Wild West,” but added that “charlatans” and “bad results” are an inevitable risk of medical freedom. “If you want to take an experimental drug,” he said, “you ought to be able to do that.” He himself had gone to Antigua for stem cell therapy to treat spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological voice condition, and it helped him “enormously,” Kennedy said.
Several states, including California, now require clinics to disclose to customers when therapies aren’t FDA-approved. And a few state attorneys general have sued clinics for deceptive marketing. But several other states, as Knoepfler wrote in Stat last July, have introduced “right to try” bills that would allow clinics to offer biologically derived drugs like stem cells, and let the buyer beware. That’s not such a healthy policy for experimental medicines. Tyler told me that she never would have agreed to stem cell injections had she known the risks. “I grew up in the time when you went to a doctor, you expected them to tell you the truth,” she says. “And you trusted them. And that’s not true anymore.”
As for RFK Jr., “if he thinks it should be approved,” he should talk to patients like her first. “It’s completely changed my life,” Tyler says. “And I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
2026-01-27 03:57:59
Last Wednesday, the Trump administration “paused” immigrant visa applications for people from 75 countries, mostly in the Global South, on the supposed grounds that people from those countries are of “nationalities at high risk of public benefits usage.”
Since the 19th century, the United States has used “public charge” rules to restrict entry, alleging that immigrants and even visitors would strain public services—reasoning very much rooted in the eugenicist and ableist thinking that shaped key aspects of public policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including the claim that so-called “defective” people would produce “defective” children.
As president, especially in his second term, Donald Trump has brought eugenicist immigration policy roaring back. I’ve detailed Trump’s long history of eugenicist claims and policies—which he’s since added to, most recently with his series of explicitly racist tirades about “low IQ” Somali Americans in Minnesota.
I spoke with University of Iowa professor emeritus Douglas Baynton, the author of Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics, to ask what history can teach us about the role of eugenics in the anti-immigration crusade of Trump and White House figures like Stephen Miller.
You’ve written that immigration policy in the United States has been rooted in the exclusion of people potentially deemed a burden. How so?
Until the 1880s, the US was pretty much open to anybody. There were some state laws in coastal states like New York and Massachusetts that had some inspection, and some laws that excluded what they called “lunatics” and “idiots,” and people likely to become a public charge. But it was just a few states, and it wasn’t really much enforced.
Eugenicists held that “the ‘superior’ parts of any race were set apart—kind of like our billionaires.”
In the 1880s and ’90s, the federal government starts getting involved—they pretty much just followed the state’s examples and excluded what they call idiots and people likely to become public charge. But it was mainly disabled people [who were]likely to become a public charge. That was the main signifier of someone who was likely to be a pauper. Then in the 1890s, and especially after the turn of the century, they started excluding more and more people with disabilities, and being more and more specific about it. The fear was of disabled people who would pass on their disabilities to future generations, something that led you to be inferior.
What role did the eugenics movement play in that change?
Big role. At the time, [when] eugenicists talked about what eugenics meant, they’d say there were two main tracks that it ran on. One was stopping the reproduction of “defective” people through forced sterilization and institutionalization and such. And the other was immigration reform, immigration restriction, to keep people out of the country who were defective. [Eugenicists] had a big influence on policy: they testified before Congress, they pressured their congressional representatives. They generally just made it a public issue. That’s really the start of American immigration law, which is rooted in the eugenics movement. That was the original intent of the laws, was to keep people out who were defective.
Only later in the 1920s did they start focusing on race. When they had to focus on “defective” [people], they implemented policy by inspecting people who came in and weeding out the “bad seeds.” That turned out to be very expensive and ineffective. They couldn’t increase staffing enough to make the inspection effective. [Eugenicists were] also racist, of course, as well—so when they talked about weeding out defective people, they figured that would reduce the numbers of people from “inferior races,” because people from inferior races were more likely to be defective.
So they switched strategy in the ’20s to restrict people by race, by which they meant nationality. Race had a broader meaning at this time: some people talked about the Italian race and the Irish race, and so on. By restricting by race, they [thought they] would also capture most people with disabilities.
[Their thinking was that] defect ran in races and then in particular parts of races: Eugenicists would often be at pains to point out that superior Italians were fine, that the upper classes of Russia were fine, [that] it wasn’t the entire race— it was always that they were just more prone to defect. The “superior” parts of any race were set apart kind of like our billionaires [and] world leaders today—they see themselves as being a special species of some kind. Since people from inferior races were more likely to be “defective.” Disability and “defect” were at the center of immigration law.
The US is suspending immigration visa applications from 75 countries based on the supposed risk that people from those countries are more likely to need public assistance. What are the parallels between that and early immigration laws?
That’s generally [the] justification for the 1920s laws. It was thesame idea that certain countries were more likely to produce immigrants who would need public assistance. But again, the primary concern was that they would spread their genes and pollute the bloodstream of America, which, as you know, Trump used that language too. It was really the blood of America. The “American race” was the issue, more so than the economic impact, but [eugenicists] believed the economic impact over time, over generations, would grow and grow as they spread their “defective genes” more widely in the population.
Is there anything else on the subject that you’d like to add?
Gender and race, and class and ethnicity, are all used as proxies for disability. In the women’s movement in at the turn of 20th century, the suffrage movement, anti-suffragists would be prone to point out women’s defects: women were [supposedly] more likely to be overly emotional, prone to hysteria, and incapable of rational thought. These are all disability, but never thought about that way. The same goes with ethnicity and race. When you want to point out somebody’s inferiority, you point to their disabilities, and that justifies treating them differently. So this is part of a larger pattern of using disability in this way to justify inequalities based on identity.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
2026-01-27 03:55:01
Jeff Bezos’s $40 million bribe of the Trumps, in the form of his Amazon-MGM-produced Melania documentary, is out in about 2,000 theaters across the country this Friday (5,000 worldwide, according to MarketWatch), backed by an inescapable $35 million advertising assault on the country’s airwaves and commuter transit. The Wall Street Journal reported that Melania will personally pocket $28 million.
On the day the nation reeled from her husband’s federal agents shooting and killing Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, Melania Trump herself hosted a ritzy private White House screening for execs, celebs, and Queen Rania of Jordan. There will also be a premiere at the formerly prominent arts institution once known as the Kennedy Center. All this, and let’s not forget the film’s director Brett Ratner is attempting a comeback after his career imploded in 2017 when he was accused of sexual misconduct (he denied the allegations and no charges were filed, according to People). He also appears in a photo released as part of the Epstein files.
So it was with some solace that I perused the Letterboxd page of Melania, which made for some entertaining reading, as users have pre-swarmed the review section to push the score down and let their voices rip.
Here’s a sample of some of my faves. And yeah, there are so many spicier versions on the page itself, not fit for publication here. I’ll leave that to you to scroll through. These are on the PG-rated end:
Death of American DemocracyAnd my favorite:
★★★★★ Watched by jbruno7478
An astonishing nonfictional rising biopic where an entire life in all its complications and contradictions is expressed through a series of non-linear, subjective fragments of storytelling showmanship that simultaneously construct and deconstruct an enigmatic myth of American empire. Every time I sit down to watch this I go “ok but is it really that good?” and every single time I am sucked in by the form which combines expressive deep-focus images with lots of wide and low-angle compositions that take in the gorgeously-designed, idiosyncratic interior spaces (including miniatures and optical illusion set extensions) and serve to heighten the constantly overlapping sound design and montage that collapses all of the techniques (and the sense of time and space they establish) into a panoramic stream of memory. This is a triumph in every sense of the word. I was left speechless, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be angry. You will get all the feels. It’s criminal that we had to wait this long for this project.
2026-01-27 03:54:02
A Republican attorney in Minneapolis who gave legal counsel to the ICE agent who shot and killed Renée Good dropped out of the Minnesota governor’s race on Monday, saying he couldn’t win given the Trump administration’s violent campaign in the state.
Chris Madel stated in a Monday announcement video that, “national Republicans have made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota.” Despite dropping out, Madel claimed to still support Trump’s “originally stated goals” of going after the “worst of the worst,” meaning people convicted of serious crimes.”
Madel criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the cruelty. “Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats,” he said. “United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear. United States citizens are carrying their papers to prove their citizenship. That’s wrong.”
He continued: “I cannot support the national Republican stated ‘retribution’ on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.”
Madel also defended his decision to provide legal advice to ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who killed Good earlier this month, saying he helped Ross “fill out a form” because “I believe the constitutional right to counsel is sacrosanct.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, although Madel largely campaigned on his record of going after fraud, many of his cases were defenses of law enforcement.
In 2024, Madel represented Minnesota state trooper Ryan Londregan, who was accused of killing 33-year-old Ricky Cobb by firing several shots at him while in his vehicle. Londregan faced murder, assault, and manslaughter charges, but they were dropped later that year.
At the end of the day, Madel said, “I have to look my daughters in the eye and tell them ‘I believe I did what was right.'”
Madel’s decision comes as some Republicans have publicly voiced opposition to the DHS operation in Minnesota, especially after Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs, on Saturday.
The Department of Homeland Security claims that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Multiple videos of the shooting refute this framing.
But the Trump administration indicated that it would enforce this brutality well before Operation Metro Surge launched last month. As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote earlier this month, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made ICE the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country. ICE is also in a hiring surge, deploying new agents with limited training to meet the administration’s quota of 3,000 arrests by ICE per day.
2026-01-27 03:19:21
On Saturday, the same day that a federal immigration officer killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, US Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a pointed letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz stating that if he wanted to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” he should comply with some “common sense solutions.”
Those “solutions,” according to Bondi, included Minnesota providing the Department of Justice with access to the state’s complete, unredacted voter roll, which includes sensitive personal information like voters’ Social Security numbers, drivers license data, and party affiliations. Bondi claimed that the DOJ needed the state’s full voter roll in order to “confirm Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law.”
But state election officials and election security experts say Bondi’s letter is an outrageous attempt by the Trump administration to coerce Minnesota into providing confidential voter data that could be weaponized by the president and his allies to amplify false claims of voter fraud, wrongly remove eligible voters from the rolls, and challenge election outcomes.
“That is simply a disgusting attempt to take attention away from Alex Pretti’s death,” said Joanna Lydgate, president of the States United Democracy Center, a group devoted to fair and secure elections. “It’s also a shakedown. They’re trying now to use the power of the federal government to scare Minnesota officials into handing over voter rolls and backing down on their protective policies. Trump wants that state voter data so that he has the ability to interfere with the upcoming midterm elections.”
Months before federal immigration agents killed Pretti and Renée Good in broad daylight, the DOJ had already requested complete voter rolls from 44 states and Washington, DC, including Minnesota, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Only 11 red states have complied with the request, with most others citing federal and state privacy laws that preclude officials from sharing voters’ personal information, not to mention the fact that states are in charge of running their own elections under the Constitution. The DOJ has since sued 24 states and counting, including Minnesota, which ranks highest in the country for state voter turnout and is often lauded as a model for having robust election security protocols.
“It is deeply disturbing that the US Attorney General would make this unlawful request a part of an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.”
As Mother Jones reported in December, these requests and lawsuits are part of a decadeslong history of right-wing activists seeking private voter data to advance the unproven narrative that there is rampant noncitizen voter fraud proliferating across the US. That the DOJ is now using its considerable resources to promote the same repeatedly debunked theory represents a major escalation of these tactics.
As Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows—who has also been sued by the DOJ for voter roll data—told us: “The Department of Justice has the power to investigate, prosecute, and place people in jail.”
Bondi’s letter raises the stakes of the DOJ’s demands for state voter roll data even further, according to Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, by suggesting that ICE will leave Minneapolis only if the state capitulates to the administration’s demands. “It is deeply disturbing that the US Attorney General would make this unlawful request a part of an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security,” he said in a statement Sunday.
The administration appears to want the voter data in order to construct an unprecedented national database of all registered voters, which it would share with the Department of Homeland Security. Such a database could be a prime target for hackers and could be easily weaponized to spread false claims of illegal voting, which could then be used to remove eligible voters from the rolls and challenge election outcomes.
The Justice Department recently admitted that two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team at the Social Security Administration may have handed over Americans personal information to an advocacy group working to “overturn election results in certain states,” and suggested they be prosecuted.
Three courts have recently ruled against the administration’s demand for such voter data. The first came in California, with US District Judge David O. Carter ruling that the state did not need to hand over its voter list to the DOJ.
“The Department of Justice seeks to use civil rights legislation which was enacted for an entirely different purpose to amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data,” Carter wrote. “This effort goes far beyond what Congress intended when it passed the underlying legislation. The centralization of this information by the federal government would have a chilling effect on voter registration which would inevitably lead to decreasing voter turnout as voters fear that their information is being used for some inappropriate or unlawful purpose. This risk threatens the right to vote which is the cornerstone of American democracy.”
A judge in Oregon indicated from the bench that he would rule against the administration while a third judge in Georgia dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit against the state, indicating it was filed in the wrong jurisdiction.
Weighing a federal lawsuit examining whether the Trump administration’s “Operation Metro Surge” can continue in Minnesota, a federal judge also expressed outrage at the administration’s new demand for state voter data, asking the DOJ in court, “Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it can’t achieve through the courts?”
Bondi’s recent letter to Walz suggests that, after repeatedly losing in court, the administration is now using more aggressive methods, including exploiting a horrific tragedy, to get what it wants.
“The administration has really shown its hand,” Lydgate says. “They’re using these violent ICE operations as a weapon to try to get states to change immigration policies, voter data, and to shrink their power. And the states are standing up, and they’re pushing back.”
2026-01-26 20:30:00
If Democrats are to have any hope of retaking the Senate this fall, then Roy Cooper, the former North Carolina governor, must flip the seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, in one of the most anticipated races of the 2026 midterms. The stakes of the race have already led to an influx of cash and media attention: Cooper, who will likely be running against former RNC chair Michael Whatley, set fundraising records the day after announcing his candidacy last July, in a contest that could be one of the most expensive in history.
For North Carolinians like me, long before Cooper had the fate of the Senate resting on his shoulders, he was a familiar fixture in state politics. Cooper joined the state legislature in 1987 before serving four consecutive terms as the state attorney general, then winning the governorship in 2016 and again in 2020.
As a state politician, Cooper’s style was often about getting results, even when it meant working with Republicans or breaking with his own party. As governor, he’s remembered for working with Republicans to repeal HB2, which prohibited transgender people from using public restrooms aligned with their gender identity, and for passing Medicaid expansion with bipartisan support. But his gubernatorial career was also defined by a contentious relationship with state Republicans who held a supermajority in the legislature—and thus the ability to overturn Cooper’s vetoes—for four of his eight years in the office. As governor, Cooper vetoed 104 bills. Republicans overturned half of those.
I remember Cooper campaigning for his first gubernatorial bid on my college’s campus and sitting courtside at basketball games. To me, he seemed like he could’ve been a classmate’s dad.
Despite those political battles, Cooper has managed to remain pretty well liked by voters in a long-time purple state growing redder (thanks, in part, to newly drawn congressional maps). North Carolina has the country’s second largest rural population and, to reach these voters, Cooper often touts his upbringing in rural Eastern North Carolina as an indicator of his trustworthiness. North Carolinians will be familiar with his stories of cropping tobacco on his family’s farm during the summers and his frequent reminders that his mother was a public school teacher.
I remember Cooper campaigning for his first gubernatorial bid on my college’s campus and sitting courtside at basketball games. To me, he seemed like he could’ve been a classmate’s dad. He ate Bojangles. He liked Cheerwine. He’s a self-described “caniac”—a fan of the North Carolina hockey team, the Carolina Hurricanes. But will this nice-guy appeal be enough to propel Cooper to victory when the stakes are higher than ever? Recently, I traveled to Nash County, where Cooper grew up, to find out.
I’m from Eastern North Carolina, about an hour and a half from Nash County. I’ve spent a lot of time driving through this area and have become familiar with the landscape: lots of pine, oak, and maple trees; state roads curving through small towns; plenty of lakes, rivers, and creeks. Driving around Nash County feels familiar, with its rows of crops—this time of year, likely cabbage or collards. Nash has strong railroad ties, so I often bumped over tracks as I drove around.
While some parts of Nash County feel like forgotten ghost towns, others are seeing a surge of new development. Rocky Mount Mills, once a thriving cotton mill at the center of the county’s largest city, is now a bustling campus with bars and businesses where locals and visitors gather.
In nearby counties, it’s become common to see a Trump flag hanging next to a Confederate flag or Trump signs outside of homes, businesses, or roadside produce stands. But driving through Nash that day, the only political ad I saw was from a 2022 congressional campaign. Nash County’s political allegiances are a bit of a mystery, with the rural county emerging as a bellwether in recent elections. Since 2012, the county has supported the winning candidate in each US presidential election. And when President Donald Trump won the county (and the state) in 2016, so did Cooper.
I drove into Rocky Mount and stopped at a coffee shop, where I saw a chalk sandwich board that read, “Welcome. All are friends.” A few of the employees said they didn’t know enough about Cooper to have strong opinions about him. Opinions about Cooper around town are “mixed,” one barista told me.
While in Nash, I met with Harris Walker, a Rocky Mount native running for North Carolina General Assembly, at a burger spot. As a kid, Walker volunteered for one of Cooper’s earlier state assembly runs, helping distribute pamphlets.
I asked if Cooper’s long political career in the state had inspired Walker to run for office. “When he was representing Nash County he always fought for what would improve the livelihoods of people right here. Yeah, that did inspire me,” Walker said. “Watching Roy come from here and be able to follow that trajectory was important.”
Walker knew he wanted to go into politics one day, so when he was a teenager, Cooper sponsored him to be a legislative page in the state’s General Assembly. When Walker’s grandparents died during Cooper’s tenure as attorney general, Cooper attended their funerals, where he sat in the back. “It wasn’t a campaign thing for him,” Walker said. “That’s Roy Cooper.”
Still at the burger spot, I asked my waitress what she thought of Cooper as I paid my bill. She turned her head to the side. “Who’s that?” I briefly went through Cooper’s bio. “Oh, I think I like him? Well, I think I voted for him,” she replied.
Before he was going toe-to-toe with lawmakers in Raleigh, Cooper was a managing partner at the law firm his father co-founded, Fields & Cooper, in the town of Nashville. In 1997, he hired Mark Edwards, a Nash County native who’d just graduated from law school at Wake Forest University. Edwards, who chaired the Nash County Republican Party from 2009 until last year, surmises that Cooper’s time in the smaller firm in Nashville helped prepare him for his role as attorney general. “He just has a very practical demeanor about himself and is able to relate to almost anyone in any circumstance,” Edwards said. “I could see that when he was practicing law and I could see that when he was serving as attorney general.”
Walker told me he thinks many folks are proud that Cooper is from Nash County, but Edwards wonders if the national stage of a US Senate race will change that. “It’s going to be a much more partisan affair, and if he were to win, I’ll be curious to see if there’s that same feeling,” Edwards said.
Later in the day, I drove into Rocky Mount’s downtown and met Cassandra Conover, who chairs the Nash County Democratic Party, at the party’s headquarters near an old train station. Conover and her husband, John, moved to Nash County from Petersburg, Virginia, just before the pandemic. Conover, who was a longtime prosecutor in Virginia, wasn’t surprised to hear that some people were un-opinionated about Cooper. She explained that there’s a “level of apathy” about politics in the county. But she hopes that’s changing. Each of the county’s 24 voting precincts enlists a chair to help organize elections and reach voters in their precincts, but when Conover arrived, most of the positions were vacant. Now, all but one precinct is chaired.
Because Cooper’s a familiar name around town, Conover thinks voters in the county are comfortable with him as a candidate. Cooper “has demonstrated the things that make him more credible and more authentic,” Conover said. “And that’s what the voters right here are looking for.”
“He was the governor for all the people,” Roberson said. “And going into the Senate, I feel that he’ll be a Senator for all of the people.”
Nearly everyone I spoke to recalled Cooper coming back to Nash County for various reasons: to attend funerals, birthday parties, community events, and to visit and care for his aging parents.
Morris Roberson, whose brothers attended Northern Nash High School (one of the first Rocky Mount schools to integrate) with Cooper and played with him on the football team there, remembered Cooper visiting Rocky Mount for the 85th birthday party of his high school basketball coach, Bobby Dunn. Cooper attended the event wearing his high school letterman jacket and shared a few words with the crowd. Roberson thinks Cooper will “represent the masses” if elected to the Senate. “He was the governor for all the people,” Roberson said. “And going into the Senate, I feel that he’ll be a Senator for all of the people.”
Brenda Brown, the Republican mayor of Nashville, lived next to Cooper’s parents for years. Just a few years older than the former governor, Brown remembers Cooper as a “regular Nash County boy with ambitions.” Despite their political disagreements, Brown describes Cooper as a “great person.” “He hasn’t lost the connection with Nashville, and it is appreciated,” Brown said.
Echoing the barista I spoke to earlier, Brown said that now, opinions are “mixed” when it comes to Cooper. “I think he still has a lot of respect from our county for what he did as governor, but at the same time, I think there’s some people that were disappointed,” she said.
Of course, not all Republicans take as favorable a view of Cooper. State Republicans—including Whatley—blamed the August murder of a passenger on a Charlotte light-rail train on Cooper’s “soft on crime” policies. Cooper has also been repeatedly criticized by Republicans for how his administration handled disaster relief efforts after Hurricane Helene. Under his administration, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, which assists homeowners with disaster recovery efforts, was mismanaged and left many hurricane victims displaced.
While the latest polling shows Cooper with a comfortable lead on Whatley, only Election Day will prove whether Cooper’s homegrown persona is enough to win a national race. To do so, he’ll have to not only win urban areas like Raleigh and Charlotte, but also minimize his losses in some of the state’s more conservative rural counties—where trailing Whatley by 10, 15, or even 25 points would be a triumph for any Democrat. If Cooper can repeat his performance as a gubernatorial candidate and “lose less badly” in those counties, he may be on track to victory, said Asher Hildebrand, a professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. “That is important at a time when many voters—especially right of center voters—feel kind of looked down on by today’s Democratic Party,” Hildebrand said.
Though Democratic candidates on both ends of the spectrum—from democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to moderate Abigail Spanberger—celebrated victories in November’s elections, politicians like Cooper are an increasingly rare breed. In many ways, Cooper is a “bridge” between the Democratic Party of the last century and the party today, Hildebrand said.
When he was elected governor, Cooper was a relatively moderate former state AG with an “ideological pragmatism” reminiscent of 20th-century Democratic governors, who valued getting work done over party allegiance, Hildebrand said. But though he never lost that results-oriented approach, his governorship also came in an era of increased partisan fighting and ideological orthodoxy, shaped by what Hildebrand describes as “a political ecosystem that rewards stridency over compromise.” Somehow, Cooper has managed to hold on to his nice-guy reputation despite that—at least in his home county. In North Carolina, where unaffiliated voters outnumber both major parties, Cooper’s likability could be valuable.
“He has an ability to connect with voters in a way that is authentic and respectful and doesn’t look down on them,” Hildebrand said. Cooper’s style is “a throwback to politics as it once was. It’s a throwback that I think a lot of voters still want in this era.”
