Voting in the Republican U.S. Senate primary begins Thursday. Meet the top candidates. ...Middle East

Virginia voters cast their ballots at a precinct inside Libbie Mill Library on Election Day, Nov. 4, 2025. (Photo: Marcus Ingram/Virginia Mercury)

With early in-person voting in the 2026 North Carolina primary set to begin tomorrow, NC Newsline interviewed leading Republican candidates for U.S. Senate on their views on the issues.

Polling in the Republican primary has been scarce. The few that have been done show President Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate Michael Whatley, the former Republican Party chair, with a substantial lead, but little name recognition.

A January 2026 survey by progressive pollster Carolina Forward showed 36% support for Michael Whatley, 6% support for Don Brown, and 4% support for Michele Morrow. Roughly half of self-described GOP primary voters said they were undecided.

Whatley, an accomplished political fundraiser, has a substantial lead in the money race, with rival campaigns adopting a more grassroots approach. He raised $5.2 million in 2025 against Brown’s $146,000 and Morrow’s $3,728.

Other candidates in the election are IT professional Richard Dansie, teacher Elizabeth Temple, and CEO Thomas Johnson. Business owner Margot Dupre, who also appears on the ballot, was disqualified from the race for failure to prove North Carolina residency.

Early voting in the primary will begin on Feb. 12 and conclude on Feb. 28. The election will be held on March 3, with the winner expected to face former Gov. Roy Cooper in the general election.

Don Brown

Joining the interview from his car in a Chick-fil-A parking lot in Charlotte, Don Brown flexed his blue-collar credentials.

“My granddaddy was a small farmer. I’m probably the only Senate candidate ever to work in tobacco,” Brown said. “Probably the only one ever to slop hogs. I mean, I’ve sent hogs to the market.”

That manifests, he said, in a firm understanding of the issues that matter to regular North Carolinians. “I’ve stood up for our shrimpers down in the eastern part of the state. I’m the only Senate candidate that probably even understands it.”

That focus extends to western North Carolina, where he criticized a sluggish recovery. “We’ve gone through a second cold winter with some people still displaced out of their homes,” he said.

His proposed solution is a Hurricane Helene trust fund: millions of dollars invested in local banks, which Christian charities would disburse in partnership with local governments. “We’re going to get FEMA out of the way — FEMA should be abolished.”

Brown is a former U.S. Navy JAG officer turned author and conservative media personality. He counts former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in his circle of friends. He is perhaps best known for representing U.S. Army Lt. Clint Lorance — convicted for ordering the killing of two Afghan men — and helping to secure a pardon from Trump.

Brown praised Tillis’ work vetting judicial nominees but condemned his obstruction of other Trump appointments. It was Tillis’ efforts to block Hegseth’s nomination that prompted Brown to jump into the race, he said — though Tillis ultimately dropped his reelection bid before the primary.

“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He needed to go, and I jumped in at that point,” Brown said. “What he did with Pete Hegseth was absolutely inexcusable.”

He also condemned Tillis for rejecting Ed Martin, Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia nominee, whom he refused to support over his defense of Jan. 6 protesters. Brown has also represented clients who faced charges for breaching the Capitol that day, writing on his website that they were patriots who “the left tried to destroy with a massive, vicious, unconstitutional prosecutorial scheme.”

Brown said if elected to the Senate, he would extend considerably more deference to Trump on foreign policy issues, standing with the president on recent military strikes in Venezuela as well as demands for U.S. control over Greenland.

“The last three times he’s supported major military action, he’s done so in a swift, surgical manner without massive deployment of troops,” he said. “That’s the way it should be.”

The earliest entrant into the race, Brown said the time he has spent building his campaign gives him a path to victory.

“We’ve been there for a year already,” he said. “If Lara Trump had entered the race, we would have gone to the beach. Lara Trump did not enter the race.”

Michele Morrow

Michele Morrow, the only GOP Senate candidate to run a statewide race — narrowly losing a 2024 bid for state superintendent by 2% of the vote — said she entered because “we need a fighter that’s in this race.” Whatley, she said, is not up to that challenge.

“He has no connection with the people of North Carolina,” Morrow said. “I have the name recognition. I have the trust of the people of North Carolina. And I believe, I know, that Roy Cooper fears me more than he fears anybody else on the ballot.”

Morrow has a long history of extreme rhetoric and online controversy. A conservative education activist, she was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and urged Trump to put “the Constitution to the side” in a since-deleted video following the electoral count. In other deleted social media posts, she called for the execution of prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama.

During the 2024 superintendent campaign, Morrow downplayed those comments. “The dysfunctional media is trying to create ‘gotcha moments’ out of old comments taken out of context, made in jest, or never made in the first place,” she wrote on X.

In her interview with NC Newsline, she said she backs the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis that has led to the deaths of two activists during confrontations with federal immigration enforcement. “In my opinion, everyone needs to be arrested,” she said of the protests.

“American citizens need to understand — they can pick their crime, but they cannot pick the consequences. And if you are getting in the way of somebody else being arrested, you are at risk of being severely hurt,” Morrow said. “What we should be telling people is ‘Go home, obey the law, and protect your family and be a law-abiding citizen.’”

Morrow also condemned Tillis and others who have criticized Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem or called for her resignation. “I think Kristi Noem is doing exactly what President Trump has asked her to do,” she told NC Newsline.

She said she supports hardline immigration policies in part due to her experience serving as a missionary to Mexico. “I have been saying for the last 11 years, having an open border is not compassionate to the people south of us,” Morrow said.

If she could change one thing about the administration’s approach to the border, she said, it would be to increase its focus on self-deportation — offering funds and free airfare to migrants in the U.S. unlawfully to return to their country of origin.

“We are now buckling down, and we have asked people to self-deport,” Morrow said. “That was something that I think needed to have been made much more public than it was.”

Morrow condemned Whatley’s performance as “recovery czar” for western North Carolina — a label his campaign has rejected but that his Democratic and Republican opponents have embraced — calling him “absolutely sight unseen.”

In her view, the charitable work of churches has been the most effective at promoting western North Carolina’s recovery. She said the rebuilding process provides a great opportunity to invest in the region’s educational resources and businesses. “We need to return it to the incredible place that it is and return tourism,” Morrow said.

Morrow views her candidacy as an opportunity to strike back against entrenched power in politics and to halt an anti-Trump turn “as the radical left moves down the eastern seaboard,” pointing to the Democratic trifecta now leading Virginia.

“This is more than just taking a Senate seat. This is about changing the way that we do government,” Morrow said. “We’ve got to get rid of the political-industrial complex that has put power and money and has selected people to be our leaders rather than us electing who is going to represent us and who understands our needs.”

Michael Whatley

Michael Whatley declined an interview with NC Newsline. His campaign makes the case that he is the only candidate capable of defeating Cooper in November.

“We are the only candidate that’s in a position to be able to beat Roy Cooper next fall because we are focusing very hard on the issues that matter to North Carolina,” Whatley told members of the media at the president’s December rally in Rocky Mount.

He said his campaign is focused on economic issues — creating jobs, raising wages, and lowering prices by backing trade, tax, and regulatory policies tailored to North Carolina manufacturers, small businesses, and farmers.

“What we need to do is make sure that we have an economy that’s working for everybody,” Whatley said. “We need to get more jobs, we need higher wages, and we need those lower prices.”

Whatley has expressed support for Trump’s trade policies, including an aggressive tariff push that has cut into North Carolina farmers’ earnings.

“His strategy of flipping the table and putting tariffs on everybody and saying, come back to the negotiating table if you want to bring these tariffs down has been record-setting in terms of its effectiveness,” Whatley said on the Main Street Matters podcast in July.

In a stop in Fletcher, N.C. days after his inauguration, Trump said Whatley has been “incredible” and is “going to lead the team” when it comes to Helene recovery efforts. He was tapped for the president’s FEMA Review Council, with the aim of overhauling the agency.

“If Michael Whatley does half as good a job for North Carolina as he did for my campaign, we’ll be very happy,” Trump said at the time.

But in the year since, as rivals have blamed Whatley for a lack of progress in finding housing for displaced residents and rebuilding communities ravaged by the storm, Whatley’s campaign has distanced itself from a supervisory role over recovery. “He is not a czar of any sort,” campaign spokesperson Jonathan Felts said last year.

Yet, speaking to reporters in Rocky Mount in December, Whatley took credit for progress in the Hurricane Helene recovery process, which he said has been “very significant.”

“Since that day when he asked me to help make sure that we’re getting recovery here, we brought $5 billion worth of relief into North Carolina, 99% of the roads are rebuilt, 99% of the bridges are rebuilt, all of the water systems and wastewater systems that were shut down are up and running,” Whatley said. “That is not to say mission accomplished. We have a lot more work to do.”

Whatley has extolled Trump’s virtues and speaks about him frequently in his campaign speeches, though often has declined to weigh in on controversies facing the administration. He has not discussed the shootings of Minneapolis protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti, nor has he spoken out on the calls for Noem to resign, even when leveled by the senator he is running to succeed.

Speaking on stage ahead of the president in Rocky Mount, he thanked North Carolina for giving him “the opportunity to work with the greatest president of our lifetime, Donald J. Trump.”

“Donald Trump is fighting every day for you. That’s why he’s here tonight. And we need to make sure that we’re going to welcome him here with open arms,” Whatley told the crowd. “Now, we need you one more time. Because if the Democrats win the House, if the Democrats win the Senate, we are going to go right back to investigations and hoaxes and impeachments.”

Whatley said his vote would be one for “the America First agenda” and for North Carolina. “I believe that you need a conservative champion and Donald Trump needs an ally in Washington, and I cannot do it without you.”

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