RALEIGH — Roy Cooper is treating a Supreme Court stay as proof that Republicans, and the money behind them, can buy a midterm edge his side does not have.
The former governor, now the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, wrote on X Friday night that the Court’s decision “further cements the scheme the GOP began in June, giving megadonors, billionaires and shady corporate money more power in our elections.”
He aimed the rest at the air war, and at the man he is running against. “By forcing local TV stations to give a massive discount to party committees like the RNC, they’re opening the floodgates for the DC swamp to bail out former RNC Chair Michael Whatley’s flailing campaign.”
The seat is the one Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is leaving. Whatley chaired the Republican National Committee before he got into this race. Cooper’s post is a campaign argument that the party Whatley used to run, plus outside Republican money, can now cover for a campaign Cooper says is behind.
The ruling is a stay, not a final reading of the law. On Sept. 4, the Supreme Court put back in place Federal Communications Commission guidance that lets political party committees and some joint fundraising committees buy broadcast ads at the lowest unit charge. Stations already must give that discount to candidates in the 60 days before a general election. For these midterms, that window opened the same day the Court acted.
The Fourth Circuit had said the discount belongs to candidates, not parties. The National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee asked the Supreme Court to step in. They said they had budgeted tens of millions of dollars in ads at the cheaper rate, and that stations were taking the rate back after the appeals court ruled. The justices said the committees would be harmed if they had to pay more in the last weeks of the campaign. They did not decide the underlying question. The stay holds while they consider whether to take the case.
That is the first half of the advantage Cooper is naming. The Republican National Committee and the party’s House and Senate committees can buy local television at the candidate price, on top of the cash they already have. A fuller party account, spent at a lower rate, buys more spots. National Republican committees have gone into this fall with larger war chests than their Democratic counterparts. CBS News described the stay as a lift for those GOP groups because they can put more ads behind their candidates in the weeks before November.
The second half is not the RNC. It is Elon Musk.
Musk’s America PAC spent more than $239 million helping Republican candidates in 2024. He was the largest donor of that cycle for either party, according to Federal Election Commission filings cited by CBS News. For these midterms, the New York Times reported that Musk authorized the PAC to spend more than $100 million to help Republicans in November. The first public slice of that spending landed in August: more than $800,000, mostly printing and mail, in Senate races in Texas, Maine, Ohio, New Hampshire, Iowa, Michigan, and Alaska, plus competitive House districts. Chris Young, a former RNC national field director, signed the disclosure. The PAC has not, in that filing, shown a North Carolina check. The authorization is national. Cooper’s race is the kind of contest that money is built for.
Put the two together and Cooper’s post reads as a cash complaint, not a poll. The RNC and its campaign committees get a court-restored discount on the ads parties buy in coordination with candidates. Musk’s committee is a separate pile, already moving, with a nine-figure authorization behind it. Democrats do not have a matching outside spender of that size in this story. Cooper called the beneficiaries megadonors, billionaires, and “shady corporate money.” He did not name Musk. The filings do.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez called the restored guidance unofficial and unlawful, and said local stations will eat much of the cost when more political inventory has to be sold at the candidate rate. The Democratic candidates who sued argued the statute names candidates, not party committees.
Republicans’ answer is the one the Court accepted for now: they planned the buy at the discount, the window is open, and losing it mid-campaign is the harm. Whether Whatley’s campaign is “flailing,” as Cooper wrote, is his claim. The Court’s order does not say so. What it does is cheaper airtime for the party committees that can write the check, in a cycle when Musk’s PAC is already writing checks for other Republicans.
Cooper’s post is here: https://x.com/roycoopernc/status/2095981591742804212
In a close Senate race, that is how the last eight weeks get bought. Cooper is saying, in public, that he thinks the other side can buy more of them.
