Democrat Roy Cooper leads Republican Michael Whatley 50%-42% in a new poll released Thursday on North Carolina’s U.S. Senate seat race.
Down ballot, the North Carolina Supreme Court race is too close to call within the poll’s confidence interval. Democratic incumbent Justice Anita Earls leads 46%-44% over Republican former state Rep. Sarah Stevens.
The sample Aug. 3-12 by the High Point University Poll in conjunction with YouGov measured responses from 800 adults registered to vote and 660 likely to vote. The confidence interval +/- 3.8%.
Voters have been casting ballots since Sept. 4 in the nation’s longest voting window for any registered voter. Election Day is Nov. 3.
Last week’s release of polls included Cooper leading Whatley 48.4%-42.5% in the InsiderAdvantage poll’s sampling Sept. 16-17, and Cooper leading Whatley 49.2%-34.1% in the Carolina Journal’s polling from Sept. 13-15.
This U.S. Senate seat is viewed as a major player nationally in the quest for a majority in the chamber. Republicans have 53 seats today. In no particular order, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, Maine, Iowa, New Hampshire, Alaska, Texas and Montana are the other top battlegrounds among 35 races. Two of those are special elections, the other 33 are in regular rotation.
In last week’s poll released by Carolina Journal, Earls broke from consistently tight sampling to lead Stevens 47.2%-36.5%. The nearly 11 points was double any of three previous polls this year.
Earls, a Seattle native, was a founder of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice before winning election to the Supreme Court in 2018. Stevens resigned from the North Carolina House of Representatives effective June 16 to focus on her campaign, having served District 90’s Surry and Wilkes counties in the northwestern region of the state along the Virginia border.