Whatley's campaign told the Washington Post that 'prices were down considerably in 2025.' The government's own index says the opposite: overall prices rose 2.7% across 2025 and groceries rose 2.4%. Prices have gone up another 3% since.
Ronald Hayes agreed to talk about his murdered son because he was told the ad was about gun violence. It has been viewed more than 25 million times, as part of a $17 million campaign for Michael Whatley — and the claim at its center is not true.
A NOTUS column collected what Republican candidates have been saying about the cost of living. Twelve of them have report cards on this site. Their answers range from 'earn more' to 'the Democrats invented this term affordability.'
Supports Devastating Health Care Cuts for North Carolinians
North Carolina worked hard to expand Medicaid and provide health coverage to hundreds of thousands of residents. Michael Whatley opposed that expansion — and then backed a bill designed to unravel it.
Backed a Bill That Puts North Carolina's Clean Energy Jobs at Risk
North Carolina spent a decade building one of the country's strongest clean energy sectors. Michael Whatley — a career oil and gas lobbyist — cheered the bill that gutted the tax credits holding it up.
Michael Whatley spent his career working for the oil and gas industry, and then cheered a bill that raises North Carolinians' power bills and puts their clean energy jobs at risk. We deserve better.
Elon Musk's DOGE slashed federal jobs and services — and a Senate subcommittee report found it wasted billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. Michael Whatley called DOGE "absolutely critical" and wants to bring it back.
Whatley praised Musk's DOGE as "absolutely critical" and said "We need to do more. We need to get that process back up and running and very aggressively" — even after the minority staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found DOGE had generated at least $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government between January 20 and July 18, 2025.
Michael Whatley wants to bring back the DOGE cuts that wasted billions of taxpayer dollars and gutted government services. We deserve better.
Failed Western North Carolinians as Hurricane Recovery Czar
Trump appointed Whatley to lead Hurricane Helene recovery in North Carolina. Residents said he went missing — and more than 120 of them signed a letter demanding he be removed.
Pushed Trump's 2020 Election Lies and Excused January 6
As chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, Michael Whatley pushed Trump's lies about the 2020 election. And after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he refused to blame Trump — and punished a fellow Republican who did.
After the 2020 election, Whatley repeatedly claimed on the radio that "there was massive fraud that took place" in "places like Milwaukee and Detroit and Philadelphia," and shared false claims that Republican observers were blocked from polling places — even though there was no evidence of massive fraud anywhere, and Trump and his supporters lost every one of the more than 60 cases they filed in six battleground states.
After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Whatley told CNN that "the fault lies with those people who attacked the Capitol" and, pressed on whether Trump deserved any blame, refused to say he did. He also distanced his own party from the mob, saying that February that "most of the people that have been arrested were not necessarily Republican voters" — though investigations have since shown those arrested were mostly Trump supporters. Under his leadership, the North Carolina Republican Party unanimously censured Senator Richard Burr for voting to convict Trump of inciting the insurrection.
Michael Whatley pushed Trump's election lies and punished a fellow Republican for holding Trump accountable for January 6. We deserve better.
Celebrated the Fall of Roe and Backed North Carolina's Abortion Ban
Michael Whatley spent his years running the North Carolina Republican Party working to elect politicians who would restrict abortion — and cheered when they did.
Michael Whatley celebrated the end of Roe, backed North Carolina's abortion ban, and has spent his career working to elect politicians who will restrict women's health care further. We deserve better.
Works for Billionaires, Big Business & Special Interests and Not for Us
Our elected officials should work for us, the people.
Michael Whatley works for billionaires, big business and special interests, not for us. North Carolinians are barely funding him. His campaign has raised $11,272,504 this cycle, but $4,621,452 of that - 41% - isn't donor money at all; it was transferred in from other committees he controls. Of the individual money that can be traced to a donor's home state, only 43% came from North Carolina. Florida, Texas and California together gave nearly a third.
The Senate Leadership Fund - $71,000,000 committed to his race. The super PAC has raised $253.7 million this cycle for Senate races nationwide, and roughly 62 cents of every dollar of it came from one secretive nonprofit and six men: $70.7 million from One Nation, which is not required to name a single one of its donors; $30 million from casino billionaire Miriam Adelson; $17 million from Blackstone chairman Stephen Schwarzman; $14.5 million from Paul Singer; $10 million each from Citadel's Ken Griffin and Elon Musk; and $5 million from Stephen Wynn.
Americans for Prosperity Action - $3,077,168 spent supporting him. The Koch network's super PAC, which faces no limit on what it can spend, has already put more behind Whatley than every PAC in the country gave his campaign combined.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) - $285,712 raised for him through its donor network - money AIPAC's supporters earmarked for Whatley and AIPAC forwarded on. One lobby, hundreds of donors, aimed at a single Senate race.
The oil, gas and utility industry he used to lobby for. The US Energy PAC - the political arm of the American Exploration & Production Council - gave $10,000, as did Phillips 66 and the utility holding company Pinnacle West Capital. Employees of ConocoPhillips and Alliance Coal gave too. And Chevron gave $3,900,000 to the Senate Leadership Fund - the same company that bankrolled the "grassroots" front group Whatley ran before entering politics. He spent two decades lobbying for exactly these companies - see Is a DC Insider and Big Oil Lobbyist below.
Chemours - and it has never done this before. The company's Fayetteville Works plant discharged PFAS "forever chemicals" into the Cape Fear River, contaminating the drinking water of about half a million North Carolinians. Its corporate PAC gave Whatley $5,000 - the first contribution it has ever made in a North Carolina Senate race. Asked three questions about PFAS by WUNC, his campaign answered neither the email nor the text.
Wall Street. Employees of Blackstone gave $34,000 - the same firm whose chairman put $17 million into the super PAC backing him - along with the private equity giant KKR, the law firm Davis Polk, and Winklevoss Capital Management, the crypto investment firm run by the Winklevoss twins.
Sitting Republican senators' personal leadership PACs, each giving the maximum $10,000 - Shelley Moore Capito's Wild and Wonderful PAC, Deb Fischer's Nebraska Sandhills PAC and John Hoeven's Dakota PAC among them. Washington picked this candidate before North Carolina did.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee - $62,000. The party committee that recruited him gave six times what any other committee wrote his campaign directly.
And it isn't only about who funds him. A November 2025 disclosure shows Whatley and his wife hold between $163,000 and $445,000 in Duke Energy stock - the monopoly utility for most of North Carolina. That same month, Duke asked state regulators for an 18% residential rate increase. He campaigns on "reliable, affordable energy" while holding a six-figure stake in the company trying to raise your power bill.
Michael Whatley is funded by billionaires, big business and special interests. No wonder he's not doing anything to improve OUR lives. We deserve better.
Whatley has told voters at least 15 times that he "grew up" in Blowing Rock, North Carolina — but an NBC News review found he was born in Michigan, stayed there until his early high school years, and spent only about three years in Blowing Rock before leaving for college.
Michael Whatley is a DC insider and big oil lobbyist who has spent his career delivering for special interests, not North Carolinians. We deserve better.
Elevated a Convicted Child Sex Offender Within the GOP
Michael Whatley put Harvey West Jr. — a convicted child sex offender — on one of the North Carolina Republican Party's most powerful committees, twice, and has refused to answer questions about how much he knew.
Michael Whatley elevated a convicted child sex offender within the North Carolina Republican Party and refused to answer questions about it. We deserve better.
