Republicans are starting to abandon their effort to hold the Senate seat in North Carolina.
The Senate Leadership Fund, the Republican Party’s biggest Senate super PAC, is pausing its advertising in the state after pouring more than $30 million into the race.
And where is that money going instead? Kansas.
Yep.
The group is launching a seven-figure advertising campaign to help Republican Sen. Roger Marshall fend off a surprisingly competitive challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton.
The move is a pretty telling sign of how Republicans are reshuffling their Senate strategy with the midterms approaching.
North Carolina was supposed to be one of the GOP’s key defensive races. The Senate Leadership Fund initially committed $71 million to help Republican Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chairman, defeat former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. More than $30 million has already been spent there.
But Whatley has continued to trail Cooper in poll after poll.
A late-September Big Data Poll had Cooper ahead 51% to 39% among likely voters, while a Catawba College-YouGov survey had Cooper leading 47% to 35%.
Now the GOP’s biggest Senate super PAC is shifting money elsewhere.
Democrats were more than happy to point out what that means.
“The fact that the biggest Republican Senate Super PAC took its money out of North Carolina today and put it into Kansas says all you need to know about which direction the Senate Majority is headed,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on X.
Republicans, naturally, are framing the move differently.
The Senate Leadership Fund says its job is to maintain the Republican Senate majority and that the shift reflects what it considers the most effective use of its resources.
Translation: The money is going where Republicans think they need it most. And Kansas is apparently becoming one of those places.
Kansas is about as red as Senate states get.
Donald Trump carried the state by 16 percentage points in 2024. Yet Marshall is now facing a serious challenge from Hamilton, a Democratic pastor who has managed to make the race competitive enough to attract major Republican attention.
The Senate Leadership Fund is now putting millions into Kansas, while Vice President JD Vance has already traveled there to campaign with Marshall.
That’s quite a change in priorities.
North Carolina, meanwhile, is getting less Republican attention.
And the Senate Leadership Fund isn’t the only GOP group pulling back.
Old North State Action cut its North Carolina ad reservations by roughly a third last month. MAGA-aligned groups have also reduced or halted future reservations in the state, according to CNN.
Then Americans for Prosperity Action announced a $22 million advertising campaign for five Republican Senate candidates through Election Day.
Whatley wasn’t one of them.
That omission didn’t exactly go unnoticed.
Whatley has dismissed concerns about outside spending and said last week that he feels “very comfortable” that his campaign will have the money it needs.
His campaign also pushed back after the Senate Leadership Fund’s decision, pointing to the possibility of late-deciding voters breaking Republican.
“Undecided Voters who break late decide the election in North Carolina,” Whatley spokesperson DJ Griffin said, adding that the campaign is “confident” it has the resources needed to defeat Cooper.
But the outside spending decisions are telling a different story about where national Republicans are putting their money.
The GOP isn’t formally abandoning Whatley. But after initially committing $71 million to North Carolina, its top Senate super PAC is now moving additional resources somewhere else — while another Republican group is spending millions in other races and leaving Whatley off its list.
The question now is whether this is simply a strategic reshuffling of Republican resources — or the beginning of a much bigger retreat from North Carolina.
