EXCLUSIVE — Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley said that he and the “entire Republican universe” would back Lara Trump should she decide to enter the 2026 race for North Carolina’s United States Senate seat, but he didn’t close the door on a possible run of his own.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), amid public sparring with President Donald Trump regarding the reconciliation bill, announced he would not seek reelection next year. A few days later, the president told the Washington Examiner that Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, would be his “first choice” to be the Republican nominee in that race, based on successful co-chairing of the RNC alongside Whatley during the 2024 election and her personal history with the state.
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Whatley, who chaired North Carolina’s state Republican party before taking over the RNC, has also been floated as a potential Tillis successor. In a Monday interview with the Washington Examiner, he signaled that he agreed with the president’s instincts but declined to say if he himself is interested in entering the race.
“What I will say is this. If Lara Trump is going to be interested, then she is certainly going to have the entire Republican universe, myself included, that are going to coalesce behind her,” he stated. “And if not, we’ll work with the president, and we’ll figure out who the best candidate is to be able to win there.”
“I’ve been the chair down there for five years. I’ve worked with the president through three different presidential election cycles. We know how to win in North Carolina, and I feel very confident that we’re going to be able to hold that seat,” Whatley continued.
Pundits predict that Republicans will have an uphill battle to fight in the 2026 midterm elections, and Tillis’s retirement moved the North Carolina seat into the toss-up column. In addition to Tillis, former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced earlier this year that he will retire and not seek reelection in 2026.
Whatley seemed to indicate Monday that the biggest challenge in defending the current map next year, in addition to potentially picking up Senate seats in Georgia and Michigan, is that Trump simply won’t be on the ballot.
TRUMP SAYS DAUGHTER-IN-LAW, LARA TRUMP, IS HIS ‘FIRST CHOICE’ TO RUN FOR NORTH CAROLINA SENATE SEAT
“The biggest challenge that we have at the RNC right now is taking all of these Trump voters and converting them into Republican voters,” he explained. “The fact is, we are going to have to get those voters out there. We’re looking at potentially seeing a fall off from 70% plus turnout of Republicans to 50% in the midterms [elections], and that’s our biggest challenge, making sure that we’re going to be able to get everybody out to those polls.”