High Point University Poll has Cooper stretching lead over

Twenty-four polls. That’s not a blip, that’s a trend. Roy Cooper’s average lead over Michael Whatley sits at 49.7 to 41.3, and while no one should mistake an August poll for an election result, this is the kind of cushion that ought to wake up North Carolina Republicans. Trump won this state twice. A Republican should be competitive. Whatley is still running like a man hoping to be discovered.

Cooper has been around long enough that voters think they know him, and for a lot of them, that’s fine. He’s the Democratic governor who managed to stay just outside the most toxic national fights. Whatley can’t win by hoping Cooper trips. He has to make the race about what Cooper’s policies and his party’s priorities actually mean for the people who live here. This is a name-recognition race right now, and name recognition only changes when someone earns it.

The good news for Whatley is that the fundamentals aren’t terrible. The national mood favors Republicans, and North Carolina isn’t California. But the polling gap shows a real problem: the challenger hasn’t broken through. If the next two months are just more of the same, Cooper will coast. If Whatley wants to prove the polls wrong, he needs to start acting like he’s behind. He is..