Roy Cooper wants to run for Senate in North Carolina. Michael Whatley wants to stop him. The entire financial media apparatus has decided this matters to your portfolio.
North Carolina went blue for Obama in 2008 and has spent eighteen years reminding everyone it was a mistake. Now Cooper thinks he can flip it back because he served as governor and people vaguely recognize his name from that time they had to renew their driver's license.
Whatley runs the RNC. His job is losing winnable races and then explaining why the data actually showed a moral victory. He's now betting he can win his home state by doing absolutely nothing different.
The race could decide control of Congress. This sentence appears in every Senate race article written since 1992. It will appear in every Senate race article written until the sun explodes. Journalists copy and paste it between bourbon shots and call it analysis.
Swing state voters will spend the next five months getting targeted ads about prescription drug prices and January 6th. They will see Cooper's face seventeen thousand times. They will see Whatley's face seventeen thousand times. Then they will vote exactly how they were always going to vote because nobody changes their mind anymore.
Democrats haven't won North Carolina in a presidential race since 2008. This fact has now been mentioned twice in under four hundred words. Repetition doesn't make it relevant to your Robinhood account but it does make political reporters feel like they're doing journalism.
The outcome will be decided by which candidate's base is less hungover on election day. Markets will not move. Your stocks will not care. But some analyst will draw a line between Senate control and small-cap momentum and you'll believe him because he wore a tie in his LinkedIn photo.
Photo by Jacob McGowin on Unsplash
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