Mr. Tillis, 53, a former management consultant, defeated an evangelical opponent and a Tea Party favorite in a May 6 Republican primary, arguing that he alone had the name recognition and fund-raising clout to defeat Ms. Hagan in November.

Ms. Hagan has long been considered a vulnerable candidate, and outside groups have already spent millions on ads linking her to unpopular Obama administration policies here.

Outside groups have also paid for a number of ads attacking Mr. Tillis and blaming him for cuts approved by the legislature last year. This week, the liberal group Progress North Carolina Action opened a new front in an email blast, accusing Mr. Tillis of campaigning for the Senate instead of trying to solve the state budget impasse, which has stretched out a legislative session that lawmakers had hoped to wrap up by late June or early July.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Tillis’s campaign manager, Jordan Shaw, said the candidate was proud of his record in the statehouse. The campaign, he said, would focus on Mr. Tillis’s legislative achievements, such as tax cuts and a decision to take North Carolina out of a federal program that granted extended benefits to the unemployed, a move, he said, that helped businesses avoid steep tax increases. The resulting business climate, Mr. Jordan said, has played a role in an unemployment rate drop from 10.4 percent, when Mr. Tillis was elected speaker in January 2011, to 6.2 percent today.

Mr. Shaw noted that some of Mr. Tillis’s legislative successes came when Bev Perdue, a Democrat, was governor, and required at least some level of cooperation with Democrats.

“His approach is more about getting results more than it’s about ideology or partisanship,” Mr. Shaw said.

Mr. McCrory was elected in December 2012 on a similar promise of practical problem solving, and a reputation as a Republican moderate.