RALEIGH, N.C.—Roy Cooper wants Democrats to do something they haven’t done in state politics in years: Go on offense.

His eyes on 2018 state Legislature races and potential special elections before then, the North Carolina governor is launching a multimillion-dollar, multiyear effort to knock Republicans out of the state capital. And national Democrats, reeling from losing hundreds of seats in statehouses across the country over the past decade, are hoping other governors pay close attention.


Cooper’s initiative is the latest frontier in a state that’s a cauldron of just about every political fight in America—redistricting, voter ID, public education, gender. The two major parties are just about equally matched here, though unaffiliated voters outnumber Republicans. North Carolina is where Hillary Clinton swooped in for her final, exuberant past-midnight campaign rally—only to see the race called later that day for Donald Trump; it’s where a local battle over who can use which bathroom became a national brawl over human sexuality.

Already, Cooper has quietly banked $1 million for his new group, Break the Majority, and plans to raise several million more, along with recruiting candidates and then campaigning for them in state Senate and General Assembly races. The money, being put into a new state Democratic Party account, will also cover salaries for what will effectively be a new campaign committee, with a dedicated communications director, research director, several junior staffers and cash for everything from field organizers to ads.

Given the cutthroat nature of politics in North Carolina, Cooper’s power play is especially audacious: Though there have been previous independent expenditures and coordinated campaigns in the state and beyond, an effort with this kind of focus and funding is unprecedented.

“Until I get some leverage in the General Assembly, I can’t get the things done in education, in economic development. I can’t do as much to stop this social conservative legislation that makes us embarrassed as a state, and doesn’t truly reflect who we are as North Carolinians,” Cooper, who is six months into the job, told me in an interview in the governor’s mansion here for Politico’s Off Message podcast. “And it’s time for that to stop.”

Cooper is coordinating closely on mechanics and messaging with Eric Holder, who’s chairing the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. At the state party’s Unity Dinner last weekend, Holder called North Carolina “ground zero in the fight to restore our democracy” as the finishing touches were being put on the launch for what NDRC executive director Kelly Ward calls “a great model for Democratic governors across the country.”

Cooper already had national Democrats paying attention: He’s the only swing-state candidate for governor or senator who won last year in a state Trump carried, thanks in large part to the outrage over HB-2, the transgender “bathroom bill,” and the businesses that pulled out of the state in response. Lanky, with a homegrown Nash County drawl and stories about growing up on a farm, plus two degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he’s exactly what many Democrats say they’ve been waiting for. He kept them waiting for years, including four terms as state attorney general.

Ralph Northam, running for governor of Virginia this fall, and Gwen Graham, running for governor of Florida next year, are among those who’ve debriefed with Cooper, and Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez has expressed interest in learning from the victory, according to a person familiar with the conversations. The Democratic Governors Association hired Cooper’s campaign manager, Trey Nix, as its campaign director for the 2018 cycle.

Cooper tells the people who call him for advice to start early and commit to raising huge amounts of money to outspend opponents who’ll likely have massive outside help. Campaign aides have pushed how they invested in online organizing, and how much time Cooper spent responding to attacks directly, on camera. “They knew that he was a little more progressive than they were, but they also knew that he had a connection and cared about the state in a unique way,” Nix says of North Carolina voters.

Cooper also stresses what he thinks is the connecting thread between taxes, education and jobs that most candidates miss: They have to figure out how to shake voters who believe “Democrats are going to take something from them and give it to somebody else who doesn’t deserve it.”

But first, Cooper warns, Democrats need to get real about how completely Republicans have outmaneuvered them in state-level elections, and how, in the existential moment the party finds itself after the 2016 wipeout, it’s time to get scared straight. The Trump fatigue he says he already hears from North Carolinians isn’t going to be enough.

“Democrats didn’t get it,” Cooper says. “And where else can you go at this point? We have to look at the root of the problem.”

Click here to subscribe for the full podcast to hear more Cooper discussing what he’s told North Carolina’s two Republican senators about Obamacare, the future NBA player whose shot he blocked in high school, how his father talked him into running his first race, and what he thinks of Chris Christie’s leadership of the White House Opiate Task Force.

Winning a legislative majority is Cooper’s dream—optimistically, some North Carolina Democrats say there’s a chance of that by 2020. But for now, the goal is to break the GOP’s supermajority in the General Assembly, which has allowed North Carolina Republicans to essentially govern around Cooper, overriding vetoes, cutting funding and—in an example Democrats cite as pure proof of overreach—threatening to impeach the secretary of state.

The state’s districts are so gerrymandered that when HB-2 was passed last year under the previous governor, North Carolina Democrats point out, 90 percent of the legislators who voted for it had won their previous race by double digits, if they drew an opponent at all. “They have complete confidence in their absolute authority,” says Morgan Jackson, the top Democratic strategist in the state who is advising Cooper on Break the Majority.

In June, after years of litigation, the Supreme Court ruled that North Carolina’s existing district map was racially gerrymandered and unconstitutional, and sent it back to district court to reconsider holding special elections before next November, as Democrats had been hoping for. Cooper says that makes the current Legislature itself “unconstitutional,” and he is calling for special elections before it gets to vote on another budget next year.

The current court situation makes special elections unlikely, creating complications for Cooper and the other Democrats who’ve fanned out to begin recruiting: State law requires that legislators live in their districts to run, and right now, no one knows where the eventual district lines will be, and thus who’d be eligible where.

But given how many legislators have never faced competitive races because of the current legislative map, Cooper and his colleagues feel optimistic, citing the kind of energy in the base and turnout at local political meetings that Democrats say they’ve been seeing around the country since Trump won. “There’s a great deal of enthusiasm. There’s a great deal of check-writing, too,” says Dan Blue, the state Senate minority leader.

Cooper’s political career is a sometimes puzzling mix of boldness and caution. He got his start in politics fresh out of law school, running a successful primary against the then-majority leader of the General Assembly. He says he’s agnostic about primaries in the races he’s recruiting for now.

He’s less agnostic about running for president, of which there’s been some talk: Despite a party that has no clear 2020 front-runner, despite Cooper fitting a Bill Clintonesque profile of a Democratic governor from a conservative Southern state, despite his approaching politics with a tactical, figure-out-how-to-win and just-make-it-happen-sensibility, no one close to him sees any chance of that. This is a guy, after all, who spent 15 years as attorney general never quite feeling the fire in the belly to run for the job he has now.

Among the people still holding out hope that he might is Jim Hunt, a former North Carolina governor who remains a dominant Democratic presence in the state 16 years after finishing his fourth term and is a gushing Cooper fan.

“He doesn’t want to be president—yet,” Hunt says.

But Hunt, who ran a smaller independent-expenditure effort on behalf of state legislators when he was in office, says he’s fine with Cooper focusing on winning a majority for now.

“You know it’s a huge job,” Hunt says of Cooper’s ambitious plan to oust his rivals, “because no one in America has done it successfully.”

