Did North Carolina Dem Senate hopeful Roy Cooper push a race hoax to incite black voters?

Cooper’s campaign pushed a lie that a local election board was trying to suppress black votes in the city of Greensboro by eliminating an early-voting polling site on the campus of North Carolina A&T, a historically black university.

“I went to North Carolina A&T State University, the largest HBCU in North Carolina. They removed that ballot box from their campus,” he said in an August interview with MS NOW.

“But the students are marching to the nearest polling place and they're spreading the word that it's really important for them to get out and vote in this election because our country needs a course correction,” Cooper added. “And that's what they can do in these midterms by putting the checks and balances back into the Constitution that the framers intended.”

Fact checks on the claim, including one by left-leaning PolitiFact and another from Raleigh-based WRAL, acknowledged that Cooper was fudging the truth.

“Cooper omitted key context: The campus has never hosted an early-voting site in a midterm election like the 2026 contest — and it wasn’t slated to have one this year, so his use of the word ‘remove’ could be misleading,” WRAL acknowledged in September.

The campus did have one in past presidential elections, including the 2024 election, likely to accommodate a higher anticipated turnout. However, the decision not to have one would undoubtedly have been a logistical matter made by local officials due to staffing limitations, not a political conspiracy.

Despite getting smacked down on the claim by mainstream media, Democrats sought to double down on the hoax.

A viral post from leftist propaganda pushers @allchronology again invoked the lie recently to claim that hundreds of students had protested the site removal by staging a march on the first day of early voting.

On LinkedIn, Justin Catanoso, a journalism and media literacy professor at nearby Wake Forest University, reposted footage from Todd Simmons, the director of executive communications at A&T, linking the demonstration to the historic Civil Rights-era sit in at the Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Greensboro.

“The Greensboro Four would be proud,” Catanoso wrote. “The board of elections ought to be ashamed of itself.”

Conveniently, the Oct. 15 march also overlapped with another march in downtown Greensboro, organized by A&T’s campus NAACP chapter, in honor of an equally dubious cause: the July 4 drowning death of 18-year-old Mississippi resident Nolan Wells.

The Wells case has been a pet project of race-baiting former George Floyd attorney Ben Crump, suggesting there may be a broader national-level effort to gin up pseudo-outrage in order to help mobilize voters ahead of the midterms.

The student activists in Greensboro once again tried to invoke the Woolworth lunch-counter protest to insinuate that there were civil-rights implications in the case of Wells, who disappeared after a day of drinking while on a boating trip with several white friends in the Gulf of America.

Recent polls have shown Cooper, a former governor of the state, has a double-digit lead over former Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley in what promises to be an embarrassing seat flip (nominally, at least) to replace ousted RINO Thom Tillis.

Ominously, outlets like Politico reported that Whatley’s campaign had “gone dark” last week with a major ad pull, suggesting national GOP organizations had lost faith in their former leader's ability to close the deal in a state that President Donald Trump won by 3.2 percent in 2024.

Jennica Pounds, aka “DataRepublican” posted on her high-traffic X account that early voting, although it traditionally skews leftward, likewise showed a dismal outlook for Republicans in the state, based on Thursday's preliminary returns.

In particular, Cooper was enjoying comfortable double-digit leads with voting groups under age 50.

But ironically, the 69-year-old governor appeared to be sensitive about questions regarding his own health and advanced age.

The North State Journal reported that Russiagate architect and Democrat super-lawyer Marc Elias had issued a cease-and-desist letter after the outlet pressed Cooper’s campaign on whether “he was committed to fulfilling his six-year term if elected in November and if there were any health problems that might impede him.”

Some speculate that Cooper may hope to use the Senate as a launchpad for his presidential aspirations, similar to what former President Barack Obama did in 2008 after having served in the U.S. Congress for less than four years.