“People are excited about a governor who’s walloped Donald Trump twice on the ballot, and who’s gotten Medicaid expansion to over 500,000 people in North Carolina, even with Republicans in a state that had been trying to deny it for the last decade,” Clayton said. Dallas Woodhouse, the former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party who rarely spares a kind word for Democrats, added that Harris “could do worse than Roy Cooper.” State Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, a Raleigh Democrat who worked for Cooper in the Attorney General’s Office, points out that Cooper is a master of retail politics who has a long track record of winning tough elections.