Michael Whatley’s career as an oil lobbyist could haunt him in his bid to be North Carolina’s next U.S. senator.
Whatley, the recently departed chair of the Republican National Committee, spent more than a decade lobbying for oil and natural gas companies and their allies. As part of that, he helped launch and lead the Consumer Energy Alliance, an oil-backed advocacy group.
Democrats are looking to make that a liability in a state where people and leaders from both parties have been skeptical of offshore oil drilling.
“Whether it’s fighting for offshore drilling that would harm North Carolina’s tourism economy, or championing Medicaid cuts that will raise costs and gut health care for hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians, Michael Whatley is a DC insider and Big Oil lobbyist who puts billionaires and special interests over North Carolina families every chance he gets,” said Mallory Payne, a spokesperson for the North Carolina Democratic Party.
Whatley has lobbied for offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean, including off the coast of North Carolina, a prospect that’s been met with bipartisan opposition.
He is now the favored Republican candidate to succeed retiring Sen. Thom Tillis with the support of President Donald Trump and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
In endorsing him in August, Trump said Whatley would “Champion American Energy DOMINANCE,” while saying he “delivered for North Carolina, especially after the terrible floods,” referring to the 2024 destruction from Hurricane Helene.
He’ll likely face former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, in next year’s midterm election, a race that could decide the party balance of the closely divided Senate.
The North Carolina Democratic Party and Cooper’s campaign manager have been referring to Whatley as a “Big Oil lobbyist” in nearly all of its communications about him.
The accusations come as both Whatley and Cooper work to introduce the Republican to North Carolinians. He’s chaired the RNC and the North Carolina Republican Party but doesn’t enjoy the same name recognition as the former governor.
“I do have a name recognition deficit. And that’s OK,” he said in an interview on Spectrum News 1 North Carolina. “Right now I think we’ve got plenty of opportunity to introduce myself to the voters of North Carolina. And I am right on the issues that they care about. And so we just need to make sure that we do that.”
‘I have fought for lower energy prices’
Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College, said making Whatley out to be primarily an oil lobbyist could help to paint him both as a Washington insider and a close ally to Trump.
“We know that midterms are always referendums generally on the president and his popularity, or lack thereof, and can tell us a lot about the environment that midterm will operate in,” Bitzer said.
“I think Democrats are trying early on to paint Whatley as not only a D.C. insider, but the president’s insider. They’re fitting a strategy into what we generally know about midterm elections,” he continued, pointing to the pattern of presidents being unpopular in midterm elections.
Cooper seems to have an overall advantage in the race so far due to his name recognition — he’s won six statewide elections, going back to his time as attorney general — but the race is still early, Bitzer said.
“Whatley has to broaden beyond the Republican Party … to the broader electorate of North Carolina, and that’s probably what he’s going to be doing through now through the March primary,” he continued.
Whatley’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment and questions about whether he still supports his previous positions on oil and gas.
But in the Spectrum News interview, Whatley defended his oil work and sought to turn the issue around onto Cooper.
“I have a career where I have fought for lower energy prices for consumers all across the country. I have had the support of the Farm Bureau and I have had support from a number of different groups — truckers and shippers and airlines and manufacturers — because of the work that we have done on that,” he said. “There is only right now one career politician in this race, and that is Roy Cooper.”
Long lobbying history
Whatley is a former Department of Energy official under President George W. Bush, chief of staff to then-Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.) and a senior aide for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee under then-Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.).
He launched the lobbying firm Patriot Group in 2005 and represented mainly utility companies like DTE Energy, American Electric Power and Xcel Energy on air pollution issues, disclosures show. He became a partner at O’Connor & Hannan in 2007 and helped found HBW Resources, an oil- and gas-focused lobbying firm, in 2009.
That year, HBW launched Consumer Energy Alliance, which Whatley led as executive vice president and which shared almost all of its staff with HBW.
CEA has gotten support from a broad group of oil companies, including BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell and Statoil, as well as their allies and business interests. Under Whatley’s leadership, CEA advocated for the Keystone XL oil pipeline and against regulations on water pollution, fracking, power plant emissions and auto efficiency, among other priorities.
The group was also a major voice in favor of expanding offshore drilling opportunities. He fought to quickly resume drilling in 2010 after President Barack Obama put it on hold following the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. He vocally supported Trump’s 2018 proposal to open nearly all of the areas off the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf and Alaska coasts to drilling — including near North Carolina.
Weeks after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Whatley pushed the Interior Department to open the mid-Atlantic region to offshore drilling, saying drilling “serves our nation’s best interests by improving energy security, diversifying supply, increasing economic development, and generating important local, state and federal revenue.” The letter was through the Southeast Energy Alliance, another HBW-managed group.
In a November 2010 opinion piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Whatley celebrated the end of the drilling moratorium, saying the Gulf economy was “on the ropes and pleading for relief.” He slammed Obama’s planned new regulations on the industry as a “long-term de facto moratorium.”
CEA is also behind the Outer Continental Shelf Governors Coalition, a group of Republican governors advocating for more offshore drilling. A 2014 Center for Public Integrity report concluded that the effort paired “a public advocacy campaign with direct, behind-the-scenes appeals to elected officials, urging them to make similar public comments in their own voices.”
Whatley resigned from CEA in 2019 when he became chair of the state Republican Party but stayed with HBW. He left HBW in 2022.
Cooper, meanwhile, opposed offshore drilling off North Carolina’s coast from the time he took office in 2017. His position represented a flip from that of his predecessor, Pat McCrory (R), who worked with Whatley’s organization to push for drilling.
A High Point University poll in 2018 found that 53 percent of North Carolinians opposed offshore drilling near the state’s coast, and 37 percent supported it. Municipal leaders all along the coast opposed it as well.
With Trump back in office, the offshore drilling issue could come back. Interior is working on a new five-year plan for leasing, despite former President Joe Biden’s action to close the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to drilling indefinitely.
Cooper’s successor as governor, Josh Stein (D), joined with South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) in June to ask that their states be excluded from any drilling.
