Why Roy Cooper Didn’t Want to Be Vetted for Vice President

As soon as Kamala Harris’ veepstakes began in earnest, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper was widely considered to be a top choice to serve as her running mate.

The case was obvious. Cooper is the twice-elected Democratic governor of a key swing state, where he’s never lost an election since his first race in 1986. And he and Harris have some history: They became close when they served as the attorneys general of their respective states back in the 2010s.

But Cooper did something unusual. He told the Harris team he didn’t want to be considered for the ticket.

In an interview for the Playbook Deep Dive podcast, Cooper explained why he took himself out of contention and how some weird local politics influenced his decision. One factor: concern that the state’s incendiary Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the GOP gubernatorial nominee, could try to seize power temporarily whenever Cooper was out of state campaigning with Harris.

Cooper also talked about his conversations with Harris, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi as Democratic leaders navigated the party’s crisis after Biden’s debate implosion; how he coached the president in the last days before Biden stepped aside; and one of his biggest concerns amid Harris’ sudden momentum against Donald Trump.

“We’ve got to make sure that people understand that now we’re in a tie,” he said. “Now this race can go either way.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive producer Kara Tabor and senior producer Alex Keeney. You can listen to the full Playbook Deep Dive podcast interview here: 

We have just been through one of the most historic months in American politics. Let’s spend just a little bit of time doing an oral history from your perspective about the last crazy month. I want to start with the Biden-Trump debate on June 27. Where were you watching it and what did you think that night?

I was watching it here in the Executive Mansion and it did not look like the Joe Biden that I had come to know and trust over the years. It was clear that it was a bad night for him. It caused concern for his people and for Democrats across the country.

What was the first inkling that you got that it could be more than a bad night but that it could trigger him leaving the ticket?

This had been something that had been talked about even before he made the decision to run for reelection — whether he was going to be a bridge president or whether he would run for reelection. I supported his decision to run for reelection because Joe Biden is a good man to the core. He has been an excellent president. He knows how to get things done.

In fact, on the day he decided to [step aside], he gave me a call that afternoon to tell me what he was doing and to thank me for our relationship over the years. I told him that he had cemented his legacy among the greatest presidents and now we needed to work together to make sure that we won this fall. He did not tell me at that time that he planned to endorse the vice president. I strongly suspected that he would, but it was a good conversation. I told him that this was the right decision. I think he looked at the numbers.

You did? You told him it was the right decision?

Yeah. Because it was the right thing to do. He has amazing character traits. No. 1, he always wants to do the right thing, and No. 2, he always wants to fight through adversity. When you get knocked down, you get back up. And 99.9 percent of the time, those two character traits coincide.

This is one of those times that it was the right thing not to fight through the adversity. And I think that he realized that and made the right decision. Since 2008, Barack Obama — who, by the way, won North Carolina that year — I've never seen the enthusiasm that I have seen over the past few weeks as a result of Kamala Harris entering this race and about to become the nominee.

You saw the president on June 28 at the rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, the day after the debate. Did you talk to him then? Did you get any indication of where his head was at that moment?

His head was fighting through that adversity. He said he had a bad night and he was going to win this thing. And it was a good brief conversation, but it was still the old Joe Biden making sure that he was going to do the things that he needed to do to win, because he had confidence that his presidency had been a good one and he wasn't going to let one bad night stop that.

You didn't get any inkling at that point that things were headed in the direction that they eventually headed?

No, I did not.

From my view, there's a sort of Forrest Gump-like quality with your role in all of this. You're at all the key moments here.

Yeah, I could’ve had a few Dr. Peppers for sure!

On July 3, you call in to this governors’ meeting with Harris and Biden. Tell us about that moment.

Governors had been hearing from people on both sides of this, and this was a very uncomfortable time for me because there was so much disagreement within the party regarding whether he should go forward. I would talk to people on both sides of this passionately stating their position to me. And I think the president got a little flavor of what governors had been hearing that day.

I don't want to get into the details of the meeting, but I think he certainly heard that at the time. And look, this is something that was a process with him.

I'll tell you one of my big concerns at the moment through the euphoria [about Harris]. I love team sports and think that you can learn a lot about life from them. It's like we were 12 points behind and all of a sudden we made a huge run and now we've tied the score. A lot of teams are so happy about the fact they caught up that they forget to finish the job. That's what I don't want us to do here.

I was talking to one of my daughters who said, “You know, Dad, I think everybody's so confident that we're going to win now.” And talking with people — she's 30 years old, talking with her friends in their late 20s and early 30s — she said, “I'm worried about whether people are going to actually do the work and get to the polls because they're feeling so good about the race and they were so concerned about it before.”

And I said, “Well, that's where we all come in here.” We've got to make sure that people understand that now we're in a tie. Now this race can go either way and we have a lot of work ahead. This is going to be a tough fight. We know how Donald Trump campaigns. So we've got a lot of work to do.

Back in that period in July, were you pushing to swap out the quarterback or were you sort of agnostic on the issue? What did you tell people at the time?

I believed that it was the president's decision. I relayed information that I had from people that I had heard on the campaign trail, both pro and con. But this was the president's decision. I think he made the right one.

There were a couple of rallies with Vice President Harris, one in Greensboro, one in Fayetteville, a week apart, July 11 and July 18. Did you talk to the vice president at those rallies? What did you glean from those conversations?

The vice president's mind was totally focused on winning the race. She was being a good vice president. She was supporting the president. We had no conversations about the controversy regarding the ticket. We talked about what are the strategies to win. The great thing about the vice president is that she has now been to North Carolina 15 times since she has been vice president. This is the only state that they didn't win last time that they put in the swing category. It was their closest loss.

She wants to win this race. I think the people in the campaign want to win this race. We talked about issues like we usually do. We talked about how we were going to move people forward. I'll tell you, I was so impressed after Dobbs. She really hit her stride when she came and did a rally in Charlotte, speaking from the heart on women's reproductive freedom and this attempt by MAGA Republicans to police women's bodies and police their doctors. I'm excited about how she can now be at the forefront of that message on this campaign trail.

But you weren't pushing her saying, “Hey, we’ve got to swap out the quarterbacks. You'd be a better candidate anyway.”

No. Absolutely not. And neither was she.

Now on July 20 — the night before Biden makes this decision — one of the key players in all of this is giving the keynote at a big Democratic dinner at the Raleigh convention center: Nancy Pelosi. Tell us about that dinner and what the conversation was like. Did anyone have an inkling? Pelosi was at the center of this.

I think that she would contend that she was not the center of this. I don't want to divulge too much of the private conversation that we had. I think by that time, obviously people thought that this might be a possibility. So we did talk a bit about if this were to happen, what would happen next a little bit.

Did you leave that conversation thinking that it's happening?

No, I did not. And I don't think she knew. I don't think anybody knew. We talked about if he stayed in the race, we just all got to work. Pull everybody together. What I had believed is that once we got through the convention and the nomination was done, then we all needed to work. I think she agreed with that. But what happened afterward was something that I have never witnessed before. And it was so grassroots among people who were streaming to Kamala Harris, from delegates to workers. It was an amazing thing.

The president sends his letter out at 1:46 p.m. and you told us that the two of you talked. So did you talk before he went public with the letter?

No. I was sent the letter by my communications director as soon as it was posted. My first question is, “Is this real?”

Because we were talking about X and so therefore you don't know for sure whether it's real, but it became obvious that it was. At that point, people began to think about, “OK, what do we do next?” And it wasn't long before I did get a call, separately from both President Biden and Vice President Harris on that afternoon.

I had a brief conversation with the president because I know he was calling a number of people who he had had good relationships with. I was friends with Beau Biden. He was attorney general of Delaware at the same time I was attorney general of North Carolina. Beau and I had visited then-Vice President Biden, when he lived at the Naval Observatory and served with Obama and had spent some time with him there. And then obviously, I worked closely with him as he served as president.

That was a wild Sunday for people like you, because all of us in the press were saying, “Wow, we now have the potential for a contested convention.” And I imagine in Democratic governors’ mansions across the country, people are thinking, “What do I do? Do I endorse Harris? Do I jump into the race? Do I try to become vice president?”

What was that afternoon like between the call from Biden, the call from Harris and your decision to endorse her in the evening? 

There was no question as to what I was going to do from the get-go. I was going to endorse Kamala Harris.

You never thought about jumping in? 

Nope. It was clear that she was the most qualified with all of the issues regarding campaign funding, with the campaign that was already in place. This had to happen, and I was excited because I believe that she was the best person to do it.

The only question was when. And there was concern about this coronation issue, right? So I held off for a few hours for her, so that it didn't look like all the leadership was trying to do this. And what was amazing was how quickly grassroots Democrats jumped on this train. I like to say they pushed the people at the top to get this done.

We got a call that our North Carolina delegation was assembling and meeting. What was amazing to me is that all 168 of these delegates voted for Kamala Harris for president. I'm thinking, “It's hard to get 168 delegates to a convention who are obviously very political to agree on anything.”

Your endorsement started a week of speculation about you as Kamala Harris' running mate for lots of reasons. But the reporting is that the next day you told the Harris campaign, “Not me. I don’t want to be vetted.” What happened there?

It was pretty early in the process. I did think about it. I was not asked. I did have a lot of people call to ask me to think about it — political leaders across the country — and I was really surprised at how fast my name became so prominent. I didn't do anything to foster that at all. It just all of a sudden came.

So it was something that obviously you had to think about. You had to think about your family. You had to think about your job as governor and your state. Over the years in my career in public service, I've been approached about running for office several times for governor before I actually ran, a couple of times for the United States Senate.

I have a pretty good sense of when is the right time for my family, for me and for my state to take a move to run for something. And this was not right for me or my state at this point in time. So I did let them know that I did not want to be vetted for this, but let them know that I'm in 100 percent. I'm ready to campaign. I already have been working hard at this.

How much of a factor was this issue of your lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, and the concerns about what he might do if you leave the state? Maybe you can explain how it works there between a governor and lieutenant governor when they are from two separate parties.

In North Carolina, we have in our constitution — back from the wagon wheel days — a provision that says when the governor leaves the state, the lieutenant governor becomes the acting governor. Many states across the country have this provision. You had no way to communicate. Back then, it made sense.

There have been a few cases across the country that have said, “Look, now with text and phone and email and Zoom and ways to communicate, this doesn't make sense for this to be the case.” And courts have ruled that it doesn't literally mean that. North Carolina courts have not ruled that, however, and fairly recently, Republicans have taken over the North Carolina Supreme Court. They have made some extremely partisan decisions here lately, particularly regarding voting and redistricting.

Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, is the most extreme statewide candidate in the country right now. I was on a recruiting trip to Japan. He did claim he was acting governor. He did a big proclamation and press conference while I was gone. It was something about support for the state of Israel. It was obviously to make up for all of his antisemitic comments that he'd made, his denial of the Holocaust that he'd made over the years. But it was a big distraction. We analyzed this.

Our concern was that in this race for governor, he likes attention. He likes to get extremist contributions from all over the country. If I were to be out of state at a campaign event, if I had been the vice presidential nominee, he could claim he was acting governor. The attention he would get would be times 10 and it would be a distraction to the presidential campaign. And plus, we don't know for sure what the Republican Supreme Court would decide.

So we looked at this not as much as the issue itself, because we believe we've got good arguments on the issue, although that was part of it. It was more that he would use this as a real distraction, drawing attention to himself, drawing attention away from the presidential campaign and that was part of the calculation that I looked at in making the decision.

Do you think that the Harris campaign is going to go all-in in North Carolina and treat it as a true swing state, or is the jury still out on that? Should they?

I don't see any difference between her decisions and President Biden's decisions on making North Carolina a targeted state. This was their closest loss — 1.3 percent. We’re the third fastest growing state in the country. I believe that they will continue to target North Carolina because if we win North Carolina for Kamala Harris, she is the next president of the United States. Trump has to win North Carolina. He will spend a lot of resources here. And in 2020, either he or one of his family members were here every single week during the campaign because they cannot afford to lose North Carolina. I'm very confident that we can win this state for her. I'm confident that she will win the presidency.

We also know that with our big statewide races, Josh Stein — our attorney general whom I've endorsed — running against Mark Robinson, his extremism; his disrespect for women, saying that men should lead and not women; saying that when you get pregnant, it's not your body anymore; extreme abortion ban with no exceptions; saying that he has an AR-15 and that he would shoot government officials who got too big for their britches. It is on and on and on and on.

That race, I think, can even help Vice President Harris' race, because I think that race is going to draw a lot of people to the polls in and of itself. There will be probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars invested there, because it is the biggest governor's race in the country. You’ve got the RGA, you’ve got the DGA, you’ve got all of these outside groups that are going to be involved. I think all of that confluence of issues makes North Carolina a place, just like in 2008 when Barack Obama won, that Kamala Harris can win and I believe will win. I'm going to do everything that I can. And hey, her swing state tour starts next week, we're on the list Thursday for her coming here.

Who do you think she'll be bringing with her on that tour as her vice presidential pick?

I don't know!

I'll tell you what: I know all of the governors very well. Any of them — that was another reason, there was a wealth of candidates that she can pick who will do an extraordinary job. All of these governors have executive experience. They are strong. They're motivated. They're great communicators. I'm excited to see who she does pick.

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