Cooper Asks the Most Powerful Lobby in His Own Coalition to Please Stop Helping Him Win

RALEIGH — Senate nominee Cooper, locked in a race polling within a point, has asked one of the best-funded advocacy groups in American politics — a group whose positions he shares, whose events he has attended, and whose money his party has accepted for decades — to please not run advertisements on his behalf.

The request followed a conversation between the candidate and the group's chairman. The next day, an already-produced ad attacking his opponent was shelved. Talks between the campaign and the group have since gone cold, and donors with ties to both sides have been pressed into service as intermediaries, a role normally reserved for hostage situations and custody disputes.

The group had spent more than $30 million in the other party's primary trying to defeat the man Cooper now faces, and had planned to spend millions more helping him. The candidate's allies concluded that public support from the organization had become a liability with voters, which is a polite way of saying the check would clear but the endorsement would bounce.

Critics called it a candidate who wants the lobby's positions without the lobby's logo — a spine that appears only in the ad buy. Supporters called it a smart read of the electorate. The Press's donor desk notes that both descriptions are in stock and are dispensed according to which party's nominee is sneaking out the side door of which fundraiser.

"We agree on everything," said one campaign official. "We would just prefer to agree quietly, and preferably without them."

At press time the shelved advertisement remained shelved, the intermediaries remained intermediating, and the candidate's position could be summarized as a welcome mat flipped to its blank side: still there, still technically a welcome.