The Roy Cooper Helene Record and the North Carolina Senate Race: Jim Pfaff on On Second Thought | Sep 18, 2026
Published: September 18, 2026
Network: WHKY, Hickory NC
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff
On the September 18, 2026 edition of On Second Thought on WHKY in Hickory, Chuck Boozer brought Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff on to talk about the race his listeners live in. President Trump had been in North Carolina that Wednesday to boost Michael Whatley for the Senate, and Boozer’s read was that Roy Cooper still seemed to be taking the lead. Pfaff’s answer ran through the whole segment and came back to one issue: the Roy Cooper Helene record, and why Pfaff would have the Whatley campaign run on it. Along the way he took on the week’s AI scare, gas prices and the Iran timeline, and the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, where The Conservative Caucus ran a full media booth.
Topics Covered
- Roy Cooper, the Effective Politician
- The Roy Cooper Helene Record and the Trump-Sign Homes
- DC Consultants and the Western North Carolina Base
- The AI Scare: If Skynet Comes, Government Builds It
- Gas Prices, Iran and the 46-Day Clock
- The Dallas Convention and the TCC Media Booth
- Key Takeaways
Roy Cooper, the Effective Politician
Boozer introduced Pfaff as a regular on the show out of Fairfax, Virginia, with a political career stretching over three decades: chief of staff for the Colorado House Republican Caucus, founder and executive director of Americans for Prosperity of Colorado, and president of the Colorado Family Institute. Then he went straight to North Carolina. Trump had come down to try to boost Whatley, the station had covered it all over the place, and Cooper, Boozer said, is pretty well known through that area.
Pfaff separated what he thinks of Cooper’s politics from what he thinks of Cooper’s skill.
“I have no political respect for Roy Cooper, but at the same time, the guy is an effective politician. He knows how to try to communicate to people. They’re mostly lies, to be candid, as with most Democrats, at least in my humble opinion. But he’s very good at doing that.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus
It was good that Whatley had Donald Trump down, Pfaff said; it is very helpful and may show up in polls coming up. But it does not close the loop. For that, Whatley has to get over into western North Carolina and talk to people who are not inclined to get excited about him, and give them a sense that he is actually going to go after the MAGA agenda.
Pfaff was specific about why the résumé is not enough. Saying “I was national RNC chairman and supported Trump” may be somewhat to Whatley’s benefit, he said, but the base does not even know if it can trust him, because he has been part of the establishment class. North Carolina, in Pfaff’s words, is not a Democrat state by any stretch of the imagination, and if Republicans have the base even minimally excited or somewhat connected, that brings them over the top statewide. Cooper taps into that and is able to get his own base excited. Whatley, Pfaff said, has to get his base excited in the right way: get in their faces, let them feel upset, and make some commitments about what he will actually do.
The Roy Cooper Helene Record and the Trump-Sign Homes
Boozer raised the Roy Cooper Helene question from what his audience has noticed: Whatley seems a little bit scared to go to the Helene-affected areas. Was that just their imagination? Pfaff said it is not, and that a lot of people there are still really upset about all of it, for good reason. He laid out two sides of the story. One is how well Republicans deal with it. The other is what they should hang around Roy Cooper’s neck — and he warned before he said it that it would sound hyperbolic.
“Democrats literally, I mean, this is going to sound hyperbolic, but they literally killed people because they did not go out and attempt to take care of people that had just a freaking Donald Trump sign on their front doorstep.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus
Pfaff’s point is that the Roy Cooper Helene record is not only a western North Carolina issue. It reaches the Republican base all over the state, which knows what happened and many of whom were running over to western North Carolina to try to help. That is why he called it still a big issue, and why he invoked the old rule that all politics is local — noting he does not know that it is a strict rule, but that there is something there worth paying attention to. He described the ad he would run.
“Put these scary pictures of what happened after Helene and put Roy Cooper’s picture superimposed upon it with some MAGA sign in front of someone’s house and someone in tears. I mean, just do it. He deserves it because he helped feed that problem.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus
Boozer added what his listeners remember: FEMA workers who were not calling on people, and homes with a Trump sign or a MAGA sign in the yard that were skipped over.
“We remember the FEMA workers that were not calling on people, and if they had a Trump sign or if they had the MAGA sign in the yard, then they were skipped over. We have proof of that.”
— Chuck Boozer, host, On Second Thought
After the break Boozer came back to it: Whatley’s message does not seem to be resonating, people lost their lives because Cooper did not do the right thing on Helene recovery, and the campaign is not using what it has in its arsenal. Pfaff said he would slap it right all over him, with commercial after commercial tagging Cooper to the disastrous scenes. He was careful about the cause. A whole lot of the damage, he said, was obviously the hurricane itself. But it was made worse by Cooper and by the Biden administration, and Cooper should be tagged to the Biden administration too. He called it appropriate, and summed up the man in one line.
“Roy Cooper, who does the politician thing, doesn’t do the serving people thing.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus
DC Consultants and the Western North Carolina Base
Pfaff said he does not pretend to know North Carolina well, since he never lived there, but he named his connections: he came to Christ in Tennessee at a private high school founded by a North Carolinian, and he is from Indianapolis, home of a little race, where he would still call Indiana the racing capital of the world with North Carolina a very close second because of NASCAR. With that, he said, he understands what these people are frustrated with.
His diagnosis of the Whatley campaign was about who is running it.
“Michael Whatley’s main problem is that he is having DC consultants run his race. Those are the people he’s always relied on, and he ran right to them rather than just having a normal campaign that Americans like.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus
He widened it to the party: Republicans run consultant campaigns, they do not tend to run people campaigns, and that, in his opinion, is why candidates get these missteps. It is the same fence-mending argument he made to Boozer the week before, in the Whatley Senate race interview from the Dallas convention: Whatley has to mend bridges with the people in western North Carolina.
A Race on the TCC Target List
Boozer asked whether Pfaff would come down and campaign in North Carolina. Pfaff said he should want to: it is a race on The Conservative Caucus target list of districts where the organization is doing things. The two agreed to talk offline about it.
The AI Scare: If Skynet Comes, Government Builds It
With two minutes left before the break, Boozer turned to what he called the boogeyman the Democrats, and even some Republicans, are stirring up: AI. That week a whistleblower had appeared on CNN, and former President Barack Obama had chimed in. To Boozer it looked like an effort to make AI the center of everything. Pfaff said it is almost entirely concocted — not that there are no risks at all, he added, but that is true of any technology and is not unique to AI.
“There are a lot of people trying to tell us that we’re right in the middle of the Terminator movie, and we’re not. If Skynet is created, it will never be created by the AI companies on their own. It will be created by government.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus
The danger he named is not machines building robots to destroy humans, as in the movie. It is government actors weaponizing AI to go after people, as he said they are already doing to some degree in China. That is the risk, in his account, and it is the same argument TCC laid out in why AI doomerism is really about government control.
He came back to it at the end of the interview with a term from the tech industry: fear, uncertainty and doubt, known as FUD, particularly in the blockchain world. The AI fear, he said, was thrown out as a political matter because Democrats have nothing to run on at all except the Biden record, which they are avoiding. They are trying to overwhelm the positives of the GOP convention.
Gas Prices, Iran and the 46-Day Clock
Boozer said people in the area were paying well over $4.25 a gallon for regular and over $6 for diesel. He noted these are not record highs — prices were higher under the Biden and Obama administrations — but people have short memories, and the President keeps promising prices will fall while the timeline keeps moving. Was Trump out of touch?
Pfaff said no. He tied the price of gas to the war.
“When the Iran conflict gets to some settled position, whether we withdraw troops from the area or not, gas prices are precipitously going down. They already did that when the MOU was announced.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus
The settled position does not have to mean the U.S. is out of any engagement with Iran of any sort, he said. But he would not count on prices dropping sharply before the election. With about 46 days left, something dramatic would have to take place shortly. Trump, in Pfaff’s view, is trying to get something done that he thinks is important, whether that has the proper political implications or not.
Asked whether Trump knew what he was getting into, Pfaff said he cannot say whether the President knew how long it would last, and that no one should be unwise enough to think a war is clean enough to predict an end date. He does think Trump knew the risks. Trump is very New York folksy, he said, but people forget he is not a dumb guy. Pfaff pointed to how Trump has transformed Silicon Valley, and to the All In podcast: apart from Jason Calacanis, whom he counted among their negatives, the hosts are really smart, great businessmen, and on board because they know Trump is smart.
“He’s a guy, for good or for bad, politically, he’s a guy that says, listen, if I’ve got to do something, I’m going to do it. I’ll take the consequences and I’ll try to work it and figure out how to make that work. But if it’s right, I got to do it.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus
That, Pfaff said, is unlike a lot of past presidents who did a lot of wrong things, including kicking the can completely down the road again and again.
The Dallas Convention and the TCC Media Booth
Boozer said he thought holding a Republican midterm convention was a great idea, and asked how Pfaff thought it went the week before in Dallas. Pfaff called it a fantastic event: well-focused and energetic, with a lot of people. The Conservative Caucus had a full-fledged media booth and was there in full force. It got noticed, and the people who came in to talk were energized themselves. TCC had been running highlights of its interviews and of convention speeches live on all its channels the night before, and planned to keep doing it through the weekend.
His one exception was the same one he raised from Dallas: the promise to give $5,000 to every American. This time he added a read on the motive — he actually thinks Trump is poking Democrats in the eye with it, because they give away much worse stuff.
From there he tied the convention to the stakes. Trump, he said, needs to blanket the country between now and Election Day making a case for himself, because in a sense he is running for president again.
“So we got to hold the House and Senate if at all possible. I think it’s still possible, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus
If Democrats take control, he said, Trump’s presidency will be hampered in certain ways, just like it was in his first administration, even though he will keep working it. For North Carolina, in Pfaff’s view, the Roy Cooper Helene record is the argument that reaches the Republican base across the state, not only the Helene-affected counties. Boozer closed by asking what listeners follow at the Caucus — teachings, thoughts, philosophies. Pfaff offered “prognostications,” and pointed listeners to theconservativecaucus.com, where all of TCC’s convention coverage is posted.
Key Takeaways
- Cooper is an effective politician – Pfaff has no political respect for Roy Cooper but calls him effective and very good at communicating, and says he knows how to get his base excited.
- The Roy Cooper Helene record should be the campaign – Pfaff would run commercial after commercial tying Cooper to the disaster scenes and to the Biden administration, saying the hurricane damage was made worse by both.
- Whatley’s problem is his consultants – Pfaff says DC consultants are running Whatley’s race, that Republicans run consultant campaigns instead of people campaigns, and that Whatley has to earn the trust of a base that sees him as establishment.
- The AI scare is almost entirely concocted – AI carries risks like any technology, but if Skynet is created it will be created by government, not the AI companies. Pfaff calls the fear campaign political FUD from Democrats with nothing to run on.
- Gas prices follow Iran – Prices fell when the MOU was announced and will drop sharply when the conflict reaches a settled position, but Pfaff would not count on it before the election, about 46 days away.
- Hold the House and Senate – Pfaff called the Dallas convention fantastic, said Trump should blanket the country until Election Day, and said holding both chambers is still possible with a lot of work left.
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The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.
Originally broadcast Sep 18, 2026 on On Second Thought with Chuck Boozer, WHKY, Hickory NC.
Peter J. Thomas is a veteran conservative political strategist and seasoned policy expert dedicated to upholding the principles of the Constitution and democracy. As a founder and the chairman of the Conservative Caucus, he has played a pivotal role in promoting and shaping the conservative agenda across the nation for over half a century.