EXCLUSIVE — Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) will run for a second term in the Senate in 2028, an early announcement that spares Republicans an open seat in purple North Carolina.
“That’s the plan. Absolutely, I’m in,” Budd, 55, told the Washington Examiner at the Capitol on Tuesday. “This is an awesome state. It’s an honor to be able to represent it, and I look forward to continuing.”
Budd’s decision follows the striking defeat of Republicans up and down the ballot in North Carolina last week. Democrats not only flipped the seat of retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), but also defeated at least five House Republicans.
Those losses were not isolated to North Carolina. Democrats captured seven Senate seats nationally, a number that could rise to nine with two races yet to be called.
Going forward, Budd’s race will be one of the most expensive in 2028 and will be a test of whether Democrats can expand their foothold in the South after winning seats in South Carolina and possibly Mississippi.
In the interview, Budd said it was too soon to say what the national environment will look like for Republicans, who struggled last Tuesday to overcome voter anger over the war in Iran and its impact on energy costs.
Two years earlier, President Donald Trump carried the election in a commanding win that helped deliver the Senate majority and unified control of Washington to Republicans.
“2026 obviously wasn’t 2024, and 2028 ain’t going to be 2026,” said Budd, who was elected to the Senate in 2022 after three terms in the House. His 3-point win that year kept the seat, held by Richard Burr for almost two decades, in Republican hands.
“North Carolina is a state that you have to continually earn, and nobody’s ever entitled to be elected in North Carolina,” said Budd. “You have to constantly make your case.”
Budd, who cuts a relatively low profile in the Senate, has established himself as a reliable Republican vote, although he’s occasionally broken with the Trump White House on priorities such as disaster relief funding.
In diagnosing what happened in North Carolina last week, Budd blamed the extent of their losses on national Republicans’ decision to pull funding for Michael Whatley, their Senate nominee, late in the cycle.
“I mean, when air cover gets pulled — you know, first of all, I’m not a campaign expert, right? I just run, try to represent the folks back home,” he said. “But when you pull that much money out to try to triage another state … it has a drastic downballot effect.”
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Whatley ultimately lost his Senate race to former Gov. Roy Cooper by almost 20 points.
Two years from now, Republicans will be navigating a map that includes GOP-held seats in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Alaska, among others. Democrats, who will control as many as 56 seats in the new Congress, will be on defense in battlegrounds such as Georgia, Ohio, and Arizona.