The North Carolina lawmaker planned a campaign launch reception and fundraiser Wednesday evening in Washington, D.C., where at least 20 Republican senators will join him as he seeks to defend one of the most competitive seats of the 2026 election cycle.

However, Tillis’s past votes on key cultural matters, such as enshrining protections for gay marriage and immigration, led the North Carolina GOP to censure him, and he is likely to face a primary challenge.

Tillis, though, has backed his record and remains confident that he will convince North Carolinians to stand by him.

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“I think we’ve got a good story to tell and results that I’m proud of,” Tillis told the Washington Examiner.

Political experts, though, warned that grassroots Republicans aren’t going to easily roll over after spending years viewing Tillis with suspicion.

“It’s gonna be complicated even before we get (to a general election) because he’s got to get through a primary first, and the so-called grassroots of the Republican Party has made it very clear that they plan to have a significant primary challenger to him, who that is we don’t know,” said Western Carolina professor Chris Cooper.

Controversial Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R-NC) cast doubt on Tillis’s reelection bid in multiple social media posts.

“Thom is toast,” Robinson wrote on X after asking his followers if Tillis should be the nominee.

Robinson lost last month’s gubernatorial election in the Tarheel State to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein after media reports of his past comments on pornographic websites.

“Mark Robinson is damaged goods, to say the least,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “But as far as primary challenges, I wouldn’t rule anything out, per se.”

Lara Trump, President-elect Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, is among one of the contenders who could challenge Tillis in the primary. However, she has also been seen as a leading contender for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) to tap to replace Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who will likely get confirmed as the president-elect’s secretary of state.

“If she were to get Rubio’s seat, I think Tom Tillis is going to breathe a little bit of a sigh of relief because that would have been a primary challenge that would have been extraordinarily difficult to go against,” said Cooper.

A poll from Victory Insights showed Lara Trump beating Tillis in a GOP primary 65% to 11%, with 25% undecided.

Tillis’s first two Senate campaigns saw him win by less than two points. He won by just 1.8 points in 2020 and 1.7 points in 2014. His third campaign is expected to be just as close.

Should he survive a primary challenge, he could still face an even tougher battle if popular Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) decided to run for the Senate.

Cooper has not announced a Senate run, but he told a local reporter last week, “I love public service. I want to keep helping North Carolina and our country. I haven’t made that decision yet, but it’s on the table.”

The Victory Insights poll also showed in a head-to-head matchup between the two men, Cooper narrowly leads 45.1% to Tillis’s 44.1%, and 11% are undecided.

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Coleman said Donald Trump’s endorsement of Tillis would essentially end a primary challenge.

“I think that would basically make him hard to beat,” he said.

“Sen. Tillis can just about guarantee his primary victory by once again earning Trump’s endorsement, as he did early in the 2020 primary,” added David Capen, president of Capen Consulting. However, “securing that endorsement may hinge on his votes for Trump’s Cabinet nominations.”

The North Carolina senior senator appeared confident that Donald Trump would eventually back him.

“President Trump endorsed me in ‘20 I would expect he’ll endorse me again. I hope that he does,” Tillis said.

The Trump team did not respond to a request for comment on whether the president-elect backs the senator.

With certain Republicans itching to remove Tillis, much attention will be focused on whether he votes to confirm Donald Trump’s Senate nominees, including the embattled Pete Hegseth, who is up for defense secretary.

“I voted for every single Trump nominee in the prior administration,” Tillis said in reference to past support for Donald Trump. “I’ve got a great relationship with the transition team, and President Trump knows where I want things that matter most to him, and so I feel like I’ll continue to enjoy a great relationship.”

Tillis quipped that the only thing that keeps him up at night is “caffeine” rather than worry about a primary challenge or pressure to vote to confirm the president-elect’s nominees.

After losing key Senate races in Pennsylvania, Montana, and West Virginia, a Democratic path to flipping control of the Senate includes winning North Carolina, one of the top battleground states of the presidential election.

The math favors the GOP even though the party is defending 22 seats. Out of those 22 seats, only one seat, currently held by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), is in a state that Donald Trump didn’t win in 2024.

Democrats would need to win Tillis’s seat, along with Collins’s and other races in Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Florida, and Alaska, in order to flip the Senate.

The state and national Democratic Party will likely invest millions of dollars in the Senate race, given North Carolina’s status as a consistent purple state.

Other vulnerable senators up for reelection include Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Gary Peters (D-MI), Collins, and Bill Cassidy (R-LA).

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Cooper, the North Carolina professor, warned, “If Tillis [is] too far right and too far pro-Trump, that might help him in the primary, but it might hurt him in the general.”

“He’s really in a tough spot, and that every Pete Hegseth-like vote can cut both ways,” he added.

However, Coleman suggested that after a spring primary, “he does have some time there to sort of work on maybe appealing to voters in the middle” before the November election.

Marisa Schultz contributed to this report.