The ‘Surreal’ World of Political Spouses

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North Carolina’s first lady is first to admit she often fails at the fine art of flitting. 

In political parlance, to flit is to sweep cordially from one constituent to another, spending no more than a minute with each while still making all feel valued. 

“I tend to get wrapped up in a conversation and end up talking to the same person in a corner,” Anna Stein told me. “I’m a bad flitter. Josh teases me about it.” 

Josh would be her husband, the 76th governor of North Carolina. And before that the state’s attorney general for eight years. And before that a state senator for seven. And way back in the 1990s, an ambitious young man who caught Anna’s eye when they both interned at the North Carolina Department of Justice. 

Flitting is one of many social skills the spouses of serious politicians are expected to master. Other key stratagems include managing alcohol at fundraising events. If one feels the need to indulge, the collective wisdom goes, the correct choice is a single glass of white wine because the alcohol level is relatively low. 

Plus, should standard event elbow-rubbing result in a spill, a splash of red wine is not the kind of lasting impression one wants to leave.

But this is the easy stuff, the tips and tricks of blending into a picture-perfect version of politics. Away from the cameras, behind the carefully constructed scenes, loom the most intense stresses: making a lopsided relationship work, carving out one’s own identity, and coping with mounting partisan invective that has, at times, included fear of physical harm. 

“You cede control of your life trajectory.”

N.C. First Lady Anna Stein

Last spring, Sen. Thom Tillis shared a ghoulish compilation of concerning voicemails. Both Jefferson Griffin and Allison Riggs reported receiving threats during their long legal fight for a seat on the state Supreme Court. As the proceedings dragged on, a lawyer for Griffin announced that the candidate’s wife had delivered the couple’s baby “prematurely at just 23 weeks” and that the child had died. The lawyer asked the public to respect the family’s privacy, but later noted the threats only escalated. 

Sometimes the harassment ends in violence. 

In April 2025, an attacker used Molotov cocktails to set ablaze the executive residence of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who was asleep inside with his family; they escaped unharmed but shaken. In June, an assailant with a political hit list shot and killed Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her North Carolina-raised husband, Mark.

“Political spouses are critically important,” said Matt Mercer, communications director with the NC Republican Party. “But it’s a test of faith and love. And often, it’s not fun.”

On the bright sun porch on the east side of the Executive Mansion, Stein, an attorney and public health specialist before becoming a full-time first lady, folds her arms over her midnight blue blazer. 

After her husband’s swearing in, she launched three initiatives: advocating for a smoother path to reintegration for formerly incarcerated people, championing small-town tourism, and destigmatizing mental illness and substance use disorders. 

In 2025, she traveled to 40 counties to promote these causes, with an agenda that included touring adult correction facilities and hang gliding at Jockey’s Ridge State Park.

Still, for all her proficiency and accomplishments, there are times she’s felt “very alone.” 

“I was not planning for this,” she said, glancing out the window into the mansion’s gardens, surrounded by a high brick wall. “You cede control of your life trajectory … It can be quite surreal.” 

‘Political Dorks’

The doorway to this surreal world peels open when a significant other decides to run for office. For me, that meant my wife, Lucy Inman, having a go at the state Court of Appeals in 2014—a successful go, as it turned out.

This desire to run may come as a surprise to some spouses. It may be delightful, or it may feel akin to discovering their partner wants to move to a sweltering island inhabited by melon-sized mosquitos. But more often, the possibility of some sort of public life is present early on in a relationship. Perhaps explicitly, perhaps as a vague, flitting notion. 

“When I first met Thom in 1986,” said Susan Tillis, “he told me one day he’d be in public service.” Then she laughed, “As soon as I heard that, I should have run.”

The question of chasing a political career as a team is a marriage proposal in miniature. Will you say “I do” to the vicissitudes of politics? Or will you say, “I don’t” and either kill the idea or set firm boundaries? 

Politics is inherently unstable. Circumstances change, positions shift. Failure to hash out a spouse’s role can leave a politician even more off-balance. 

“All campaigns are screwed up, they’re just screwed up in different ways,” Mercer said. “And the ones screwed up the worst start by being screwed up at home.”

Coloring the initial negotiation is the powerful emotion that bundled a couple together in the first place. “If you love your spouse, you want to support your spouse,” Anna Stein said. “And there are the marital vows, right? ‘For better or worse’?”

Once a significant other becomes a candidate, the couple morphs into a tangle of tentacles—the original twosome plus consultants, operatives, and anyone else with standing who pipes in with an opinion or request.

Republican consultant Jonathan Felts staffed First Lady Laura Bush during her fundraising and promotional swings through North Carolina during her husband’s second term, and has since aided GOP candidates across the state. He goes into consulting with a sort of spousal assessment checklist: 

1. If the spouse is willing and able, figure out how to optimally put them to work. This could mean attending events as an encouraging presence, networking ninja and/or speaker as well as making fundraising calls, door-knocking, and other campaign chores. 
2. If the spouse is reluctant or perpetually peeved or could otherwise be a liability, figure out how to manage the issue. 
3. Either way, make sure that the campaign team fully understands that “a happy spouse goes a long way toward a happy candidate.” 

“We’re asking spouses not only to put themselves out there,” he said, “but also to put their faith in a political dork like me that there’s no way in the world they’d ever deal with other than because of the campaign.” 

Felts has found himself advising on wardrobe selection (though he admits he’s no fashion plate), and fetching a candidate’s wife and kids from an airport after a cross-country flight that left the family frazzled and fussy. A favorite bit of campaign lore passed along from a fellow consultant involves the making of a TV spot. While the camera captured a couple strolling hand in hand from a distance, a hot mic caught the disgruntled wife grumbling: “You promised me I wouldn’t have to do this!” 

“A spouse is a wild card in a campaign,” said Maggie Barlow, a Democratic consultant with Maven Strategies. “And they’re unique. They’re laying their head down on the pillow with the candidate. You want that person to be supportive, to be someone the candidate can go home to after a tough day and be truly at ease.”

The spouse tends to regard all this with fluctuating degrees of forbearance. I sometimes felt like our sad-eyed family hound when a pet cat joined the household. At other moments, I was a bouncy bird-dog eager to hunt.

“As a spouse,” Stein said, “I tread lightly; I keep my nose out of things. Because of that, staff knows that when I do express a desire that things go a certain way, I mean it. That’s what I hope.”

For the winning campaigns, when the stumping is over, the trials are just beginning. An early challenge can be keeping the triumphant pol grounded. 

“There’s a thing I call the Freshman 50,” Felts said. “With all the attention, new candidates assume their IQ has risen 50 points.”

Stein chuckled when I shared this theory. “If you don’t have someone who loves and respects you to take the hot air out, that’s a problem,” she said. “You have to find a way to keep your relationship even.”

The Window Closed

On her 38th anniversary last summer, Susan Tillis was at the beach. Her husband was not.

Though the U.S. Senate was in recess, Thom Tillis remained in Washington D.C., navigating the biggest typhoon of his decades-long political career. He was at odds with President Trump over parts of his Big Beautiful Bill. 

Susan wasn’t alone. Her children and grandchildren bustled about the beach house. She and Thom had spent plenty of anniversaries apart since he had jumped from the corporate fast track to the political roller coaster. But this one felt particularly lonesome. 

And then a text dinged in. It was her husband, saying that perhaps the couple’s epic adventure in politics would end soon. Very soon. He would sleep on it. He told his wife he loved her. 

The next day, Sunday, June 29, Thom Tillis announced he would not seek a third term. “I was sad when it happened,” Susan Tillis said, talking over Zoom as a Bernedoodle named Theo occasionally barked in the background. “But now, we are both just so happy.”

Tillis’ first exposure to the fray came in 2003 with her husband’s run for the Mecklenburg County board of commissioners. While she had never been particularly partisan, the people-centric pulse of politicking suited her. It was not unlike her career as a real estate agent or her stretch as a Sunday school teacher, PTA volunteer, and Girl Scout leader.

“We’re asking spouses not only to put themselves out there, but also to put their faith in a political dork like me.” 

Jonathan Felts, Republican political consultant

When, in 2014, her husband made the leap from speaker of the state House to candidate for the U.S. Senate, his wife campaigned across the state, too—appearing both by his side (a minimum requirement for a spouse on active-duty) and on her own (a more advanced mission). 

“Tillis’ wife fires up GOP women,” read a headline in the Asheville Citizen-Times during the general election. She even proved adept at dealing with her tracker, an operative equipped with a camera sent by a rival campaign in the hope of scoring a gotcha moment. At one event, Susan Tillis gave a generic, two-minute speech, then sat down. Once the tracker left, she hopped back onstage for a more candid 20-minute talk. 

Together, the Tillises and their campaign team toppled incumbent Kay Hagan, who had previously deposed Elizabeth Dole, North Carolina’s most famous spouse-turned-elected powerhouse. 

In Washington, Susan Tillis embraced the opportunities afforded to political plus-ones, including bipartisan field trips. On one such excursion to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, she helped cook meals for wounded soldiers alongside Jill Biden, then the country’s Second Lady. The experience inspired Tillis to create a foundation, Red, White & Bundled, which continues to support North Carolina’s military families. 

“There’s no playbook” for spouses in D.C., she said. But early on she wanted to work “in a bipartisan way to make a difference.” And then the window for kumbayah closed. 

“When Thom was first elected, the country was in a different place,” she said. “The first half of his time in the Senate was great. The second half has been a lot of looking over my shoulder … I’m so glad we’re not running.”

With Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025, Thom Tillis’ positions earned him the usual ire of progressives but also inflamed MAGA loyalists. Threats blazed in, Susan Tillis said, pointing to one particular fire accelerant: “Social media has driven up the temperature on both sides of the aisle.”

Endless Trolling

For spouses, social media can be a madding morass. It promises connection but often delivers vitriol. Each spouse has to decide if and how they want to deal with it. One told me he was elated when a consultant advised him to stay off it all together.

Others seem perfectly well-adjusted. Republican U.S. Rep. Pat Harrigan of Hickory and Democratic state Attorney General Jeff Jackson may be political opposites, but their wives—Rocky and Marisa, respectively—both sparkle on Instagram. Their feeds feature charming children, White House visits, and their mates on and off duty.

Perhaps no spouse uses social media as entertainingly or intriguingly as Kristin Cooper, whose husband, Roy, a former two-term governor, is running for U.S. Senate. 

In peppery prose that has included the word “whackdoodle,” the former first lady posts her support for flu shots and Raleigh’s No Kings rallies. She bemoans pumpkin spice candy and the state of college football.

Cooper declined interview requests. But Mercer, the Republican communications operative, speculates there could be a strategic benefit to the online exploits. 

“People want authenticity, and she seems very candid,” he said. “If voters feel like they know everything there is to know about Roy Cooper at this point, Kristin Cooper could be more interesting and colorful. And that could appeal to the base.” 

Even for spouses who avoid online confrontations, trolling remains a reality.

Susan Tillis recalled recently landing at Reagan Washington National Airport when a fellow passenger recognized her husband. 

“This person got up and followed us all the way out of the airport,” she said, “making comments the whole time on all the things she thought he should do differently … People have no boundaries.”

“The first half of his time in the Senate was great. The second half has been a lot of looking over my shoulder.”

Susan Tillis, wife of U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis

Often the spouse takes such abuse harder than the politician. “Thom just kept walking, looking straight ahead, unfazed,” she said. “He has a much thicker skin.” 

Now, she’s preparing to have her husband back full time. To travel together. To celebrate anniversaries together. But already, there’s talk Thom Tillis will return to the scrum to run for governor in 2028. 

Tillis brushes off chatter about her husband’s political future, but not the country’s. 

“I’d like to go back to a quieter time when leaders led and didn’t put personality first and do so much name-calling,” she said, softly and deliberately, as if offering up a private prayer. “But I’m not optimistic.” 

A Knock at the Door

Long before his name flashed across news reports in 2024, Mark Hortman was an apolitical theater kid growing up in North Raleigh. He got along well with most everyone and could usually diffuse a conflict with well-chosen words. 

After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill in the early 1990s, Mark worked for IBM in Washington, D.C. He was volunteering with a nonprofit mentoring low-income kids when he met Melissa Haluptzok, who’d been assigned the same mentee. 

Three months later, they were engaged. The couple settled in Melissa’s home turf, Minneapolis. By 2004, she’d been elected a Democratic member of the state’s House of Representatives.

“He thought it was so great that she had these hopes and dreams,” said Mark’s sister, Lisa Hortman Bean, who lives in Greensboro. “He adored Melissa and thought she was doing good work.” 

But in October 2024, Mark turned to his sister with a look that chilled her. They were on vacation in mountainous Ashe County, sitting around a blazing fire pit. The New River rolled by as indie-folk band Caamp burbled on the stereo. 

“He looked scared,” she said. “He wanted Melissa to think about getting out of politics. He said he was terrified for his family’s safety. He said the climate had changed. For Mark to say something like that—he was never one to exaggerate.” 

The siblings talked about staying the course and being careful. “If I could go back, I would say, ‘Run!’” Bean said. “But we couldn’t have known. You can’t live your life in fear.”

Last June 14, at around 3:30 a.m., a man dressed as a police officer knocked on the Hortmans’ door in Minneapolis. He was not a police officer. In short order, he shot and killed Mark and Melissa as well as their Golden Retriever, Gilbert. When actual law enforcement eventually captured the assailant, they found Melissa’s name on a list of advocates and politicians who support abortion rights in his car.

Bean was sitting on the same outdoor deck where Mark had revealed his creeping fears when she heard the news. Now, she wipes away tears, her easy southern cadence faltering, personifying for the moment all the pain families in politics endure. 

“You give up a piece of your soul” when you marry a politician, she said, as well as more tangible things. Mark had dreamed of opening a distillery, but deferred to Melissa’s career. Still, even after her brother made such sacrifices, Bean noted, some media coverage of the murders left out any details of his life or identified him only as Melissa’s spouse or not at all.

“Mark didn’t want to be in politics,” she said. “Melissa consulted him, but the families, they don’t choose to be in politics. They choose to be with a person who has chosen to be in politics.” 

An Aide Beckons

“Is it worth it?” 

Anna Stein repeated the question I’d just put to her. She looked away for a moment, then locked into me and answered firmly, “You have to say yes. So many people put their lives on the line for what they believe—the police, highway patrol, first responders, members of the military. Who would we be to say no? And I’m very interested in helping to make the world a better place.”

When Stein and her husband just want to relax and catch up, they’ll watch a streaming series, including Only Murders in the Building, about true crime nuts in Manhattan, and Landman, about oil roughnecks and billionaires in Texas. And when she wants the reinforcement of community, she turns to the National Governors Association’s First Spouses program and the Sir Walter Cabinet in North Carolina. 

Since 1919, the nonpartisan group has brought together executive, legislative, and judicial branch spouses for lunches, civic engagement, lectures on subjects from history to ecology, and the occasional fashion show featuring members. 

“We don’t sit and talk about being political spouses,” said Stein. “But it is helpful to be around people who understand what you’re dealing with and develop friendships with people in a similar position.” 

With the winter sun retreating in a pale blue sky, she stood, took a deep breath and added with evident relief, “I think this is my last appointment of the day.”

But the moment Stein exited the sun porch, she encountered the governor in the parlor, posing for a photo with a guest. An aide beckoned her. She embraced the visitor and—far from flitting—was soon immersed in another conversation.