Jim Hunt’s Daughter Tries to Win In a New North Carolina

When Democrat Jim Hunt was elected lieutenant governor in 1972, tobacco was still the undisputed king in Eastern North Carolina. And no place was it celebrated as much as in the city of Wilson.

Festive tobacco auctions were an annual ritual in the city, not far from the farming community of Rock Ridge where Hunt grew up. Farmers and auctioneers put on their best suits for what was touted as “The World’s Greatest Tobacco Market.” For weeks, the sweet smell of flue-cured tobacco filled the town and a dozen brick warehouses. Buyers came from as far as Japan. There were parades, pig-pickins, and Tobacco Queens.

Governors and other politicians flocked to pay homage to the crop that, along with furniture and textiles, accounted for one in four jobs in the state. The golden leaf was gold, not just for Wilson but for all of North Carolina. “It was huge,” said 80-year-old Robert Boykin III. “That’s when farmers had money to spend and merchants did well.”

Today most of the tobacco warehouses are gone, replaced by direct contract sales between farmers and buyers. Only two remain. On the site of one old warehouse in the center of town stands the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park, named for the farmer who created its whimsical windmills from recycled machine parts. It’s become a showcase in a city whose economy, like that of the state, has changed dramatically.

Now Hunt’s daughter Rachel is running for lieutenant governor, the post her father won when she was 7. He would go on to dominate North Carolina politics for more than a generation, becoming the state’s first governor to serve more than one full term and the only one to serve four. He was a direct link to the progressive Democratic tradition of former governors Kerr Scott and Terry Sanford.

When the Hunt family lived in the Executive Mansion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was a rite of passage for the children to return to Wilson County each summer for what Rachel calls “a little dose of reality.” She would work in cucumber fields and curing barns, drying tobacco leaves by tying them with cotton twine to long sticks hung from rafters.

Rachel Hunt, now 58 and a state senator from Charlotte, won her primary with 70 percent of the vote and will face the winner of a May 14 runoff between Republicans Hal Weatherman and Jim O’Neill. 

In some ways, Hunt’s campaign echoes that of her father. Jim Hunt had “keys” in all 100 counties, volunteers who could organize support. So far, Rachel has keys in almost 50 counties. “We are taking as much as we can from the playbook,” she says.

Even her campaign logo is similar: a red, white, and blue North Carolina map emblazoned with her name and an oversized “H” in the middle. But a half-century after that first Hunt campaign, North Carolina’s shape is about all that hasn’t changed.

Transplants and immigrants have transformed the state, its economy and its politics. Since Hunt was first elected, North Carolina has added more than five million people—including three million since he left office in 2001. No longer do courthouse crowds and political machines determine elections. 

If his daughter wants to follow in his footsteps, she’s going to have to win over an electorate more complex—more diverse, more Republican and more polarized—than any her father ever faced.

50 Years of Newcomers

In 1972, North Carolina had just over 5 million people. Today it’s more than doubled, to 10.8 million. That’s like adding the population of Minnesota or Colorado. 

The ‘70s marked a turning point, says state demographer Michael Cline. Before then, population growth was the result of natural increase—more births than deaths. More people left the state than came to it. Not anymore.

“The trend was shifting prior to the 1970s,” Cline said, “but the 1970s were the first decade where we had more people move to the state than moved away.” 

When newcomers arrived, it was generally along two-lane roads. Interstates 26, 40, 77, and 95 were unfinished; I-85 was still a temporary corridor. They were drawn by an economy that was rapidly changing. 

“We are taking as much as we can from the playbook.”

Rachel Hunt

In Wilson County, tobacco still dominates agriculture but it’s no longer king in a local economy driven more by production of tires, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment. Across the state, the “big three” industries of the ‘70s (tobacco, textiles, and furniture) have been replaced by a more diversified economy. Finance, health care, pharmaceuticals, energy, technology, and services have become the new economic pillars.

“We are a totally different economy now than we were 50 years ago,” says Michael Walden, a former N.C. State economist. 

Like the rest of the Sun Belt, he said, North Carolina benefited from the spread of air conditioning and by the reduction in racial tension that followed the most tumultuous days of the civil rights struggle. 

People haven’t stopped coming.

Take North Carolina’s Hispanic population. In 1970, it was about 43,000, a number that would fit into Chapel Hill’s Kenan Stadium with room to spare. State officials say by 2022 it had risen to 1.1 million—or 11 percent of the population. (More than 60 percent of Hispanics in North Carolina were born in the United States.) Other immigrants have come from Asia, Africa, Europe, and around the world. Nearly 9 percent of today’s residents were born in other countries.

North Carolina’s population was nearly all white or Black in 1970; whites were about 77 percent of the population and Black residents made up 22 percent. Now the white population has fallen to 70 percent while the Black percentage has stayed the same. 

Where people live also changed. Most of the 1970 population—55 percent—lived in rural areas. Now only a third do. Jobs and opportunity have drawn rural residents, as well as migrants from other states or countries, to cities whose populations have mushroomed like their skylines.

Charlotte was North Carolina’s largest city with 240,000 people. Today it has nearly 900,000. The Wake County village of Cary had 7,400 people; now it’s the state’s seventh-largest city at around 175,000. 

In cities and suburbs, Southern drawls have made way for Yankee brogues and foreign accents. These newcomers have also helped change the electorate. The state’s 7.5 million voters are roughly split between unaffiliated, Democrat, and Republican, with unaffiliated now making up the largest share at 37 percent. (“Unaffiliated” was a category that didn’t exist until 1978.) 

“While I heard from my constituents during my time in office, I think Rachel will need to take it a step further and engage with the people even more,” Jim Hunt, who’s 86 and lives in Wilson County, said in written responses to The Assembly. “The job has changed so much—it was more administrative when I served. Now, it’s about communicating with the public all the time.”

Courting Mecklenburg Republicans

At a January forum sponsored by the Charlotte Black Voter Project, an audience member asked a pointed question: “Should someone be elected because of who their parents are?” 

“I realize that question was probably directed at me,” Rachel Hunt replied. “I am proud to be the daughter of former Gov. Hunt. … I am not running as their child.” She said she’d won in a GOP-leaning district “because I talked to Republicans and unaffiliated people at their door. So that is not because of who [my parents] are.”

The Hunt family is deeply rooted in the state Democratic Party. Jim Hunt liked to tell the story of how, at 13, he watched a giant machine pave the road to his family’s farm. It was part of Democratic Gov. Kerr Scott’s massive road-building program. “I saw the difference that a political official could make,” he once told a historian. 

As a young man, he kept an almost singular focus on politics. 

In 1960, at 23, he worked on Terry Sanford’s gubernatorial campaign. Two years later, while attending law school in Washington, he organized college campuses for the Democratic National Committee. He ultimately graduated from the UNC School of Law.

He was elected president of the state’s Young Democrats in 1967. By the time he ran for lieutenant governor in 1972, he’d inherited the statewide organization of Bert Bennett, a Winston-Salem businessman and Democratic powerhouse. Hunt was elected governor in 1976, 1980, 1992, and 1996. 

Rachel Hunt followed a different path, one that started 8,000 miles and an ocean away.

In 1964, Jim Hunt had taken his wife, Carolyn, and their two young children to Nepal, where he worked as an economic adviser for the Ford Foundation. He taught farmers modern agricultural methods and helped the government adopt long-range planning. 

Rachel was born in a missionary hospital in Kathmandu in 1965. A few months later she developed severe gastroenteritis, which left her in a condition her mother calls “touch and go.”

“The job has changed so much—it was more administrative when I served. Now, it’s about communicating with the public all the time.”

Former Gov. Jim Hunt

After Hunt was elected governor in 1976, he moved his family from Rock Ridge to Raleigh. Rachel did not have a typical childhood. She lived in the governor’s mansion through middle and high school.

At Broughton High, she’d invite friends home. “Not all of the students knew where she lived,” recalled Carolyn Hunt. She describes her daughter as an active child. “Rachel was the one who always tried to climb off something and had an injury during the holidays,” she said. “She was always very determined.”

Rachel Hunt studied English and political science at UNC-Chapel Hill and co-captained the fencing team. After graduating in 1987, she moved to northern Virginia where she volunteered with a church group at a women’s domestic violence shelter. She later volunteered on a voter registration project in Washington. 

In 1989, she started law school at the University of South Carolina. Once she had her degree, she took a job as risk manager for a hospital in Union County. There she met a doctor named Olav Nilender, whom she later married.

In Charlotte, Hunt began her own law practice specializing in domestic law. She also worked as a staff lawyer for a company that dealt with domestic disputes for 15 years. 

She then focused on raising her two children and serving on the PTA at their public schools. She also volunteered with the League of Women Voters and served as board chair of Lillian’s List, a group that aims to elect women who believe in abortion rights, and started a college counseling service.

In 2018, after Republicans had controlled the General Assembly for nearly a decade, Hunt decided to run for office herself. She said she was particularly bothered by what she and public school advocates saw as the shortchanging of public schools. “I was so upset by what the legislature was doing to my father’s legacy,” she said.

She ran against Bill Brawley, a Matthews Republican who chaired the House Finance Committee. Two years earlier, their southeast Mecklenburg district had gone to Donald Trump by 10 points. So when Hunt canvassed door-to-door at the homes of unaffiliated and Republican voters, she made a point to wear red. 

“So they wouldn’t slam the door in my face,” she said. “And it worked.” She edged Brawley by 68 votes in one of the year’s closest House races.

After winning a 2020 rematch, she jumped to the Senate in 2022. She was dismayed by strong Republican majorities in both chambers and their policies. That meant her bills, such as protecting abortion rights, expanding the number of teacher assistants, and raising the salaries of school personnel, were essentially DOA.

“I have found it incredibly frustrating to be in the minority party in this legislature,” she said. “You have all these great dreams about the great bills that are going to be passed or heard in committee. Then you get there and see what really happens. … I don’t have the 10 years some of my younger colleagues have to hang around being in the legislature.”

Rep. Jason Saine, a Republican from Lincolnton, said by invoking her father’s legacy, Rachel Hunt may not realize that the tenor of North Carolina politics is different now. 

“A lot has changed since her dad was governor,” he said. “While it may be very sentimental to think about, I don’t think it’s a realistic approach to a state that has grown so much. … Her dad had a time and place in history, but that was then.”

Political Earthquake

The year Jim Hunt was elected lieutenant governor saw the first aftershocks of a political earthquake that would reshape the South. The party realignment that began with the civil rights laws of the 1960s had accelerated with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” in 1968. Slowly but surely Republicans were making gains across the region, including North Carolina.

With Nixon’s 1972 landslide, Jim Holshouser became the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Jesse Helms, a lifelong Democrat until 1970, became North Carolina’s first Republican U.S. senator in a century. 

“Her dad had a time and place in history, but that was then.”

Rep. Jason Saine

On paper, the state was still overwhelmingly Democratic. Republicans made up less than a quarter of registered voters. But things were changing. Helms would serve for another 30 years. Republicans would win the state in 10 of the next 12 presidential elections.

What didn’t change in 1972—and wouldn’t for decades—was the General Assembly.

The lieutenant governor presides over the Senate. Even though it was controlled by his party in 1972, Hunt told biographer Gary Pearce that didn’t guarantee a warm welcome. “They didn’t really appreciate this young upstart coming in here, thirty-five or thirty-six years of age, never having been in the Senate for a day,” he said.

As more partisan lawmakers of both parties would do to future executives, Democratic senators tried to strip the new lieutenant governor of power, even taking away his office space in the General Assembly. 

Hunt fought back. With the help of grassroots organizers, who pressured lawmakers, he prevailed. But the friction with lawmakers continued, as it would for future governors and lieutenant governors of both parties—no matter who was in charge. When a Republican was elected lieutenant governor in 1988, Democrats stripped him of powers that Jim Hunt and others had enjoyed.

In 1994, in the middle of Hunt’s third term as governor, Republicans won control of the state House for the first time in the century, only to lose it four years later. But in 2010 they won both the House and the Senate. Last year a mid-session party switch in the House gave them super-majorities in both. 

If Rachel Hunt does win this year, she’ll have little of the power her father had as lieutenant governor. And she’d likely have a much more hostile legislature. 

But the post remains attractive to candidates because it’s been a launching pad to run for governor, as it was for Jim Hunt. Every lieutenant governor since Hunt has run for governor, although only Hunt and Bev Perdue won. This year, 15 candidates sought the job, which is elected separately from the governor.

Rural Roots

Since Jim Hunt was elected governor in 1976, every Democratic governor through Roy Cooper has hailed from Eastern North Carolina. They were able to win enough rural votes to put them over the top. But that’s gotten harder. 

In 2004, Democrat Mike Easley won by 13 percentage points in a year when Republican George W. Bush carried the state by the same margin. In 2020, Cooper won by just over 4 points while Donald Trump narrowly carried the state.

“I don’t think that rural voters are lost to the Democrats,” Jim Hunt said. “If they truly listen to their needs and take them seriously, there is a chance to win them over.” 

Rob Christensen, a former reporter turned historian who is writing a book about the former governor, said he was a political moderate “who was able to hold together a very wide-ranging coalition.” 

“We talk about the red-blue divide, and Hunt was able to straddle that divide,” he said. “It’s much more difficult for Rachel to do that because we’re a much more polarized society.”

Although she’s been a Charlottean for years, Rachel Hunt emphasizes her rural roots. When she spoke to Mecklenburg Democrats in March, she talked of her “childhood days in Rock Ridge, picking cucumbers and barning tobacco and witnessing my parents’ commitment to public service.”

Pearce, Hunt’s former aide-turned-biographer, said for all the changes in North Carolina, in some ways it has not changed much. 

“It still has the same bones,” Pearce says. “Despite all the growth there’s still a division between … the sort of rural conservatism and urban progressivism—sort of between a rural church in the country and Chapel Hill. In a way, she’s still dealing with that same tension between the two Carolinas that [her father] dealt with.” 

Whether Rachel Hunt can straddle that divide like her father did will likely determine whether she wins this fall. If she does, she’ll move into the lieutenant governor’s office on Blount Street in Raleigh—a block from the Executive Mansion where she once lived, and could again. 

Correction: This article originally understated the number of Hispanics living in North Carolina and their percentage of the state’s population.