GREENSBORO — Just after noon in front of the manufacturing building at Guilford Technical Community College, first-year student Khniya Hames recited her lines. “She has remained dedicated to education and public service throughout her life. … She also served in North Carolina’s House of Representatives. …” Hames gazed toward the crystal-clear sky as she tried to remember factoids about Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt.
A gaggle of school administrators, local TV reporters, students and police officers loitered around the glass-walled lobby of the building, awaiting the arrival of Hunt.
Not many big names come through Jamestown.
Even if the manufacturing students — identified by their matching green polo shirts — didn’t quite know who Hunt was before the announcement of her visit, it still meant something that she was coming to see them.
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Two weeks earlier, Hunt rolled out her policy agenda called “Future-Ready North Carolina” in which she committed to investing in child care and workforce development. Supporting community colleges is part of that plan, and a tour of all 58 in North Carolina was subsequently announced.
This appearance was the second stop.
At 12:30 p.m., a black SUV rolled up to the building. Two young staffers popped out and hustled to the passenger side to open the door for the lieutenant governor.
Hunt poked her head out of the vehicle, smiled then hopped to the curb.
By now, she’s used to traveling all across the state for speaking engagements. For Hunt, campaigning doesn’t end after November. It’s part of the job.
Day in the life
Hunt, like her father who served as North Carolina’s governor for a record 16 years, elevated her political standing by winning the lieutenant governorship. But being second-in-command to the state’s highest office doesn’t come with the sort of power that the title implies.
Historically, politicians have treated the position as a launching pad for higher ambitions — but with mixed success. It would surprise nobody if Hunt were to one day continue that tradition. For now, she said she’s committed to doing her job well and restoring normalcy to the office most recently occupied by one of the state’s most notorious politicians.
Hunt, 59, barely clears 5-feet tall. When not surrounded by staffers and police escorts, her appearance might easily go unnoticed. She talks with a bouncy southern lilt — inherited from rural Wilson County which she called home for many years.
After exchanging pleasantries with administrators, the green polo-wearing students led a tour of the facilities, showing off factory equipment so complex not even they knew how to explain all of it.
“What’s this machine for?” Hunt asked.
“Um, we haven’t gotten to that unit yet,” one student responded.
The tour ended at an area in the warehouse set up with folding chairs and a podium. Hames was tasked with introducing the lieutenant governor. She was just as small as Hunt, and her head peeked over the podium as she struggled to conjure up the lines she had practiced an hour before.
Hunt graciously took the podium and launched into a quick speech about how North Carolina’s economy was dependent on the quality of its workforce, which in turn was reliant on the success of community colleges like Guilford Technical.
Then she answered a few questions from the media before being taken back to the SUV.
On to the next stop.
Hunt won’t be like the last guy
For someone serving in statewide office for the first time, who only ventured into politics less than a decade ago, Hunt operates with the efficiency of a seasoned incumbent. For that, she can thank her dad — a Democratic icon of North Carolina politics.
Jim Hunt served longer than any other governor in state history with two non-consecutive eight-year stints in the Executive Mansion.
Hunt — a farmer from the inner coastal plain with progressive sensibilities — was a bridge between the old and new of the North Carolina Democratic Party. He made public education a major focus of his tenure, and he lured tech enterprises here as North Carolina worked to modernize its economy.
Now, the younger Hunt is a leading contender to be the next Democrat to carry that legacy into a new generation of Old North State politics.
“I think I have the best father in the entire world,” Hunt said. “He was definitely one of the best governors the state has ever had — or the country. So I would love to be able to follow in his footsteps, which I’m doing somewhat right now. And to be able to do things half as well as he did them would make me extremely happy.”
Hunt’s image and presentation is not a new one, but it does provide a stark contrast to a rising tide of MAGA-centric conservative politics. Divisive Republican candidates littered the ballot in November’s statewide election.
The most extreme of them, superintendent of public instruction candidate Michelle Morrow and gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson (then serving as lieutenant governor), lost handily to mainstream Democrats.
Hunt is a far cry from the booming presence of her predecessor — and she embraces it.
“I’m here to be the opposite of someone who is polarizing,” Hunt said. “I want to build bridges instead of burning them. I want to make sure people feel heard whether they are Republican, Democrat or unaffiliated.”
Robinson, with his inflammatory rhetoric and penchant for viral moments on social media, raised the public awareness of the lieutenant governorship to a level not seen in recent memory. He had an innate ability to capture the attention of any room, often with the demeanor of a fire-and-brimstone preacher.
Before Robinson, there was little reason for the average state resident to be concerned with the comings and goings of the lieutenant governor.
In fact, North Carolina’s governor is the weakest in the nation in terms of power. So it tracks that the second-in-command has little to do other than sit on a few appointed boards and preside over the state Senate — two jobs that Robinson infamously shirked during his four years.
Hunt has presided over the Senate during almost every session this year and is on pace to surpass Robinson’s total attendance within the next six months, according to her staff.
In his last few years as lieutenant governor, finding Robinson in the Senate chamber was like seeing a shooting star.
“When Mark Robinson was here, (the Senate) session would end and we’d all chase after him like a flock trying to talk to him,” one member of the legislative press corps explained. “But he’d be out the door before any of us could get him.”
Robinson saw little value in his ex officio role as president of the Senate. Republicans already held a supermajority in the chamber, and he could only vote in the case of a very unlikely tie.
As journalists and politicos know, the lieutenant governorship is important for one thing: offering politicians a pathway to the highest office in the state. The office’s short list of duties gives its holders nearly unbridled access to the bully pulpit, allowing them to campaign (without really campaigning) four years ahead of the next big election.
This strategy, however, does not always work in practice.
Last November, Robinson became the latest in a long list of lieutenant governors who lost their bid for the top job.
The last one to mount a winning gubernatorial campaign was Bev Purdue in 2008.
Before Purdue, it happened back in 1992.
The candidate’s name was Jim Hunt.
All in the family
Jim Hunt was a powerhouse when it came to campaigning. He won five statewide general elections and supported many more candidates’ successful bids for office.
Ahead of the 2018 elections, at 80 years old, he gave his most personal endorsement yet.
That’s when his daughter finally threw her hat in the ring for elected office, running to unseat Republican Bill Brawley in the state House of Representatives. Brawley was a four-term incumbent in a Mecklenburg County district that Donald Trump had won by nine percentage points in 2016.
Flipping that seat was no sure thing.
The younger Hunt had been asked “many times” to run for office, but she had always resisted while she still had two kids to raise at home. She remembers her time living in the Executive Mansion as a child, catching up with her dad only when he took a break to share a meal with his family.
“I saw the way my father worked so incredibly hard,” she recalled. “I mean, he would come home for supper and then he would go back to work.”
Hunt already had a busy professional life, too, which included a private law practice, her own college-search consulting business and positions on the boards of several education-related nonprofits.
But the call to run for office came once again.
“This time my children were out of the house, and I didn’t really have a good reason like that,” she said. “So I agreed to do it, and that was one of the hardest races that I hopefully will ever run.”
Too close to call
Hunt seemed exhausted just thinking back to that campaign.
From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., she called voters in the district. From 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., she walked the neighborhoods trying to drum up support.
“Eventually, people stopped hanging up the phone on me,” she said with a laugh.
Sometimes her parents would make calls on her behalf or join her as she canvassed. The elder Hunt’s Rolodex came in handy for fundraising — the race was one of the most expensive in the state legislature that year.
The results on Election Night were too close to call.
Three days later, the results finally came. Hunt narrowly pulled ahead after mail-in ballots were counted.
A subsequent recount confirmed her victory by a razor-thin 68 votes.
For Hunt, ‘it is what it is’
Hunt quickly climbed the ladder of state politics.
She won a second term in the House during 2020, defeating Brawley again — this time with a decisive margin.
She was elected to the state Senate in 2022, replacing another rising star in Democrat Jeff Jackson, who abandoned the seat to run for the U.S. House of Representatives.
But it was not a good time to be a Democrat in the state legislature. Republicans have dominated both chambers for more than decade, and in 2023 they consolidated a veto-proof supermajority that gave them unchecked ability to pass bills into law.
While campaigning for lieutenant governor, Hunt said that she couldn’t wait to leave the General Assembly.
Ironically, Hunt now presides over the Senate several times a week, only able to watch and maintain decorum as Republicans continue to push through controversial bills. Recently, she presided over a session during which senators passed a bill eliminating restrictions on concealed-carry firearms despite the impassioned pleas of the Democratic minority.
“Of course, I have very strong feelings about the bills that we are passing,” Hunt said. “But I cannot let that get in the way of doing exactly what I’m supposed to do, which is to preside over the Senate.
“I would love to be presiding over a Senate that is not a superminority of my party, but it is what it is. And I’m just there to do the job to the best of my ability.”
There is some comfort for Hunt in the fact that Democrats hold the state’s two highest offices for the first time in 12 years. Unlike the previous administration, Gov. Josh Stein doesn’t have to worry about what his second-in-command might be doing each time he leaves the state.
“There’s a trust factor that is not there when you’re of different parties,” Hunt said.
But neither Hunt nor Stein have much sway when it comes to passing the Democrats’ policy agenda into law.
The solution for Stein has been to work across the aisle on issues some Republicans can get behind, like workforce development and childcare.
There’s been a clear shift in messaging since Stein and Hunt took office in January. They’ve presented themselves as pro-business moderates, and they talk up the virtues of working with Republicans in the General Assembly.
Hunt can be a mouthpiece for those bipartisan matters through her numerous public appearances while also influencing policy through her positions on the State Board of Education and Community College Board.
Earlier this month, Stein named her co-chair of a new childcare task force alongside one of her former Senate colleagues, Jim Burgin (R-Harnett). One of their goals is to open childcare centers at all 58 community colleges across the state.
“I’m excited to work with her,” Burgin said. “She and I came in as freshmen together, so I’ve known her, and, of course, I knew her a little bit before that. I knew her dad and mom.”
Stein praised the two while talking about the task force during an event at Forsyth Technical Community College earlier this week. Standing next to him was state Sen. Eddie Settle, a Republican who earlier lamented the fact that North Carolina had dropped from first to second in CNBC’s annual “Best States for Business” ranking.
It was perhaps a preview of the type of rhetoric Democrats may take as they work to hold onto their increasingly threatened power in this purple state.
“I am very interested in making sure North Carolina is in the best economic shape it can be in, that people have successful lives, that they have all the money they need to raise their families, and to do that we first have to have a place to put our children when we go to work,” Hunt said.
“If people can’t go to work, we are not going to have a successful economy, and then we are not going to be one of the best states in the nation for business.”
It’s the type of line one wouldn’t be surprised to hear at a campaign rally.
In the not so distant future, that may very well be the case.
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