Rachel Hunt seeks to build on her own legacy in Lt. Gov. race
State Sen. Rachel Hunt won her three-candidate Democratic Primary Election for lieutenant governor back in March with 70% of the vote. Cory Vaillancourt photo
It’s a name familiar to older North Carolina voters largely due to her father’s two separate eight-year terms as the state’s governor, but Mecklenburg attorney, former House representative and current Sen. Rachel Hunt’s been building her own legacy and is poised to serve as lieutenant governor in what she hopes will be a Gov. Josh Stein administration, if they can both win.
On Aug. 28, inside the tiny Jackson County Democratic Party office on Mill Street in Sylva, Hunt spoke to an enthusiastic group of volunteers and supporters surrounded by campaign yard signs — some of which read, “I’m a Hunt Democrat.”
“A ‘Hunt Democrat’ is someone who believes that government can do good for people, can make people’s lives better,” Hunt told The Smoky Mountain News. “A ‘Hunt Democrat’ is a moderate person who believes in working across party lines to get things done and that, of course, harkens back to my father’s 16 years as governor and four years as lieutenant governor.”
James B. Hunt served as lieutenant governor under Republican Gov. James Holshouser from 1973 to 1977 and then succeeded Holshouser as governor, winning two terms and serving through 1985. After Hunt mounted an unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign against incumbent Republican Jesse Helms in 1984, Hunt exited the scene for nearly a decade as Republican James G. Martin won two gubernatorial terms of his own and served from 1985 to 1993. Hunt returned, won two more terms and occupied the state’s highest office until 2001.
His daughter Rachel won her first House race in 2018, defeating Republican incumbent Bill Brawley by just 68 votes, out of more than 38,000 ballots cast.
“I did that by working incredibly hard. First of all, my kids were grown. They were out of the house. They were in college,” she said. “I did not have another job at that time because it took like 60 hours a week of work, raising money from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day and then canvassing from 4-7 p.m. every day.”
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The 2020 rematch between Hunt and Brawley wasn’t close, with Hunt topping Brawley by almost 10 points. Although Hunt said her district had changed somewhat, it still took a lot of work and perhaps demonstrated the advantage of being a self-proclaimed moderate who could talk to voters of all political persuasions.
“In the first one I had to win by going to Republican and unaffiliated households, and in the second one there were more Democrats and more unaffiliated folks,” she said.
Hunt prevailed in her 2022 Senate campaign over Republican Cheryl Russo with 54.96% of the vote in a district that had performed at 50.1% Democrat and 47.1% Republican from 2016 to 2022. It ended up being another nearly 10-point win.
The thing that tied all three campaigns together, she said, was the tremendous amount of work, but that pales in comparison to running her statewide campaign for lieutenant governor, a role that comes with very little formal power.
Current Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson isn’t Hunt’s opponent; Robinson is running for governor against Stein, but Robinson’s performance in the role over the past four years has cast a long shadow over Hunt and Republican nominee Hal Weatherman, who The Smoky Mountain News interviewed shortly after he announced his candidacy in March 2023.
One of the places the lieutenant governor does wield some power is in the state’s educational spaces. North Carolina’s state treasurer, superintendent of public instruction and lieutenant governor all serve on the State Board of Education and have considerable influence there.
“I have heard that that Lt. Gov. Robinson has not attended board meetings himself. He has sent a surrogate, and that is not at all the way I would approach that role,” Hunt said. A recent story in The Atlantic also pointed out that Robinson hasn’t attended a single meeting of another board he sits on, the state’s Military Affairs Commission.
Regardless, Hunt said that Robinson isn’t focused on education and has simply been running the Republican playbook by demanding cuts to public school funding and promoting vouchers that go to schools that can and do discriminate against students for any number of reasons, but don’t require certified teachers and don’t report academic performance.
“If taxpayer money is going to a school, I say it has to be accountable to the taxpayer,” she said. “Part of that accountability is the performance reports every year and those schools don’t necessarily have to file those.”
Robinson told The Smoky Mountain News in April that he indeed wants to slash the state’s school budget, “… but when I say slash, I don’t mean redirected from education, I mean redirected to education,” instead of to bureaucrats.
That would be a tall order after his calls for the Department of Public Instruction to refuse federal education funding and the dissolution of the U.S. Department of Education as called for in the controversial conservative manifesto, Project 2025. For the 2023-24 school year, the General Assembly’s $11.44 billion in funding got a $1.66 billion boost from federal (non-COVID) funds, which go mostly towards low-income or disabled children.
“School systems are not able to take up that funding [locally] and provide the amount of money that those children need, because a lot of localities don’t have the money that your Mecklenburg County or your Wake County has. That would make education very disparate according to where you live,” she said. “That is not going to serve children or families in this country.”
Aside from funding, larger issues in the national and state educational system center on LGBTQ+ issues, like library books and parental consent. Just last week, former President Donald Trump made more false claims at a “Moms for Liberty” event, telling attendees that “the transgender thing is an incredible thing … your kid goes to school and he comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child and you know, many of these childs [sic] 15 years later say ‘What the hell happened, who did this to me?’”
Last year, Weatherman told SMN that North Carolina’s teachers should tell students who ask questions about LGBTQ+ issues to “go ask your parents.” Hunt says there’s a problem with that.
“I think kids look to teachers and people at school because sometimes they can’t ask their parents. Some parents refuse to talk about issues or don’t have answers,” she said. “Parents don’t have all the answers, but teachers are incredibly important for children. They are people that we all look up to, and we need to treat them like the professionals that they are.”
The lieutenant governor also sits on the state board of the N.C. Community College System, although in early 2023 Robinson’s Primary Election opponent, Folwell, said he’d never seen Robinson at one of the meetings. Former Buncombe County Democratic Sen. Terry Van Duyn, herself a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2020, said she’s seen Robinson at “maybe two” meetings in person and that he sends a surrogate “to every or almost every meeting.”
Given funding challenges associated with community colleges of late, both Van Duyn and Hunt think it would have been better for Robinson, who also serves as the president of the Senate, to appear in person at some or all meetings.
In places like Haywood County, community colleges do far more than offer students a cheap way to rack up college credits before earning bachelor’s degrees elsewhere. Their role in workforce development is critical, and sometimes they go far beyond what might be considered their expected scope. When Pactiv Evergreen announced it would close one of the county’s largest employers with almost no notice in 2023, it was HCC and its president, Shelley White, that quickly stepped up to address immediate and long-term challenges like health care coverage and unemployment.
“I’ve always been a huge proponent of community colleges,” Hunt said. “I was the vice chair of the community college committee in the House, the only Democrat to hold that position, and I believe workforce development is the most important thing for our rural communities today. We have got to fund fully these community college programs that are going to provide workers, especially for rural areas.”
For many, the ability to work or to attend school is being undercut by the state’s ongoing child care crisis. In July, North Carolina Child Care Stabilization grants, part of President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, expired after bringing $1.3 billion to the state’s child care providers in what the White House called the “single biggest investment in child care since World War II.” After the long-awaited deadline, the General Assembly went on to fund a fraction of the required amount, for just a few months, but the problem will soon reemerge.
“We go back to Raleigh Nov. 18 for a week. I have not heard that they are going to take up that topic. It’s obviously whatever President Pro Temp [Sen. Phil Berger, R-Rockingham] wants to bring up,” Hunt said. “I would think that they’ve heard from their constituents all over the state that this is a real, huge problem. I mean, I’ve been meeting with child care providers all over the state for a year and a half, and they are just desperate to get some additional funding,”
While Weatherman’s well known among party insiders, particularly Republicans — he worked for conservative pioneer and longtime Congresswoman Sue Myrick, as well as her son, then-Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, and then for Western North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn — he may be less known among voters outside those political bubbles.
Hunt, whose family name still carries a certain luster in this state, has seen her own name regularly splashed around the million-plus media market in Charlotte during her recent service in the General Assembly, which may provide an edge in name recognition over Weatherman. However, a good part of Hunt’s fortune at the polls in November will be determined by those above her on the ballot — Stein and Robinson, Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president. Polls show Trump and Harris neck-and-neck but Stein with a lead over Robinson that fluctuates but has largely remained outside the margin of error. If Stein and Harris do well, it stands to reason Hunt might too.
That would create a situation that hasn’t happened in the Old North State since Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue’s term ended in 2013, namely, a Democratic governor backed up by a Democratic lieutenant governor. Termed-out Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has been looking over his shoulder at Robinson for the past four years and did the same with Robinson’s predecessor Forest.
“It just makes for a better state. I mean, the governor is able to leave the state, travel, get companies to come back into North Carolina without fear that something terrible is going to happen in the legislature even if we still have a Republican majority,” Hunt said. “The lieutenant governor can serve on boards and commissions, you know, just whatever the governor needs. The lieutenant governor is just there to support the governor.”
The idea of supporting the governor, at least, is one thing both Republicans and Democrats recognize.
“[Weatherman] said he wants to be a force multiplier for Robinson,” said Hunt. “He’s an apostle of Robinson. We all know that he has the same values and the same ideas for how government should work, and they’re the exact opposite of what Josh Stein has.”
