Kay Hagan is a Democratic centrist and North Carolina’s junior senator. She was elected in 2008. Hagan was born in Shelby in Cleveland County, which in the 20th century produced an unusually high proportion of prominent state Democratic politicians. When she was a child, her parents moved to Lakeland, Fla. Her father, Joe Ruthven, worked in the tire business, was a real estate broker, and was elected mayor of Lakeland. There were other political influences in her life. Her uncle was Lawton Chiles, who was a state senator from Lakeland in the 1960s, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1970, and went on to become Florida governor in 1990. Hagan helped out in Chiles’ campaigns, and also interned in his Senate office in the 1970s. Read More

Kay Hagan is a Democratic centrist and North Carolina’s junior senator. She was elected in 2008. Hagan was born in Shelby in Cleveland County, which in the 20th century produced an unusually high proportion of prominent state Democratic politicians. When she was a child, her parents moved to Lakeland, Fla. Her father, Joe Ruthven, worked in the tire business, was a real estate broker, and was elected mayor of Lakeland. There were other political influences in her life. Her uncle was Lawton Chiles, who was a state senator from Lakeland in the 1960s, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1970, and went on to become Florida governor in 1990. Hagan helped out in Chiles’ campaigns, and also interned in his Senate office in the 1970s.

Hagan graduated from Florida State and then went to law school at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, where she met her husband, Chip Hagan. After graduation they moved to his hometown, Greensboro, where she worked as an attorney in the trust department at NationsBank (now Bank of America). After their third child was born, she was a stay-at-home mom and got involved in civic affairs—the Greensboro Coliseum, the Greensboro Day School—and Democratic politics. In 1992 and 1996, she was Greensboro chairman for Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt’s campaigns. In 1998, Hunt persuaded her to run for the state Senate, convincing her that she could balance her kids’ soccer practices and Scout meetings with political life.

With campaign help from Chiles, Hagan defeated an incumbent Republican. Once in Raleigh, Hagan befriended Democratic Senate President Marc Basnight, who became her mentor, giving her important committee posts. Hagan was able to secure money for several projects in her district, including funding for the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, the International Furnishings Market, and Center City Park. As a senator, she cast votes in favor of a state lottery, a two-year moratorium on executions, and financial incentives for corporations to create new jobs.

In 2007, when it looked like GOP Sen. Elizabeth Dole would be re-elected without serious opposition, state and national party leaders got busy looking for a challenger. Former Clinton-era White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, who lost Senate races in 2002 and 2004, declined to run again. Democratic Gov. Michael Easley, though barred from running for a third term, also declined, as did Rep. Brad Miller and Attorney General Roy Cooper. In early October 2007, Hagan announced she would not be a candidate. But Hunt and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Charles Schumer of New York pressed her hard to run, and later in the month she capitulated. In a five-way May primary, Hagan’s chief rival was Chapel Hill investment adviser Jim Neal, who criticized Hagan as too moderate. She was the only candidate to run ads in the May primary and won with 60% of the vote.

Still, Dole was the clear favorite. She had raised nearly $10 million, far more than Hagan. But Dole had also spent much of 2005 and 2006 traveling around the country on behalf of GOP candidates as the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and she had spent little time in North Carolina until the May 2008 primary. Hagan seized on this, accusing Dole of being a Washington insider and promising to give her a pair of ruby-red slippers to send her to her husband’s home state of Kansas. (Dole is married to former Republican Sen. and presidential candidate Bob Dole of Kansas.) National Democrats also subtly raised the issue of Dole’s age with a television ad featuring two elderly men in rocking chairs debating whether Dole was 92, the percentage of her votes in support of Bush administration stands, or 93, her effectiveness ranking in the Senate, according to the website Congress.org. At the time, Dole was 72. She attacked Hagan for supporting higher taxes and called Hagan a creature of national Democrats. Dole emphasized her work on North Carolina issues, such as the 2004 tobacco buyout, preserving military bases, and protecting the state’s Medicaid funding.

By October, Hagan was consistently leading Dole in polls. With one week to go, Dole ran an ad attacking Hagan for attending a fundraiser in the Massachusetts home of one of the leaders of the Godless Americans Political Action Committee, a group opposed to having Christmas as a national holiday. The announcer said, “Godless Americans and Kay Hagan. She hid from cameras. Took godless money. What did Hagan promise in return?” Hagan, citing her experience as a Sunday school teacher and a Presbyterian elder, said Dole should be “ashamed” of the ad, which she said was “bearing false witness against fellow Christians.” Hagan threatened to sue for libel and slander. Some 3,600 people sent in contributions to Hagan.

Some North Carolina analysts said the “godless” ad was the campaign’s turning point, and polling evidence suggested it didn’t help Dole. Hagan won 53%-44%, running 3 percentage points ahead of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama while Dole ran 5 points behind Republican candidate John McCain. Hagan won 71% of voters under 30, while losing narrowly among voters over age 44. Hagan clearly benefited from the huge increase in the number of young and African-American voters that the Obama campaign organization turned out. But she may have prevailed in any case, as she ran ahead of most statewide Democratic candidates.

In the Senate, Hagan supported Obama’s economic agenda during her early months in office, but was determined not to be seen as a rubber stamp. She joined a working group of fiscally conservative senators in search of a political middle ground. “We have a Congress now that is kind of divided, and I want to be one of the ones that helps bring people together,” she told National Journal. She told an audience in April 2009 that Obama’s spending path in the face of projected growing deficits was “completely unsustainable and unacceptable.” In December 2010, she opposed the tax-cut deal that Obama cut with Republicans because it added $858 billion to the national debt. Hagan broke from her party on other issues as well. She teamed with her Republican North Carolina colleague Richard Burr to oppose efforts to let the Food and Drug Administration regulate tobacco, an important Tar Heel State crop, and joined Republicans in opposing a measure to allow debate on the DREAM Act giving some children of illegal immigrants a potential path to citizenship.

On the Armed Services Committee, Hagan endorsed a commission’s recommendation in April 2011 that women be allowed to serve in combat in war zones. She also introduced a bill giving tax credits to companies hiring members of the National Guard and Reserve. On the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, she added a provision to a food safety bill to compensate farmers who suffer losses from erroneous recalls, and she pushed a bill intended to help senior citizens manage multiple prescription medicines at once. She collaborated with Republicans to ensure that biologic drugs — those derived from proteins, rather than chemicals — could have a longer exclusivity period before generic competition than many Democrats wanted.

Hagan sought to juggle the pressures of representing the second-biggest banking state with her own support for stronger consumer protection regulation. She helped carve out an exception for USAA—an insurance provider to more than 350,000 military families in North Carolina—from proprietary trading restrictions in the so-called Volcker Rule. In June 2011, an amendment came up in the Senate to delay new rules limiting debit-card fees that banks can charge merchants. In a role reversal, Hagan supported the banks’ position and voted for a delay of the new fee limits, while her colleague Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C. voted against it. The amendment failed to garner 60 votes and the new debit-card fee limits went into effect.

Hagan has also focused on job training and the high-tech sector. She re-introduced a bill in June 2011 to establish a credentialing system to match qualified workers with high-tech industries. In March 2012, Hagan was named “Tech Sector Legislator of the Year” by the Information Technology Industry Council. However, one of her innovation-friendly bills, the Computer Professionals Update Act, engendered significant opposition in early 2012. The bill would update the Fair Labor Standards Act and exempt some high-tech workers from receiving overtime pay. It was fiercely opposed by the Department for Professional Employees, an AFL-CIO affiliate. “I want to do everything I can to make sure employers have the tools they need to hire North Carolinians and invest in the local economy,” Hagan said in the Greensboro News & Record in defense of the bill. It has yet to receive a vote. In October 2011, Hagan co-sponsored a bill with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. cutting corporate taxes on overseas profits, with greater reductions for businesses that expand payrolls in the U.S.

A November 2011 News & Record piece evaluated Hagan’s career thus far. “A lawyer who rose to prominence on a reputation for intellectual horsepower and hard work, Hagan is still not much of a showboat by U.S. Senate standards,” the article stated. The News & Record argued that Hagan has focused on noncontroversial issues, such as the economy and the military. One exception was the matter of gay rights. In May 2012, a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in North Carolina was put to a ballot referendum and gained nationwide attention. Hagan forcefully opposed the measure, but it passed easily.