Governor Stein and the arrival of a new North Carolina
Published January 23, 2025
Governor Josh Stein took the oath of office in a very different North Carolina than his father moved to in the late 1960s. Stein’s father, Adam, was an acclaimed civil rights lawyer who came to the state precisely because it was a seething battleground grappling with the aftermath of Jim Crow’s demise. The state that Josh now governs is far larger, far more cosmopolitan, and holds a far greater progressive promise than anything most people could have imagined 50 years ago.
In the late 1950s, North Carolina was a sleepy southern backwater. Residents earned only 48% of the national average. The state ranked last in the number of years of education attained by its residents. The capitol city, Raleigh, had only 64,000 residents—a figure that placed it in the company of today’s Burlington, Vermont, the smallest capital among the fifty states. As a whole, North Carolina was two-thirds rural and fully out of step with the modernizing spirit of Eisenhower’s America.
The men the brilliant Raleigh philanthropist and psychiatrist Assad Meymandi called “the Founding Fathers of the New North Carolina” began to remake the state starting in 1956. In that year, Governor Luther Hodges founded Research Triangle Park in an effort to leverage the Piedmont’s “possums, pine trees, and Ph.D.’s” into something of a modern economy. Pharmaceutical giant Burroughs Wellcome would become the first tenant in RTP in the 1960s—though one of Wellcome’s top executives later remarked that she didn’t believe there were any signs of “civilization” in the state her corporation had just embraced.
The early seeds of modernity began to sprout into something substantial in the 1970s. After 1977, when Governor Jim Hunt took office, statistics show a significant takeoff in economic growth in the state. By the 1980s, Charlotte had 384,000 people—a far cry from the sleepy conglomeration of mill villages that UNC President Frank Porter Graham had once desperately tried to pass off as “the capital of a textile empire.” IBM had built an enormous campus in Research Triangle Park that would eventually employ more North Carolinians than the number of people who grew tobacco in the state. Hunt and his successor, Republican Jim Martin, had ignited a spirit of progress in the erstwhile Rip van Winkle State.
This swelling wave of growth would reach full momentum in the 1990s and 2000s. In the wonderous booming years of the 90s, Raleigh would generate 21,000 patents—a vast number that placed it in the company of renowned technology centers like Boston, Massachusetts. The city grew by 40% in both the 90s and the 2000s. Charlotte would gain 888,000 residents between 2004 and 2014. In the 2010s, as Carolina Forward Executive Director Blair Reeves explained in NC Newsline, Wake and Mecklenburg Counties alone accounted for 50% of North Carolina’s economic growth. A new North Carolina, more urban and thoroughly within the mainstream of the American economy, had arrived.
But state politics lagged behind the state’s demographic transformation. For decades even as Raleigh and Charlotte boomed and knowledge industries put down roots in the red-clay soil, conservative rural politicians continued to rule the state. Consider Phil Berger and Tim Moore, two right-wingers who dominated the legislature for an interminable 10 years (and counting, as the case may be with Berger). They hail from two towns—Eden and King’s Mountain--that have a combined population of 19,000. That’s smaller than the number of people who moved to the Raleigh-Cary metropolitan area in an average year the 2000s. Senator Thom Tillis of suburban Cornelius was a partial exception, but even he has spent much of his time pandering to the MAGA-ized, Trump-loving traditionalists in his party’s base. Significantly, Tillis attended an event at the Jesse Helms Center.
Josh Stein has finally begun to bring North Carolina politics in line with the dynamic new realities in the state. He came up through politics as a member of the progressive wing of his party. The LGBTQ-rights group Equality NC hailed him for his pro-equality leadership in the General Assembly. He spoke frankly and openly about abortion while running for governor—and the state rewarded him with an historic 15-point victory. Stein faces an entrenched right-wing legislature and a state Supreme Court that emanates the aroma of the Old South. But his forceful progressive politics have proven how our state has left its stubborn backwardness many years in the past.
In the late 1950s, North Carolina was a sleepy southern backwater. Residents earned only 48% of the national average. The state ranked last in the number of years of education attained by its residents. The capitol city, Raleigh, had only 64,000 residents—a figure that placed it in the company of today’s Burlington, Vermont, the smallest capital among the fifty states. As a whole, North Carolina was two-thirds rural and fully out of step with the modernizing spirit of Eisenhower’s America.
The men the brilliant Raleigh philanthropist and psychiatrist Assad Meymandi called “the Founding Fathers of the New North Carolina” began to remake the state starting in 1956. In that year, Governor Luther Hodges founded Research Triangle Park in an effort to leverage the Piedmont’s “possums, pine trees, and Ph.D.’s” into something of a modern economy. Pharmaceutical giant Burroughs Wellcome would become the first tenant in RTP in the 1960s—though one of Wellcome’s top executives later remarked that she didn’t believe there were any signs of “civilization” in the state her corporation had just embraced.
The early seeds of modernity began to sprout into something substantial in the 1970s. After 1977, when Governor Jim Hunt took office, statistics show a significant takeoff in economic growth in the state. By the 1980s, Charlotte had 384,000 people—a far cry from the sleepy conglomeration of mill villages that UNC President Frank Porter Graham had once desperately tried to pass off as “the capital of a textile empire.” IBM had built an enormous campus in Research Triangle Park that would eventually employ more North Carolinians than the number of people who grew tobacco in the state. Hunt and his successor, Republican Jim Martin, had ignited a spirit of progress in the erstwhile Rip van Winkle State.
This swelling wave of growth would reach full momentum in the 1990s and 2000s. In the wonderous booming years of the 90s, Raleigh would generate 21,000 patents—a vast number that placed it in the company of renowned technology centers like Boston, Massachusetts. The city grew by 40% in both the 90s and the 2000s. Charlotte would gain 888,000 residents between 2004 and 2014. In the 2010s, as Carolina Forward Executive Director Blair Reeves explained in NC Newsline, Wake and Mecklenburg Counties alone accounted for 50% of North Carolina’s economic growth. A new North Carolina, more urban and thoroughly within the mainstream of the American economy, had arrived.
But state politics lagged behind the state’s demographic transformation. For decades even as Raleigh and Charlotte boomed and knowledge industries put down roots in the red-clay soil, conservative rural politicians continued to rule the state. Consider Phil Berger and Tim Moore, two right-wingers who dominated the legislature for an interminable 10 years (and counting, as the case may be with Berger). They hail from two towns—Eden and King’s Mountain--that have a combined population of 19,000. That’s smaller than the number of people who moved to the Raleigh-Cary metropolitan area in an average year the 2000s. Senator Thom Tillis of suburban Cornelius was a partial exception, but even he has spent much of his time pandering to the MAGA-ized, Trump-loving traditionalists in his party’s base. Significantly, Tillis attended an event at the Jesse Helms Center.
Josh Stein has finally begun to bring North Carolina politics in line with the dynamic new realities in the state. He came up through politics as a member of the progressive wing of his party. The LGBTQ-rights group Equality NC hailed him for his pro-equality leadership in the General Assembly. He spoke frankly and openly about abortion while running for governor—and the state rewarded him with an historic 15-point victory. Stein faces an entrenched right-wing legislature and a state Supreme Court that emanates the aroma of the Old South. But his forceful progressive politics have proven how our state has left its stubborn backwardness many years in the past.
Alexander H. Jones is a Policy Analyst with Carolina Forward. He lives in Carrboro. Have feedback? Reach him at alex@carolinaforward.org.
