Bo Hines turned from football to politics. He’s moving closer to one of his goals.
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The Triangle’s battleground district
Democrat Wiley Nickel and Republican Bo Hines are vying for voters in a critical midterm race that could be decided by just a few percentage points, or less. The redrawn district could decide who controls Congress.
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Bo Hines turned from football to politics. He’s moving closer to one of his goals.
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The first decision 27-year-old Bo Hines makes as an elected official could be who leads the House of Representatives in the 118th Congress.
Hines is the Republican nominee to represent the 13th Congressional District in North Carolina. The district is without an incumbent and includes Johnston County and parts of Wake, Wayne and Harnett counties.
For Michael Whatley, chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, that is a high-stakes decision, but one he believes Hines is up to make.
“The first vote that is going to be cast out of that district is either going to be for Nancy Pelosi or Kevin McCarthy as speaker,” Whatley said. “That is going to be absolutely essential because if you look at the Democratic agenda right now, it is runaway federal spending, higher gas and diesel prices, higher grocery prices, and we need to make a change.”
The 13th is North Carolina’s only swing district, meaning voters there aren’t more likely to vote for one party over the other, based on past election results. Whatley said it’s not just a pivotal swing district for the state, but for the entire country.
Bo Hines: From football to politics
Hines, the son of Deb and Todd Hines, grew up in the Queen City where he attended Charlotte Christian School.
Following his father, who played for the NFL’s Detroit Lions, Hines was a rising football star at N.C. State when he traded everything to focus on a career in politics.
Between his freshman and sophomore years Hines chose Yale University over the Wolfpack because, he says, he believed Yale’s political science program would open more doors for him professionally.
Even before his 20th birthday, Hines told The News & Observer that he wanted to be North Carolina’s governor one day, or president of the United States.
Transferring seemingly paid off. Within two years, in 2017, Hines interned for Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds, of South Dakota.
Within six years, he was announcing his first campaign for Congress.
Moving districts
Hines burst into the political scene in January 2021, with the announcement that he would run against GOP powerhouse Rep. Virginia Foxx.
Foxx, 79, represents the 5th Congressional District, a position she’s held since Hines was in elementary school. At the time, Hines lived in Forsyth County, which dips into Foxx’s district.
But five months later, Hines learned that U.S. Rep. Ted Budd would not run for reelection in the 13th Congressional District, just east of Foxx’s. Hines set his sights there instead.
“He started running in another district and moved to the 13th when it became clear that that was his best path toward victory,” said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University.
Later, North Carolina lawmakers redrew the congressional districts, moving the 13th near the Triangle, and Hines followed, moving to Fuquay-Varina with his wife, Mary Charles Bryson. Hines has been married once before, to the daughter of race-car driver John Andretti.
“He has values aligned with that district,” Whatley said. “He understands agriculture. He understands the military. He understands conservative fiscal policies, and he’s going to be a fighter for the families and farms and small businesses of the 13th District.”
According to financial disclosure reports, Hines worked for his mother’s design firm when he declared a run for Congress, but no longer listed the job in his 2022 filing. The only financial disclosure he made this year was that he has a trust fund and this year took somewhere between $100,000 and $1 million from it.
McClatchy wasn’t able to interview Hines at a time his campaign said it could make him available, and the campaign didn’t respond to further requests for comment.
Campaigning for Congress
When Hines first got into the race he told the Gaston Gazette his motivators were fair trade, infrastructure investment and “fighting against tyranny of mobs and big tech giants looking to take away our God-given rights.”
His age, political aspirations and rhetoric quickly garnered comparisons to U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a political spitfire from Western North Carolina, whose laundry list of scandals would eventually cost him a second term in office.
But before Cawthorn’s political fallout, the two young politicians appeared together frequently. In September 2021, Cawthorn led a protest outside the Johnston County School Board calling for the end of mask mandates implemented because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hines and Tennessee congressional candidate Robby Starbuck appeared with him.
Cawthorn called the mask mandate “psychological child abuse.”
Cawthorn met with former President Donald Trump about North Carolina elections. Cawthorn presented a plan with a map of the state and pictures of the candidates he felt Trump should endorse, including Hines.
“His entrance into American politics was with the young, loud and America First wing of the Republican Party,” Cooper said.
Hines appeared with Trump at a rally in North Carolina and gained his endorsement, and he told the Washington Post the 2020 election was stolen. He said he believed abortions should be banned with no exceptions and that schools like Yale are liberal indoctrination programs.
“His rhetoric at the beginning was not centrist in any way,” Cooper said.
Moving to the middle?
Leaning heavily right paid off for Hines, who beat out eight opponents for the Republican nomination, including heavy hitters like former U.S. Rep. Renee Ellmers and Kelly Daughtry, the daughter of former state senator and Rep. Leo Daughtry.
“I think he’s more of a gifted politician than people give him credit for,” Cooper said.
Hines also had the support of Club for Growth, a conservative super PAC that pumped $1.5 million into his primary campaign.
He now faces state Sen. Wiley Nickel in the general election on Nov 8.
Both Nickel and Hines have spent the past four months trying to bring their campaigns back toward the center politically, at least more than what was seen during the primary.
For Hines, that meant clearing his website of references to abortion. Abortion became a hot-button issue following the primary when in June the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a 1973 landmark decision that gave women the right to abortions. Republicans around the country have since tried to back away from more extreme positions on the subject. Hines now says he would consider exceptions as part of a ban.
Still, after the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, Hines called for defunding the FBI.
“The support from Trump and far-right extremists, like (Reps.) Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, shows that you’ve got someone more interested in performance and spouting out conspiracy theories about the election, which by the way, he’s in the rare category of someone who’s fully denied the last presidential election, than helping people,” Nickel told McClatchy. “That’s not solving problems, that’s advancing his own career.”
Neither candidate is from the district, though Nickel has lived nearby in Cary since 2009. Whatley said he is unbothered by Hines’ former address or his age.
“I think that America needs outsiders,” Whatley said. “The last thing that we need are politicians as usual, that are going to go up there, particularly, if they’re going to go up there and be a rubber stamp for the Biden-Pelosi agenda. I think that having an outsider is a good thing. And we need somebody with fresh perspectives.”
Whatley added that he doesn’t think Hines will be a rubber stamp for Republicans, either.
“I think that he will be a solid conservative vote,” Whatley said. “And I think that that’s what that district wants and needs.”
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at https://campsite.bio/underthedome or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published September 28, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Bo Hines turned from football to politics. He’s moving closer to one of his goals.."