About Kay

Welcome Letter | Making a Difference | Stepping Up | State Senate | Family


Dear Friends,

There’s a groundswell of optimism here in North Carolina, rooted in the fact that this is finally our chance for change. There’s optimism driving the belief that as tough as things may appear, the momentum is finally on our side.

People are sick and tired of ineffective politicians who spend too much time taking care of special interests and their lobbyists instead of people like you and your family.

Ten years ago, I was a working mom who went to Raleigh because I thought the state needed a voice like mine. I’m still that same person, but my children are grown and I’m no longer car-pooling them to soccer practice while talking to the Governor on my cell phone.

But I am still concerned that the world their children, my grandchildren, will inherit will be in worse shape than the world I inherited from my mom, Jeanette and my father, Joe.

It’s NOT all doom and gloom, and our best days are NOT behind us, so long as we get started turning this around right this minute. We just need new leadership, new ideas, and a new way of doing business – for North Carolina families, NOT the fat cats in Washington.

Thank you for visiting my website; please check back often for updates. If you have any questions, please email me at kay@kayhagan.com. Thank you.

Making A Difference

Kay Hagan knows that you do not make a difference standing on the sideline. Before her decade of service in the North Carolina Senate, she was a vice president at NCNB (now Bank of America), then North Carolina’s largest bank.

While in the state Senate, she has proven to be an effective leader who is not afraid to do the hard work to bridge partisan divides and always put people before politics. Named one of North Carolina’s “Ten Most Effective Senators,” three terms in a row by the non-partisan North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research, Governor Mike Easley calls Kay “one of the smartest, hardest working, most effective senators we have in Raleigh.”

Kay goes to work every day focused solely on what is best for North Carolina – building on what works, eliminating what doesn’t. She has earned a reputation as a no-nonsense legislator who knows good ideas do not come with a party label.
Serving as co-chair of the Budget Committee, Kay believes in keeping track of every penny spent. She puts a premium on accountability and has no tolerance for wasteful spending. Kay has consistently done the hard work of turning out five balanced budgets, and she has made the tough decisions to ensure that North Carolina can continue to invest in quality schools, job training, and middle class tax cuts.

After ten years in Raleigh, Kay is all too familiar with the ways Washington has repeatedly come up short for North Carolina. Today, Washington needs a voice like hers; a voice for the right kind of change, accountability, and an unwavering commitment to keep North Carolina strong and moving forward.

Stepping Up

When Washington came up short on health care for North Carolina’s children, Kay led the effort to bridge the gap by increasing coverage through Health Choice for Children.

When Washington failed to provide North Carolina’s National Guard with the equipment they needed to stay safe in Iraq and around the world, Kay supported efforts to pay for handheld radios and military vehicle body armor to keep our Guardsmen safe.

After the devastating hurricanes and subsequent floods that caused extensive damage to western North Carolina in 2004, Washington failed to provide sufficient disaster assistance, so Kay supported state legislation to help the communities hurt by the disaster.

As Washington has run up the national debt, Kay used her position on the Appropriations Committee to make sure North Carolina produced balanced budgets.

When Washington was largely ignoring the rising cost of sending a child to college, Kay pushed for investments in higher education for thousands of students and their families.

Governor Easley touts Kay as North Carolina’s best hope for making Washington help everyday families back home: “She’s been a strong partner in the work we’ve done here in North Carolina to pick up the slack when Washington’s come up short. I know firsthand that North Carolina needs someone like Kay fighting for us in Washington,” said Gov. Easley.

“No one works harder than Kay to find common sense solutions to the issues North Carolina families talk about around their kitchen table,” said Senate President Pro-Tem Marc Basnight.

State Senate

In Kay’s ten years as a state senator, she helped create innovative tools for economic development, invested in technology and infrastructure to help develop the next century’s medicine and jobs, voted to pass some of the nation’s toughest predatory lending laws, and stepped up to make sure the gaps in underfunded federal homeland security and law enforcement programs were filled.

In education, Hagan wrote budgets that increased teacher pay and expanded early childhood education. Kay believes that the public universities in North Carolina are a crown jewel and an example for the whole country. She increased investments in the state university system to keep pace with increasing demand for the educated workforce that our knowledge-based economy demands.

Before the current housing crisis, Kay passed legislation mandating that the State Board of Education teach “Personal Financial Literacy” to North Carolina’s high school students. “You have to understand debt and money issues in order to get by in the world today,” Hagan said at the time.

Kay recognized that greater financial literacy means expanded access to the everyday opportunities that define the American Dream: paying for college, owning a home, and saving for retirement. Kay worked hard to forge a bipartisan compromise on the issue, and that kind of common sense forward-thinking is illustrative of what Kay takes to work with her every day.

Kay has strong ties to the military. She is the wife of a Vietnam veteran who used the GI Bill to help pay for law school, the daughter-in-law of a two star general in the Marine Corps, and she has two nephews currently in the active military serving overseas, one as a fighter pilot in the Air Force and the other as a Navy SEAL. Hagan’s service in Raleigh has been marked by a deep commitment to keeping North Carolina the most military-friendly state in the country, including increasing pensions for members of the National Guard, expanding educational benefits for service members and their families, and finding new ways to help provide assistance for families when a service member is deployed. She has a personal connection to making sure Washington prepares for the return of this most recent generation of veterans.

Family

Born in Shelby, Kay met her husband Chip in law school at Wake Forest. After her third child was born, Kay left her banking job at NCNB, where she had worked in the estate and trust division and helped people plan for their loved ones’ long term security and care, to focus on being a full-time mom. Like many mothers across North Carolina, she stayed active in the community, raising money for local causes, helping out at the Bell House and the Moses Cone Hospital, volunteering with the Junior League, teaching Sunday school classes and leading a Girl Scout troop.

Kay and Chip raised their three kids in Greensboro and watched as their bipartisanship was put to the test with a son at Duke and a daughter at UNC – Chapel Hill (their oldest daughter went to college in California).

Kay’s commitment to public service started at an early age, putting bumper stickers on cars for her uncle. That uncle, Lawton Chiles, went on to become Governor of Florida, after having served 18 years in the U.S. Senate.

Here in North Carolina, Kay was the Guilford County manager for Governor Hunt’s 1992 and 1996 gubernatorial campaigns.

Building on her civic service and grassroots involvement in politics, Hagan was elected to the North Carolina Senate in 1998 when she defeated a Republican incumbent in a close election the political establishment believed would be won by her Republican opponent.