WHITSETT — Jon Hardister is clearing out the desk and cutting off the lights. But the former state representative is not completely shutting the door on a political future.
Hardister, a Republican who has spent nearly six terms representing Guilford County’s District 59 in the N.C. House, ended his career in public office for the time being last week when his resignation became official.
The resignation follows Hardister’s loss in the Republican primary for labor commissioner, finishing second in a field of four candidates.
By choosing to run for labor commissioner, Hardister had forgone an opportunity to seek a seventh term in District 59, which is located primarily in eastern Guilford County.
Speaking in an interview at his home in Whitsett days after his resignation, Hardister said he was comfortable with that choice.
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“When I made the decision to run for labor commissioner, I decided that I was ready to step away from the House,” he said. “I felt like my time there was done. I looked at my body of work and what I was able to accomplish and felt confident that I had done a job, that I had done it well and it was time to move onto another chapter.”
Hardister’s resignation gave the Guilford County Republican Party the opportunity to appoint Alan Branson, who won the Republican primary for the District 59 seat in March. Hardister said he did not resign in order to give his party’s nominee an incumbency edge going into the fall election.
Hardister said the decision was a personal one he made after coming to the realization one morning that he could no long give his full effort to the job.
There were a few other factors as well. Family was a big one. Hardister explained that his father will soon be 80 and that his mother has been facing health problems including lung cancer and that he wanted to be able to help them.
Then there was a desire to pivot to the private sector. For now, he will continue working in marketing at First Carolina Mortgage, the lending company his family started.
From there, Hardister is weighing his options. He’s interested in consulting and business development and said he has received some offers that he could not disclose at the moment.
Hardister is also exploring an opportunity to become a member of the board at Western Carolina University, though nothing has been finalized yet.
Under state law, Hardister will have to wait at least six months before he can register as a lobbyist. Hardister is considering that among his options. If he were to do so, he said his interest would be in “something that would promote economic development, job creation, that kind of thing.”
At the same time, the 41-year-old is not ruling out a return to public office at some point.
“I’m not going to slam the door shut on running for office again somewhere down the road,” Hardister said. “I don’t know when I would run or if I would run or what office I would run for but I think sometimes if public service (is) in your DNA, it’s kind of in your DNA.”
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Hardister first ran for the state House in 2010. He lost but came back to win the seat the following election in 2012.
Only a few years into his tenure, he was chosen as the majority whip for the Republican caucus, a senior leadership position in which Hardister was tasked with counting votes and ensuring members were present for votes. He stepped into a deputy whip role during his campaign for labor commissioner.
When he looks back on what he is proudest of during his time in office, he points to the economic turnaround the state has seen, a change he attributes to Republican economic policies.
Chris Meadows, who chairs the Guilford County Republican Party, highlighted those issues in a statement released on behalf of the party reflecting on Hardister’s time in office.
“He fought for the issues that affect every North Carolinian and to better our state, making it the number one place in the nation to do business by creating a welcoming environment for companies through tax reductions and infrastructure improvements, like the Urban Loop around Greensboro,” according to the statement.
He has also cultivated good working relationships with local leaders in his district.
Pleasant Garden Mayor Dean Maddox said Hardister was a responsive representative who helped the town find ways to achieve its goals.
“What I like about Jon, some things just cannot happen and we understand that. But then he would always say, ‘And this is why it can’t happen.’ Or, ‘maybe if you altered the message a bit, maybe it could gain more traction.’ He was always supportive in that fashion,” Maddox explained.
He credited Hardister with helping to obtain $5.5 million in federal matching funds for water and sewer projects in the town.
Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan had a similarly positive view of her working relationship with Hardister.
“One thing that I really appreciated about him was that if he heard (about) a bill that would have an impact on the city that we might not be aware about, he would call to see if it was something that we would support or not support,” Vaughan said.
She also pointed to Hardister’s efforts to pass a state law allowing cities across North Carolina to hire civilian traffic investigators, non-officers who can investigate vehicle crashes that involve only property damage. City leaders had been seeking authority from the state to use the investigators.
Guilford County Democratic Party Chair Kathy Kirkpatrick, who noted her disagreement with Hardister on most issues, said she appreciated that he helped secure funding for the International Civil Rights Center & Museum.
Hardister said collaboration is something that comes naturally.
“I’ve always felt like it’s best if you try to work together,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you have to compromise your values or what you stand for or your principles but I think if you can find some common ground, I think that’s important.”
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What type of Republican is Hardister?
In Kirkpatrick’s view, Hardister is not as extreme as some Republicans in the state but she feels that he has “gone the way of a lot of Republicans, which is more to the right and that is not in our opinion where the state needs to be.”
“I mean, he’s not as radical as some of the others but he’s definitely not above playing games and politics above people’s lives and well-being,” Kirkpatrick said.
She specifically said she opposed his stances on guns, abortion rights and tax cuts for wealthier residents.
Asked to describe where he views his place within the Republican Party, Hardister says he sees himself as an individual first and then a conservative and Republican, describing himself as a “Jon Hardister Republican” before elaborating on his political outlook.
“I’d probably say more of a Ronald Reagan type,” Hardister described. “I try to lead with optimism and I’m not going to compromise what I believe in. I voted with the party most of the time but you can do that without attacking the other side.”
He defends the Republican-dominated General Assembly against criticism from Democrats and other left-leaning groups that the legislature is too extreme.
“I would submit that the majority of what we’ve done in North Carolina under Republican leadership has not been radical,” Hardister said.
He supported the abortion constraints the General Assembly passed last year after the reversal of Roe v. Wade allowed states to adopt more restrictive policies. The law primarily placed a 12-week limit on elective abortion, which scaled back the previous limit of 20 weeks.
Hardister said the law is “a measured approach.”
“I’ve approached it from the standpoint that (understands) the emotions on both sides of it,” he said. “You know, you have two countervailing interests — you have the mother, you have the unborn child. And like I was saying before about my approach to politics is I don’t go in there and attack the other side and say, ‘Well, you’re a baby killer.’ By the same token, I (don’t want) the other side just to come in and say, ‘Well you don’t care about women.’ I think that’s hyperbolic.”
Hardister does acknowledge some misgivings regarding House Bill 2, the 2016 law which required individuals to use public restrooms corresponding to their sex assigned at birth.
The legislation came in response to a nondiscrimination ordinance passed by Charlotte. Individuals, organizations and government officials in North Carolina and across the country condemned the law as discriminatory against transgender people. Some economic boycotts followed as well.
While he still believes Charlotte overstepped its authority by making the policy, Hardister said “the General Assembly response to it, I think, went too far because it got into a biological-scientific debate about gender identity and all that.”
He touted the partial repeal of the law, which the General Assembly passed in 2017, as “an example of leadership.”
“There was a lot backlash, you can’t deny there was a lot of backlash on it, including from the business community,” Hardister said. “So what do we do? We responded. We repealed that first version, replaced it with something that simply just said local governments can’t do what Charlotte did and it’s over. You don’t really hear anything else about it.”
Other critics have pointed to the Republican majority’s redistricting practices, which they claim have given the party an unfair advantage.
Hardister has been a proponent of nonpartisan redistricting, sponsoring legislation that would create such a system. At the same time, he has joined with other members in approving maps put forward by the Republican majority.
He argues that Republican legislators have followed the law with their redistricting policies and gerrymandering was practiced well before the GOP took power.
“The laws that we have in place and the case law, and everything, we followed that, right?,” Hardister said. “So I’m not going to vote against something just because I don’t think the process is the best. I think you have to vote based on the situation you’re in and that’s a system we have currently. Could it be better? Well, I think it could be but that doesn’t mean the system we have now is wrong. It just means that it could be better. There’s a lot of things that could be better.”
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Two of the more contentious episodes in Hardister’s tenure involved efforts in the legislature to intervene in local politics.
The most recent came last year, when Hardister stepped into a dispute between the Guilford County Board of Education, which was controlled by Democrats, and the Guilford County GOP.
Following the resignation of Republican board member Pat Tillman, the Guilford GOP, pursuant to state law, nominated Michael Logan to the school board.
The Democratic majority on the board opposed Logan’s nomination, arguing that he was an inappropriate choice because of his views on subjects like the murder of George Floyd and vaccination. They voted down the nomination on several occasions.
Hardister filed a bill which would have allowed Logan to be seated as a member without a vote from the school board.
However, the board came up with an interpretation of the law they claimed would allow them to avoid installing Logan as a member. The board instead voted to appoint another Republican, Bill Goebel, at a meeting where Logan was taken from the chamber by law enforcement after lashing out against the board’s decision.
Subsequent legislation paved the way for Logan to take office.
“I just thought it was unfortunate the board was doing this because they were basically being adversarial to a General Assembly that has authority over the board and that’s an authority I didn’t want to exercise,” Hardister recalled. “I don’t take that lightly. I didn’t want the General Assembly to have to get involved in it but I thought it was an injustice because the seat was held by a Republican who was elected, who resigned and it was the purview of the Guilford County Republican Party to seat that person.”
School board Chair Deena Hayes-Greene, who was among those opposing Logan’s appointment, said she was also not pleased with how things turned out but she did have some praise for Hardister.
“I regret how things ended, and that is that, instead of finding a resolution, the General Assembly got involved and that’s how things ended,” Hayes-Greene said. “I think Jon is one of few people that would have been at least willing to try to figure out, to get information and figure out how we could work things out and I think he tried to do that and I appreciated that.”
Kirkpatrick was more critical of Hardister’s role in the school board dispute.
“I also wish that he had kept his nose out of things and not tried to do special policies like the school board,” she said. “Seems to me if you can’t win fairly, we’re going to rig the system. We’re going to go around it.”
The other controversy came in 2015 over efforts initiated by then-state Sen. Trudy Wade to overhaul Greensboro’s government. Wade’s proposal called for downsizing the number of positions on the city’s governing body and eliminating at-large seats, among other changes.
The legislation, which attracted opposition from Greensboro council members and residents, went through several iterations before it finally passed in July of that year.
Hardister said he was conflicted over the dispute, seeing merit in both the arguments for amending Greensboro’s government while recognizing the concerns of people in the city over the nature of the state government’s interference. At one point, he said there should be a referendum on district changes.
On the day the bill became law, Hardister voted for one version of the legislation before voting against it on the final vote. Critics charged that Hardister had changed his vote when it was clear the bill had enough votes to pass. He denied this was the case and said he opposed it on the second vote because the process was moving too quickly.
In 2017, a federal judge ruled the Greensboro district changes unconstitutional.
At the time the bill passed, Hardister called it one of the toughest matters he had dealt with as a legislator. He still agrees with that assessment nine years later but said he would not have changed what he did then.
“I think it ended the way it did and I don’t know, looking back, what I could have done different,” Hardister said. “Looking back, I think I handled it the best I could in the circumstances.”
He did say the experience did teach him some lessons.
“I think at the end of the day you have to really follow your conscience. And that can be hard when you have constituents, colleagues, conscience — different factors influencing you and it’s all coming to you at one time. I think you just have to make your best judgement and I think that’s your conscience. If you follow your conscience, it’s kind of hard to go wrong.”