Kay Ruthven Hagan ( /ˈheɪɡən/; born May 26, 1953) is the junior United States Senator from North Carolina and a member of the Democratic Party. Previously, she was in the North Carolina Senate.
When Hagan defeated Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole in the 2008 United States Senate election, she became the first woman to defeat a female incumbent in a Senate election.
Hagan was born Janet Kay Ruthven in Shelby, North Carolina, the daughter of Jea...
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Kay Ruthven Hagan ( /ˈheɪɡən/; born May 26, 1953) is the junior United States Senator from North Carolina and a member of the Democratic Party. Previously, she was in the North Carolina Senate.
When Hagan defeated Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole in the 2008 United States Senate election, she became the first woman to defeat a female incumbent in a Senate election.
Hagan was born Janet Kay Ruthven in Shelby, North Carolina, the daughter of Jeanette (née Chiles), a homemaker, and Josie Perry "Joe" Ruthven, a tire salesman. Both her father and her older brother served in the Navy. She spent most of her childhood in Lakeland, Florida, of which her father later became mayor. She also spent summers on her grams' farm in Chesterfield, South Carolina, where she helped string tobacco and harvest watermelons. As a child, Hagan engaged in her earliest political activity: placing bumper stickers on cars for her uncle, Florida Governor and U.S. Senator Lawton Chiles. In the 1970s, she was an...
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