How Destin Hall Rose From Humble Beginnings to House Speaker

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The city of Lenoir sits in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, close to the hardwood forests that fueled its rise as the self-proclaimed “Furniture Capital of the South.” Families like Broyhill, Bernhardt, Kincaid, and Harper became brand names as their factories hummed with armies of workers from as far away as Tennessee. Furniture barons brought jobs, prosperity, and generations of civic leadership.

But by the time Destin Hall was coming of age two decades ago, all that was changing.

Overseas competition sparked by new trade agreements had begun decimating the furniture industry. Between 2002 and 2010, Caldwell County lost more than 10,000 jobs, pushing the county’s unemployment rate to nearly 18 percent. Factories and showrooms went vacant. Poverty rose. So did drug and alcohol addiction, something that hit close to home for Hall.

Over the years, he would leave and then return to the county that shaped him. When he first ran there in 2016 as a 29-year-old underdog, voters elected him to the state House. He’s been re-elected four times.

Last week, he stood on the dais next to his wife and took the oath as speaker of the House, becoming one of the state’s three top elected officials. At 37, he’s also one of America’s youngest legislative leaders and, according to Taylor Huhn of the National Conference of State Legislatures, the youngest North Carolina speaker since 1819.

Hall is also the state’s first Republican speaker never to have served in the minority. He inherits a chamber where his party lost its supermajority by a single seat, which could make it harder to override vetoes by new Democratic Gov. Josh Stein. He could face big decisions on issues such as Medicaid funding and aid to mountain counties still recovering from Hurricane Helene.  

A lawyer, Hall had been the speaker-in-waiting since fall 2023, when he emerged as the choice of GOP colleagues. But there was a time when his future seemed much less certain. 

“But for my grandparents and the grace of God, there’s no way that I would have been in the General Assembly at all,” he said on a 2021 podcast.

Hall grew up in the small town of Gamewell, just outside Lenoir. His father was a builder. His mother was a beautician who read to him every night. But like his father, she struggled with drugs and alcohol. “There were periods of time she’d just go missing,” he told The Assembly. (Through a spokesman, his parents declined to comment.) 

From the age of 8, Hall spent most of his time with his grandparents, all four of whom lived nearby. At some point, he said, the Department of Social Services intervened. By 13, he was living full-time with his grandparents. They were blue-collar workers who provided stability and Depression-era values. One grandmother used old coffee cans as storage containers.

Hall’s election as speaker has afforded him an opening to reflect on where he came from, and how a boy of modest means was guided to adulthood by grandparents whose homes offered kindness and stability. 

“It seems to me you get two types of folks in those situations,” Hall said, sitting in a conference room at his law office. “You get people who sort of go down the same road [as his parents], and you get people who just make it a point never to go down that same road. … I didn’t take any risks of going down that path.”

The Closer

The 2004 Furniture City Classic took place on the soccer pitch at Hibriten High School. Hall was in goal for West Caldwell, which had never beaten its crosstown rival. With the score tied at the end of regulation that night, the teams went to a shootout. They traded scores until Hibriten came down to its last shot, needing a goal to tie. Hall dived for a save, winning the match for West Caldwell. His teammates swarmed him. 

“I got lucky and guessed which way to jump,” Hall said. He “was a heck of a goalie,” recalled teammate Dana Smith.

Wearing No. 5, Hall also played third base for the baseball team, which won the Mountain Valley Conference regular season and tournament championships his senior year. “[He] always put the team first and just wanted to help the team win in any way possible,” said coach Scott Herman. “Always had a smile on his face and never had any bad days.”

When they weren’t on the fields, Hall and his friends would swim in nearby Wilson Creek, party on Johns River, or hang out in the Taco Bell parking lot. Sometimes friends would crash on his bedroom floor. As a senior whose blond hair fell over his ears, he won a yearbook distinction: Best Hair.

By the time Hall graduated in 2005, the furniture industry–and with it the local economy–had begun hemorrhaging jobs. “That is seared into my mind, watching the economy falter,” Hall said. He faced a choice.

“I wanted to stay here if I could,” he said, “but I had the impression, like a lot of young folks, that I would have to go to Charlotte or Raleigh or Winston in order to make a living.”

He went up the road to Appalachian State, the first in his family to attend college. After double majoring in finance and insurance, he graduated in 2009 into a national economy staggered from the worst recession in decades. He took a job with an insurance broker in Boone. But, he said, “I knew pretty quickly being an insurance underwriter was not my cup of tea.”

He decided on law school. He started at Elon University and transferred after a year to Wake Forest, where he made an impression.

“He’s one of the very best and brightest students that I ever taught,” recalled Joseph Anderson, who taught trial practice. “He has a natural ability to perceive the essence of a complex issue and simplify it. … He’s quick on his feet, articulate, rational, clear-headed. He’s a force to be reckoned with.”

On Wake’s mock trial team, professor Matthew Breeding made Hall the closer, the one who wrapped up a case. Once, they were at a competition in a Raleigh courtroom when the opposing attorney’s hands began shaking with nerves. The easel he was using suddenly fell to the floor.

“Just instinctively Destin got up and helped the guy put the easel back up,” Breeding said. “He just saw another person struggling, and his instinct was to help.”

After graduating from law school in 2014, Hall joined a small practice in Charlotte, where he handled personal injury and criminal defense cases, according to managing partner Matthew Flatow. After about a year, he returned to Lenoir in part to care for ailing grandparents.

“My concern coming back was, could you make money here?” Hall said. “Then I realized this was a legal desert. … Caldwell is like a lot of other areas in our state. … A lot of the younger folks [leave], and they don’t come back at all. I told myself if I’m going to stay here, I’m going to do everything I can to make the place better.”

Politics was also on his mind. Republicans had taken control of the General Assembly in 2011. For an ambitious Republican, reliably red Caldwell County offered more opportunity than heavily Democratic Mecklenburg.

“He was very transparent that he wanted to be in politics,” said Flatow. “That was always his ambition.”

Young Turks

In 2016, Republican George Robinson was widely expected to win re-election to the House from Caldwell County. Party leaders had appointed the 70-year-old former lawmaker to a vacant seat the year before. Robinson previously had served seven terms in the 1980s and 1990s.

In Hall, he faced a primary opponent who was 28 and new to politics. The Lenoir News-Topic called it “a generational clash.” 

Hall was the underdog. “Nobody ever really gave him a chance to win,” Jeff Branch, a Caldwell County commissioner, told The Assembly.

That year, another GOP newcomer was running for the state Senate in the district that included Caldwell. Deanna Ballard was 37. She’d worked in the Bush administration but had never run for office. Her primary opponent was the longtime president of the local community college.

Ballard and Hall had both been E.A. Morris Fellows, a program for emerging leaders sponsored by the conservative John Locke Foundation. They found something else in common while campaigning.

“People underestimated us because we were young and had not run for local office,” Ballard said. 

Hall knocked on doors and added a twist. “He was the new-age politician a lot of old people had never seen before,” Branch said. “He was doing more on social media back in the day than us old farts do. … Destin made a believer out of everybody.”

Both newcomers won, Hall with nearly 60 percent of the vote. He was unopposed in the general election. Ballard also easily won that November.

Hall is “an approachable guy,” Ballard said. “That’s part of what I’d say is his charm. He can go from one end of the spectrum talking to a CEO [or to] a small businessman.”

When Hall got to Raleigh, other newly elected Republicans elected him freshman leader. It was the start of a rapid ascent.

“I wanted to stay here if I could, but I had the impression, like a lot of young folks, that I would have to go to Charlotte or Raleigh or Winston in order to make a living.”

Destin Hall, House Speaker

By his second term, he would chair the Redistricting and Election Law committees as well as a Judiciary subcommittee. Then-Speaker Tim Moore also named him co-chair of the powerful Rules Committee, which manages the flow of House legislation.

He later became the sole chair when GOP Rep. David Lewis resigned after pleading guilty to federal charges involving financial irregularities. Hall became the state’s first millennial to hold a top legislative position. Chairing Rules was “like being speaker on training wheels,” he told The Assembly.

Hall has been a key player on some controversial legislation.

As House Redistricting Committee chairman in 2021, Hall often said lawmakers were “being as transparent as I believe we possibly can” in drawing new congressional and legislative districts, which later were successfully challenged in court as partisan gerrymanders. 

At trial, Allison Riggs, then a lawyer for Common Cause (and now a Democratic state Supreme Court justice) disputed Hall’s claims of transparency. She accused Hall of using maps “drawn behind closed doors,” suggesting outside consultants were involved. Hall said he’d simply glanced at “concept maps” early in the process and that they played no role in the final version. 

In 2023, he sponsored a bill to force county sheriffs to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. It passed the House but stalled in the Senate. Last year, a new version, which came to include more than $463 million in private school vouchers, passed but was vetoed by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat. Lawmakers overrode the veto in November.

By late 2023, it was clear that Moore was planning a run for Congress. GOP lawmakers began looking for a new speaker.

Podcast News

In late October 2023, Brian Lewis was strolling outside the House chamber when he spotted a pair of GOP lawmakers huddled in conversation. John Bell, the House majority leader, waved him over. “Who do you have on the podcast this week?” Bell asked. Lewis, a lobbyist who co-hosts “Do Politics Better,” mentioned another lawmaker.

“Can you bump him?” Bell asked.

“What’s going on?” Lewis said.

“You’ll know tonight,” Bell replied.

After meeting with their members that night, Bell, Hall, and Reps. Brenden Jones and Jason Saine walked the few blocks to Lewis’ office, where they crowded into an upstairs studio. The news was that the caucus had settled on Hall as the next speaker. “We don’t consider ourselves journalists,” Lewis told The Assembly, “but we felt we had some news here.”

Earlier that month, U.S. House Republicans had pushed out Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and they struggled through several rounds of acrimonious voting before electing Mike Johnson as speaker. “With what was happening on the national level … we didn’t want that scenario playing out within our caucus,” Saine said.

Bell was taking on a new role in his company. He and Saine both had children. Saine remembers turning to Hall and saying, “Destin, are you ready to do this thing? He said, ‘I’m ready.’”

A year later, in November 2024, the caucus formally selected Hall as its next speaker. This month, the full House made it official. In many ways, it marked a dramatic departure from legislative tradition.

“The tradition was young people were ignored, and you had to serve a long time” to get a leadership post, recalled Gerry Cohen, a former longtime legislative staffer. Moore, who was elected speaker in 2015, had served six terms. Thom Tillis, now a U.S. senator, had only been in the state House for two terms but was 50 years old when he became speaker in 2011.

Jordan Shaw, who served as an aide to Speaker Tillis and now advises Hall, sees similarities between the two.  

“Both these guys don’t come out of privileged childhoods or wealthy backgrounds,” Shaw said. “They both had to work hard for everything they’ve gotten.”

GOP Rep. Allen Chesser said, “The fact that [Hall’s] been able to rise fairly quickly and doesn’t have a lot of enemies waiting to stab him in the back speaks to his character.”

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have critics. Even before his ascension as speaker, Hall was a part of a GOP leadership team that sometimes bypassed the meandering committee process and moved quickly to enact major legislation with limited debate. 

That included pushing through a measure in November that stripped powers from the incoming governor and attorney general, both Democrats. Former Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, told reporters it was an unconstitutional power grab. The measure, which was attached to a relief package for Western North Carolina, was introduced and approved along party-line votes in two days while Republicans still had a supermajority in both chambers. 

But colleagues say policy disagreements with Hall don’t get personal.

“You’re going to have your fights, your disagreements,” said House Minority Leader Robert Reives. “But it’s not personal. They end when the fight ends.”

Democratic Rep. Pricey Harrison finds Hall “very courteous and not difficult to work with.” Sometimes, she said, “It’s a challenge because he has a caucus that has strong views that aren’t always compatible with what I think the people of North Carolina want.”

For his part, Hall wants to work with Stein. “I’m going to do all I can to have a good-faith relationship with the new governor,” he said. “We’re obviously going to disagree on a bunch of things, and that’s OK. … You can disagree with another lawyer, but that doesn’t mean you cuss him out.”

This session the General Assembly might have to deal with big issues.

The Kaiser Foundation, for example, said North Carolina is among nine states that would be most affected if the Trump administration cuts funding for Medicaid expansion. Nearly 600,000 people (including 5,600 in Caldwell County) are getting benefits since the state program expanded in 2023. The federal government pays 90 percent of the costs.

Cooper vetoed more than 100 bills during his two terms as governor. If and when Stein vetoes a bill, Hall is confident that he can corral enough Democrats to give Republicans a working supermajority.

“The fact that [Hall’s] been able to rise fairly quickly and doesn’t have a lot of enemies waiting to stab him in the back speaks to his character.”

Rep. Allen Chesser

Insiders say they expect Hall to differ from his predecessor in style if not substance. Lawmakers often complained about short-notice schedules, saying they couldn’t make personal or other plans because they never knew when they might be summoned.

“We became an almost full-time legislature on call,” said longtime Democratic Rep. Becky Carney.

Joe Stewart, a lobbyist for the Independent Insurance Agents association and former political director of the N.C. Chamber, expects a more disciplined approach to legislating. “That’s going to be the hallmark of his tenure,” Stewart said. “The House will be conducted in a much more businesslike way.”

John Hood, a Locke Foundation board member, got to know Hall when he helped lead his 2015 class of E.A. Morris fellows. “My impression is that Tim [Moore] has always been more gregarious,” Hood said. “Destin strikes me as a different personality type … a strategic thinker and good planner.”

Hall’s new job is just one of the big changes in his life. Last year he married Madison Skeens, an attorney and former lobbyist for the N.C. School Boards Association.

The night before the black-tie wedding in southwest Virginia, a groomsman fell off the back of a pickup in which Hall was riding. Cory Bryson, a lobbyist, was seriously injured and lost vision in one eye. Though no charges were filed, The Assembly reported a 911 call that included a voice saying, “You need to get the alcohol out of the car.” 

Bryson, who is back at work, attended Hall’s installation as his guest. “I consider myself privileged to be a friend of Destin Hall; I’m honored to have worked for him,” he wrote to The Assembly. Bryson, who was also raised by his grandparents, said Hall’s background “gives him compassion for seniors and kids like us.”

Hall will have another new challenge soon. He and his wife are expecting their first child this spring. House members, he said, “can feel safe about not being in Raleigh on May 3.”

A Long Journey

Caldwell County has begun to rebound from its economic troubles, slowly diversifying with industries such as pharmaceuticals and an expanding Google data center. Its unemployment rate of 3.8 percent is just slightly higher than the state average. Hall remembers the hard times, though.

“It probably makes me appreciate a little bit more the folks who grow up without great circumstances and the challenges that can cause,” he said. “So I think it makes me more understanding of folks in a lot of ways [and] empathize with people who’ve had difficult backgrounds or childhoods. …

“My goal is to try to help the everyday working folks in this state because those are the folks we can help the most.”

On a cold Wednesday last week, Hall was back in the House, wearing a navy pinstriped suit, starched white shirt, and crisply knotted red tie. His mother and grandparents were in the audience, which buzzed with pride and optimism on the first day of the legislative session. Spouses, children, grandchildren, and parents entered the chamber and held Bibles as lawmakers took an oath to uphold the state and U.S. constitutions and to pledge allegiance to North Carolina.  

Shortly before 12:30 p.m., Hall walked on the red carpet in the center of the chamber to the speaker’s lectern and to a standing ovation from all 119 other members. There he was greeted by the state’s three most recent Republican speakers: Moore, Tillis, and Harold Brubaker.

It was a short walk that capped a long journey, one that began in the foothills of the Blue Ridge with grandparents who believed in him and instilled a determination to achieve.

“Only in America,” Hall told the House, “could somebody with a background that I have and a childhood that I had wind up … becoming speaker of the North Carolina House.”