Thom Tillis

Thom Tillis (born August 30, 1960, Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.) is an American politician who was elected as a Republican to the U.S. Senate in 2014 and began representing North Carolina in that body the following year.

Tillis’s family struggled financially and moved often, mostly in the Gulf Coast region. He earned high grades and served as president of his high-school class, but, without sufficient funds for college, he went to work as a warehouse clerk. During that time, he married and divorced his high-school girlfriend twice. In the late 1980s he married his second wife, Susan, and the couple had two children, He later earned a bachelor’s degree (1997) from the online University of Maryland University College and then worked as a management consultant and executive at IBM and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Tillis entered politics in 2003, when he successfully ran for the board of commissioners for Cornelius, a city in the greater Charlotte, North Carolina, metropolitan area, where he and his family had moved in 1998. He completed his two-year term in 2005, and the following year he was elected as a Republican to the North Carolina House of Representatives. Tillis took office in 2007, and he became known for his conservative views. Notably, he opposed same-sex marriage and abortion and advocated drug testing for welfare recipients. From 2011 to 2014 he served as speaker of the House.

In 2014 Tillis entered the U.S. Senate race, and his campaign platform included repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and requiring a balanced federal budget. After narrowly defeating the Democratic incumbent, Kay Hagan, he took office in 2015. Two years later Republican Donald Trump became president, and Tillis initially opposed some of Trump’s policies, including those on immigration. While Trump adopted a hard-line approach, Tillis favoured bipartisan legislation on immigration reform. In 2017 Tillis sought to protect special counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating possible interference by Russia in the 2016 election. Tillis took that position amid speculation that Trump wanted to fire Mueller.

However, Tillis subsequently became more aligned with the president. Notably, in March 2019 the senator changed his stance on Trump’s emergency declaration to fund a border wall, voting to support it. Several months later Trump endorsed Tillis’s 2020 reelection bid. The senator subsequently opposed the U.S. House of Representatives’ impeachment of Trump, who had been accused of withholding aid to Ukraine in order to pressure the country into opening a corruption investigation into Joe Biden (in 2020 Biden became the Democratic presidential nominee). In the Senate trial in February 2020, Tillis voted not to convict Trump, and the president was acquitted in a largely party-line vote. Shortly thereafter COVID-19 was designated a global pandemic, and in October 2020 Tillis tested positive for the disease. The following month he won a second term in a hotly contested election.