Thirty years ago this month, it looked like the North Carolina Republican Party might have a bruising primary for the nomination to replace Gov. Jim Hunt, who was nearing the end of his second term and gearing up for his historic battle with Sen. Jesse Helms.

In fact, it was Jesse Helms who helped prevent an intra-party feud in 1984 — and therefore helped Congressman Jim Martin become Governor Martin.

Martin had served 12 years in the U.S. House and six years on the Mecklenburg County commission before announcing his candidacy for North Carolina governor on August 18, 1983. The time had come, Martin told a Charlotte audience, “to strike out on a new career with no guarantee of success, but rather the assurance of a grinding, difficult, uphill campaign.”

The challenges to a victorious Republican campaign for governor in 1984 did seem daunting. The GOP had enjoyed only one such victory in modern times, in 1972, as Jim Holshouser grabbed onto Richard Nixon’s coattails. Although Ronald Reagan would go on to win an easy reelection in 1984, that prospect wasn’t so obvious in mid-1983 with the country just beginning to emerge from a deep recession. Furthermore, none of the potential Republican candidates was known statewide.

For these reasons and others, Jim Martin had told supporters as recently as 1982 that he wasn’t interested in running for governor. For months, the only Republican actively working for his party’s nomination was state Sen. Cass Ballenger of Catawba County, who would ultimately withdraw. But behind the scenes, Martin and his top political advisor, Brad Hays, began in early 1983 to plan a campaign. By August, they were ready to announce it.

The political organization that had twice elected Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate, the Congressional Club, wasn’t ready to accept it. Both Martin and Ballenger were westerners, aligned with the Holshouser wing of the Republican Party. Club leaders Tom Ellis and Carter Wrenn were far from satisfied with the options.

The Helms and Holshouser factions had sparred multiple times during the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1976, for example, the Club backed Ronald Reagan for the presidential nomination while Holshouser, Martin, and Congressman Jim Broyhill (whom Ballenger would eventually replace in Congress) supported the incumbent, Gerald Ford. In response, the Congressional Club helped block the three officeholders from becoming delegates to the 1976 Republican national convention.

In 1980, the Club had recruited and run the party’s top three statewide candidates: John East for U.S. Senate, Bev Lake for governor, and Bill Cobey for lieutenant governor. Only East, an East Carolina University professor, was successful. Cobey, a former athletic director at UNC-Chapel Hill, was on the ballot again in 1982 as the GOP nominee for the 4th Congressional District. He lost again.

As Ballenger and then Martin made their intentions clear, Ellis and Wrenn decided to advance another option for the 1984 gubernatorial nomination, Bill Cobey. “They were portraying [Martin] as not being conservative enough,” Cobey later said. But a key person didn’t agree with their assessment — Jesse Helms himself. A week after Martin’s campaign announcement, Helms spoke in Gastonia. During his remarks, the senator suggested that an ideal ticket for North Carolina Republicans in 1984 would be Martin for governor and Cobey for lieutenant governor.

The Club still wasn’t on board. In early September 1983, it sent out a fundraising letter that pitched Cobey for governor and warned Martin wouldn’t be electable in a statewide race. Former state GOP chairman Bob Shaw, a Martin supporter, was outraged. “I feel that Mr. Ellis should be reminded that without Sen. Helms … the Congressional Club would have difficulty in raising enough money to run a city council race in Turkey, N.C.” Shaw wrote in a Sept. 17 letter to the editor.

Whether the Club would proceed with running Cobey against Martin despite Helms’ comments became a moot point when Cobey asked to see Martin in person. The two met in late September at a Ramada Inn in Burlington. Despite what some Helms supporters were saying about Martin, “he was very conservative and I found out at that meeting that he was,” Cobey said. He decided to endorse Martin and ran for Congress again, this time successfully. Cobey would later serve in Martin’s Cabinet as secretary of what became the Department of Environment, Health, and Natural Resources.

Still, without Helms’ early endorsement, Martin might have had to consume scarce resources winning the GOP nomination. Instead, it would be the Democratic nominee, Attorney Gen. Rufus Edmisten, who sustained damage from a bitter party primary. That’s one reason Martin defeated Edmisten in the general election — but that’s a story for another day.

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Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation, is writing a biography of former North Carolina Gov. Jim Martin.