Carter was born in Dallas. Her mother was an elementary school teacher, and her father is an engineer turned entrepreneur, the owner of a small lawn-care company.
Carter excelled academically in school; her parents told her she would have to work her way through college. She graduated in 1996 from Plano East Senior High School and earned a full scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, where she graduated with highest honors with a Bachelor of Arts in Government and a Bachelor of Science in Journalism. During Carter's undergraduate years at UT she interned at the White House during the Clinton administration.
After UT, Carter graduated with a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School. She also obtained a master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. During Carter's years at Harvard, she became a Republican and contributed articles to USA Today. After law school, she returned to Dallas and served Collin County as an assistant district attorney.
Carter decided to run for office in the 102nd House District in Texas, taking on Democrat Carol Kent. Carter won by simply pointing to Kent's record as being far too liberal for her area of Dallas and that voters in the district were far more conservative than the person who was representing them. Carter won in 2010 with 54.63 percent of the vote, having unseated Kent by a ten-point margin of victory.[2][3]
Carter had announced on July 9, 2013 that she would be a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission in the Place 1 seat vacated by the outgoing incumbent, Barry Smitherman, who ran instead for Texas Attorney General in 2014 to replace the three-term incumbent, Greg Abbott, the 2014 gubernatorial nominee who seeks to succeed the retiring Governor Rick Perry.
However, on October 22, 2013, Carter announced that she was ending her bid for the Railroad Commission and would instead seek reelection to a third two-year term to her state House seat.[4] She was defeated in the Republican primary runoff by Linda Koop in May 2014.[5]
On November 29, 2016, Carter was named as a Transition Landing Team member [6] for the newly elected President Donald Trump in the Department of Justice.
