On Valentine's Day, 1946, Tommy Sweatt, a North Carolina man with a fifth-grade education and a teeth-grinding desire to amount to something, becomes the father of twin sons. He names them Thomas Edison Sweatt and Jack Dempsey Sweatt, and he drives them, from the cradle on, to be the best and the brightest. For a time they both are. When Jack, nicknamed "Lucky," contracts polio in the fall of 1954, he becomes figuratively invisible to his father. Tom Ed and Lucky's relationship is weakened by their father's obvious preference for the former, and as soon as he is able, Lucky disassociates himself from his family. It is now 1992: Tom Ed is the good ol' boy Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina in a heated race and Lucky returns with a mind to reconnect with his estranged family. Infidelity, deception, pride, and a rich man's secret wrath conspire to turn the election - and the fortunes of the Sweatt family - in directions no one could have foreseen.