In a North Carolina primary season crowded with Republican candidates, state House District 34 in north-central Wake County is one of the most crowded. Four GOP candidates are throwing elbows for a chance to face three-term Democratic Rep. Grier Martin in the midterm election this fall.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Jamie Earp dropped out of the race late Friday afternoon, after this story went to press.]

That would have been a far-fetched idea four years ago. Democrats outnumber Republicans in voter registration in the district, and Martin won there with a 60-percent majority the last two election cycles. But the GOP hopes to ride a national anti-Democrat tide and reclaim the seat this year.

It’s one of just three May 4 primaries with four contenders, raising the possibility of a runoff if no candidate receives more than 40 percent of the vote.

Frontrunner Steve Henion, a Raleigh realtor, hopes it doesn’t come down to that. He plugs his business experience as a selling point in the race, and he’s the most willing of the four candidates to criticize his competitors.

“None of the other guys in this primary have experience running a business other than a little,” he said. “What I talk about is my core. It comes from within me. I’m not worried about a poll. I’m not worried about a current trend.”

Jamie Earp, a campaign worker for several top Republicans including former U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole and 2004 gubernatorial candidate Patrick Ballantine, says his political experience gives him the best chance of winning in November.

“At the end of the day, we can’t make these changes, we can’t govern, if we can’t win,” he said.

Clinical researcher Brian Tinga is coming at the race from the opposite end of the spectrum, casting himself as the political outsider.

“I’m not a political operative. I haven’t made my career in politics,” he said. “I’m legitimately doing this because I feel that North Carolina has some extreme challenges ahead. I want to see the course corrected.”

A fourth candidate, former police officer J.H. Ross, has the most experience vying for the seat. He’s filed as a Republican every election cycle since 2002 without success. He says the Democrats “have kicked common sense to the curb” and that “just about anyone” would be better in office.

“The honest, hard working North Carolinians feel that they’re not being heard,” he said.

Digging dirt

Henion handily bested his opponents in a straw poll taken at the Republican Party’s Wake County convention, garnering 71 percent of the vote. But his frontrunner status also has opened him to more scrutiny.

In mid-April, the News & Observer of Raleigh reported that Henion has a history of minor tax and legal problems, including a lien placed on his house by the IRS in 2007 that was dropped a few months later.

Henion blasted the N&O’s coverage in a blog post on his Web site March 18, several weeks before the story ran.

“We are seven weeks from a primary with four committed Republican contestants eager to take on an established liberal elitist,” Henion wrote. “Our state, in the upcoming historic elections, has 170 races. And the News & Observer wants to know if Steve Henion bounced a check twenty-five years ago?”

Earp declined to comment on the story directly, saying voters should draw their own conclusions from Henion’s background. But Earp also had had to play defense after the N&O reported that he was convicted of drunk driving in 2003.

“That is an issue that I don’t think will really be an issue,” Earp said at a candidate forum Thursday. “I think the real issue is going to be how we can get our economy moving, how we can create jobs.”

Pressing issues

Like most other districts, fiscal issues have dominated debate in the primary. Unemployment stood at 8.9 percent in Wake County in March, 2 percentage points better than the state average. Republicans say that lowering taxes and easing regulation will reignite the potential of private enterprise.

That’s something Grier Martin hasn’t been doing, Henion said. “[Martin] has done nothing to create jobs,” he said. “He doesn’t have the tools in order to accomplish that. He hasn’t done it in the last six years, and the reason is that he doesn’t have private sector experience.”

All four candidates oppose the Obama administration’s health care overhaul, passed by Congress in March, and would consider supporting state legislation, which Republican leaders plan to introduce in the short session, that would curb federal health insurance mandates.

“What the legislative leaders are trying to do is good in terms of making sure that North Carolinians are not being forced to buy products that they don’t need,” Earp said.

In March, Tinga sent an open letter to state Attorney General Roy Cooper encouraging him to join a multi-state lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the health care bill. Cooper has since declined to join the suit.

On the question of taxation, Tinga panned the income tax as predatory but said he would support expanding the state sales tax to cover services. The other candidates disagree.

“Taxing services is just another way for them to waste money,” Ross said.

David N. Bass is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.