State Rep. Randy Stewart, a Democrat representing House District 25, faces an uphill re-election battle with Republican challenger Jeff Collins in a traditionally conservative district covering much of Nash County.

Collins’ driving issue is fixing the state’s fiscal problems. His website says his “first priority will be to work to restructure [North Carolina’s] tax code and realign our spending priorities to stimulate business and job growth and encourage people to stay here.”

Stewart does not have a campaign website. Nor did he respond to calls at his home, his work, or an e-mail requesting an interview.

Collins believes that the best way for government to handle the upcoming budget deficit is for the General Assembly to “budget like the private sector and do zero-based budgeting — starting from scratch every year.” He said a fundamental shift in mentality must occur.

Zero-based budgeting is something that needs to be done in every department and with every department, Collins said, and lawmakers must decide which state departments are necessary and which obsolete. “We don’t need to ask ‘how much can we spend?’ but ‘do we need to spend this?’,” he said.

On his website, Collins contends Stewart “voted for virtually every tax.”

Stewart supported the $20.6 billion budget this past session. North Carolina is expected to face at least a $3 billion budget deficit next year.

In an interview with the Rocky Mount Telegram, Stewart wonders where Republicans like Collins plan to make budget cuts. Stewart believes Republicans are over-reacting. “If you look around, the sky is not falling,” he said. “Things are not happening as fast as we want, but we are setting a course that is moving things in the right direction.”

Collins disagrees, emphasizing in an interview with Carolina Journal that North Carolina does not “have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.”

Another issue that concerns Collins is education. As a teacher for 12 years, he believes that parental involvement is key to student success. When it comes to schools, Collins is “for maximum parental choice,” and is a vocal supporter of lifting the 100-school cap on charter schools.

For his part, Stewart was a primary sponsor of legislation that would raise the cap from 100 to 106 charter schools. There was, however, “pretty big disagreement about whether this was a good bill or not” within the charter school community, said Dr. Terry Stoops, director of education studies at the John Locke Foundation.

“The bill would have allowed the state to dictate who could and could not attend certain charter schools,” Stoops said. The bill would have violated state statutes requiring charter schools to give all applicants an equal opportunity to enroll, he said. “In cases where the number of applicants outnumber seats, the law requires charter schools to use a fair and impartial lottery system. Leave it to lawmakers to try to ‘fix’ something that’s not broken.”

A third priority for Collins is working to exempt North Carolina from health insurance mandates required by the passage of the federal health care reform bill passed in March.

Collins sells health insurance and finds Congress requiring consumers to buy a product “atrocious,” even if he doesn’t sell the product. He says this is the first time Americans have been “required to purchase something just because we’re alive and breathing,” something that should not happen, and something that, as far as he can tell, is “not in the Constitution.”

House District 25 is rated R +2 by the Civitas Institute’s Partisan Index, which compares a district’s party registration with its voting behavior. At an Oct. 27 election forum sponsored by Civitas, Democratic consultant Brad Crone said he already has counted Stewart’s seat a loss.

Fundraising efforts are roughly equal for the candidates. In the first two quarters, Stewart raised $34,233.20 and Collins raised $31,375.95. At the end of the second quarter, Stewart only had $670.17 cash-on-hand while Collins’ cash-on-hand was $20,831.28.

Amanda Vuke is an editorial intern at Carolina Journal. Associate editor David N. Bass and contributor Hal Young contributed research to this report.