This story originally published in Carolina Public Press.
Hundreds of candidates are vying for a seat in the state legislature this November. But political watchers don’t need to look much past Raleigh to find plenty of political intrigue. This cycle, Wake County is home to three of the state’s toss-up legislative races — two currently held by Republicans, one by a Democrat.
A Rematch in Northern Wake
Democratic family law attorney Evonne Hopkins lost to Republican litigation attorney State Rep. Mike Schietzelt, R-Wake, by three percentage points in their first matchup, two years ago. Hopkins blames the map.
Between the 2022 and 2024 election, State House District 35 underwent major changes. In the 2022 election, the northern Wake County district encompassed Rolesville and Wake Forest. A Democrat won the seat. But after the legislature redrew maps in 2023, the district lost part of Wake Forest, extended further west to the county’s edge and picked up redder portions of the county.
A now-dismissed redistricting lawsuit claimed the district “unnecessarily split” Wake Forest, “bobb(ed) and weav(ed) with seemingly no rhyme or reason” and included fewer people than it should have, effectively giving greater voting power predominantly to white residents.
The gerrymandering frustrated Hopkins, and so, when the House Democratic Caucus recruited her, she decided to run. She lost, and the seat flipped to Republican control.
Now, the pair are set for a repeat battle in northern Wake County. The map is the same, but the circumstances are different. Schietzelt has a legislative record to run on. As is typical in midterm election years, the president’s party is on the backfoot, as voters associate national politics with local candidates. The race is considered a toss-up, according to the Civitas Partisan Index.
On a recent Saturday morning in Wake Forest, Hopkins knocked on voters’ doors. When they opened them, she told them that every vote — and action — counted.
“This is a race that’s going to be won by razor-thin margins because it’s super gerrymandered,” Hopkins told one voter. “So what we need from you is really you to tell people that you met us.”
The district, she told them, would decide not only who represented northern Wake County, but the state’s overall political lean. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee named it one of their top ten legislative races to watch across the country.
As it stands, Republicans hold 71 seats in the State House, one shy from a supermajority. State Democrats want to extend that buffer so that Republicans need more than one or two swing voters to override the governor’s vetoes.
Hopkins spoke to Felicia, a mother of three, in the shade of her garage. Felicia said she was “overwhelmed” by everything going on and expressed concern about local education options.
Hopkins told her that the legislature, under Republican control for the past 15 years, hasn’t properly funded North Carolina public schools.
Since 2013, the state has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into Opportunity Scholarships, vouchers given to students to help pay for private school tuition and fees. While the program was originally available only to students of a certain household income who previously attended public schools, those restrictions were lifted in 2023.
Many Democrats, including Hopkins, argue that Opportunity Scholarships take needed taxpayer money away from public schools and redirect it to less accountable private schools that end up raising their tuition anyways.
“This is basically a money grab situation by private institutions, and not an education opportunity for students,” she said.
If elected, Hopkins would support adding income caps, accountability measures and private school tuition caps to the program.
Schietzelt supports Opportunity Scholarships, but potentially with some restrictions. He’s also made public education a major part of his legislative agenda. While money is an important part of the equation, he said he’s focused on what else raises student performance.
This session, he sponsored a bill that would have restricted cellphone use during instructional time in schools — while his version didn’t become law, a similar bill did.
Alongside State Rep. Erin Paré, R-Wake, he sponsored a bill that originally would have raised public school teacher starting salaries to $50,000 and reinstated master’s pay. That raise, albeit a few thousand dollars lower, ended up in the final budget.
“We tried to show from the outset that we were serious about making investments in public education, that we were serious about those investments going all the way down to the classroom,” he said.
Schietzelt knows his ride to reelection is not guaranteed. But he stands by his belief that his district is “pragmatic and thoughtful,” and that his record makes his pragmatism clear.
In this year’s budget, he helped secure a few wins for northern Wake County, including a new DMV office, a workforce development program at DeBois High School and HVAC system renovations at a Boys and Girls Club.
But his record goes beyond bills, he told Carolina Public Press. Sometimes, his greatest impact is starting a conversation, he said.
For example, Schietzelt said a budget amendment he ran that was ultimately axed started a conversation with the Department of Transportation about not using tolling to pay for a long-awaited Capital Boulevard expansion to a six-lane highway extending from Raleigh to Wake Forest.
As Raleigh’s neighbor, northern Wake County is growing. Its infrastructure isn’t necessarily keeping up.
Hopkins wants smarter development. She feels that the district isn’t prepared for heavy rainfall or drought. She also would invest more into public transportation to relieve some congestion.
“We can’t just keep building and not think about how we’re moving people, how we’re developing, how we’re building our communities, both from a housing perspective, but also from a safety perspective,” she said.
Schietzelt also weighed in on the recent proposed WakeMed-Atrium merger, calling for Wake County commissioners to pause and listen to the public before voting to approve the deal. Their decision was expected later Monday.
“I’ve never seen one of these hospital consolidations that ended up lowering prices and improving quality. We need to slow down until we have all the information,” he wrote in a social media post.
After Gov. Josh Stein secured a series of concessions from Atrium intended to keep prices low, he announced that he does not oppose the deal. Hopkins feels similarly. She said it would expand health care, bring investment into Wake County and create health care jobs.
“Protecting affordability and ensuring WakeMed remains accountable to our community must remain priorities,” she said. “I trust our commissioners to weigh the benefits and concerns and make the decision they believe best serves the people of Wake County.”
Paré Seeks Reelection in Southern Wake
There’s really only one way to look at it, in Wake County Republican State Rep. Erin Paré’s mind: if a Republican wins the State House District 37 seat, they’ll have a seat at the table when funding decisions are made. If a Democrat wins, they won’t.
Paré wasn’t sure whether she wanted to run again after six years in the legislature. But after some soul-searching, she concluded that she needed to finish the projects she’s started in southern Wake County — including Fuquay-Varina and Holly Springs.
Democratic candidate Winn Decker is running against Paré. A son of two public teachers, he’s worked in the education space for a decade, and currently owns his own company helping education and nonprofit organizations with strategic planning. He’s been at the policy table in a nonpartisan capacity in the past, but he thinks it’s time to share more of his perspective.
District 37 does not follow one party line; 45% of its registered voters are unaffiliated, followed by 30% Republican and 24% Democratic. Two years ago, Republicans had an estimated three-point advantage, which Paré overshot with a six-point lead. This cycle, election analysts consider it a tie.
Paré thinks it’s a little more on her side.
One of her main goals is to address the district’s growing pains. The district needs enough water and wastewater infrastructure to meet growing residential and commercial needs, for one.
“Those are conversations that I’ve been very involved in over the years, and they’re kind of hitting a critical point right now, where we need to really focus on the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, and what that’s going to look like as far as the needs for water from an economic development standpoint,” Paré said.
In the 2021 and 2023 budgets, she won funding for water and sewer projects in the district, as well as road and bridge projects. As one of the House’s appropriations chairs, she said she is in a position to continue bringing money back to the area if elected.
For Decker, while stormwater drainage, road expansion and water infrastructure are needed, infrastructure also extends to public education. He recently talked to a mother of a 3-year-old who was concerned about whether there would be adequate public school funding to support her child’s education in a few years. She wasn’t sure whether she would have to move.
Decker said the state needs to fully fund public education, including by raising teacher pay and setting some limits on Opportunity Scholarships. He pointed out that a small percentage of scholarship recipients actually came from public schools — about 11.5%, according to a Department of Public Instruction report.
“Other folks’ opportunities cannot come at the expense of public students,” he said.
When Paré meets voters, they tell her about their rising property taxes. Conveniently, she’s been working on the issue for a while. She is one of the House’s property tax committee chairs, sponsored the constitutional amendment that would establish a property tax levy limit for local governments and filed several bills that would have closed property tax exemption loopholes and expanded current exemptions.
It’s a complex subject, and it will take a dual approach, she said. One one hand, the state needs to consider expanding current exemptions for seniors, disabled veterans and other groups. On the other side, she wants to cut back on “overly generous exemptions” for nonprofits. On the local level, she said she prefers creating some kind of formula instead of a property tax revenue cap, so that counties and municipalities can be transparent and predictable while maintaining core services.
Decker doesn’t think the proposed constitutional amendment does much more than “throw some red meat out there” to get Republicans to turn out in November. He added that the state should not cap counties’ ability to collect property taxes.
“We all value living in communities that are safe, that have quality public education, that have quality public safety; those are all things that are funded through property taxes.”
Decker suggested that if the state fully funded public education and paid teachers at a higher rate, then property tax revenue localities spend on education could be spent elsewhere, and taxes would decrease. Generally, he wants localities to have more control over their policy decisions, instead of the state putting its thumb on the scale.
Paré said Decker was “oversimplifying a very complex problem.” The state isn’t solely responsible for education costs; they don’t pay for teacher supplements, school construction or maintenance, for example.
“That’s a convenient political talking point that doesn’t really match what reality is,” she said.
As a public-school mother, Paré pushed for teacher raises in the 2026 budget. She thinks moving forward, the state should consider reforming the teacher pay scale to benefit veteran teachers.
In 2023, Paré sponsored the Fairness in Women’s Sports bill, which banned people born male from playing on girls’ or women’s sports teams. Some campaign material highlights this legislation, and contrasts Decker as a “transgender activist.”
Paré said she thinks Decker is on the wrong side of the issue, as evidenced by his LGBTQ+ Victory Fund endorsement.
“Protecting girls’ sports is a fairness issue, a safety issue, and a common sense issue,” she said. “And as a sponsor of the bill, I don’t want to see this bill rolled back.”
Decker isn’t paying that criticism any attention.
“I live my life and run this race based off of human dignity and starting with love,” he said. “And that’s why I’m in this — because I want to do good for people and make our community a better place.”
A Somewhat Open N.C. Senate Seat
State Sen. Haseeb Fatmi, D-Wake, just became a lawmaker four months ago, after replacing outgoing State Sen. Terence Everitt. Now, he has to defend his seat.
State Senate District 18 is the third toss-up race including Wake County. It also encompasses all of Granville County, to the north. The district is home to 44% registered unaffiliated voters, 29% Republicans and 27% Democrats, but has been held by a Democrat since 2020.
Fatmi, an employment attorney with experience in civil rights law, joined the legislature just in time for veto overrides. He quickly learned what it was like to be in a working superminority. Republican lawmakers didn’t bother to take his caucus’ opinion into account, or even give them a preview of legislation before it was almost time to vote, he said.
He’s eager to keep the seat to increase Democrats’ chances of having some semblance of power.
“If we have the power of the veto, (Republicans) have to speak to us, and that’s very very significant,” he said.
Fatmi faces Republican Chris Stock, an attorney and former lobbyist with experience in several areas of state government.
Stock said he became frustrated after spending long days in Raleigh and then hearing from people in his community that they felt like their needs weren’t being met. In Stock’s view, they didn’t have a legislative advocate who had the ability to get the job done. He couldn’t sit on the sidelines anymore.
In contrast, Stock said his experience and pre-existing relationships will allow him to break through for Granville County and northern Wake.
“This is a part time legislature,” he said. “It really requires people to hit the ground running on day one and being able to execute on priorities and provide common sense solutions.”
Stock was named one of the top 25 corporate lobbyists by the North State Journal in 2024. His portfolio included counties and municipalities, the North Carolina Association of School Administrators and several clean and sustainable energy groups.
If history is a measure, the race will be close. In 2024, Everitt, a Democrat, won the seat by 128 votes, the narrowest margin in the state. Anything could make a difference.
One major change from 2024 is an additional early voting site in northern Granville County, in rural Stovall. Stock said he heard people drove 45 minutes to get to the closest early voting site before the change.
The county election board also moved a downtown Oxford site 5 miles outside the city. Fatmi noted that the downtown site is where the largest African-American population in Granville county lives. He doesn’t think that’s a coincidence. However, he thinks the move will backfire, and galvanize more of the voters in the area to show up at the polls.
State Senate District 18 is “candidate-specific” and very purple, Stock said. So, he’s trying to make the race about the issues. He noted that campaign ads against Fatmi attempting to tie him to Hamas were not from him or approved by his team.
Like in other Wake County races, growth is at the forefront. Specifically, the district is grappling with water access and cleanliness. Granville County belongs to a shared water system originating at Kerr Lake, but there’s been recent drama over who can claim how much. Fatmi said they’re trying to reform and regionalize the system now.
Stock said he thinks the state needs to cover some of the costs of providing clean water to everyone, since Granville County’s tax base isn’t large enough to do the job. Water is at the crux of economic development, he said. Both Stock and Fatmi agree that data centers should not locate in either Wake or Granville counties considering their water issues.
They also both oppose recent Duke Energy rate hikes, and the bill that gave Duke room to raise rates to pay for data centers, sometimes before they started construction. They agree that Wake Forest needs a hospital, and that the state’s certificate-of-need laws are getting in the way unnecessarily.
They do disagree on some issues, though. Stock approves the property tax levy limit amendment as the first of many steps to address rising property taxes. Fatmi does not.
Stock supports Opportunity Scholarships, while raising public school teacher salaries even more than in the last budget. He thinks the issue is “writing a blank check” expecting progress, and would rather be more specific about where state education money should go. Fatmi opposes spending public tax dollars on private school vouchers.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
