In a recent telephone conference purported to have reached 10,000 upstate New Yorkers, Rep. William L. Owens’ staff asked the respondents to press a number on their phones to signify what issue was most important to them.

It wasn’t even close.

Fifty percent of respondents said that jobs were the most important, with the next closest, the debt and deficit, coming in at 15 percent in the survey. It may not have been scientific, or surprising, but it highlighted the fact that the Nov. 6 election between Mr. Owens, D-Plattsburgh, and Republican Matthew A. Doheny will revolve around that issue. It also highlighted a distinction between the candidates about the effectiveness of government austerity.

And Mr. Doheny’s appraisal of the job Mr. Owens has done on jobs is damning, though Mr. Owens calls the criticism “illogical.”

“I think my opponent’s getting a little bit out of his depth here,” said Mr. Doheny, who, like Mr. Owens, touts his experience in the private sector as his main qualification for office.

In May 2012, the 11 counties in Mr. Owens’ 21st Congressional District, including Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence, had higher unemployment rates than in May of 2010, a few months after Mr. Owens took office.

“My opponent’s jobs agenda just isn’t working,” Mr. Doheny said in a news release.

But Mr. Owens said that nearly a percentage point of those unemployment rates are due to job losses in the public sector — the natural consequence of government austerity.

“If you’re going to reduce government spending, that’s going to result in jobs loss,” Mr. Owens said. “You can’t have it both ways, and say Bill Owens is responsible for this, when in fact that is a natural consequence of cutting like this. That, to me, is not logical.”

Mr. Owens, who has said that government should cut, but do so carefully, said that severe austerity measures won’t result in a booming economy.

“There’s been no evidence of that that I can see,” he said. “You look at England, which went into a very austere policy, and they have an economy and a (gross domestic product) that’s declining.”

But he, too, has called for cuts on the federal level — a different type of austerity than what has come to pass, he said.

“This is a very delicate balance,” Mr. Owens said.

The budget offered by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., would balance the budget in 50 years, something that Mr. Doheny wouldn’t support because it didn’t cut the deficit quickly enough.

Cutting government — as well as taxes and regulations — would indeed help spur the private sector, Mr. Doheny said.

“It’s a fundamental distinction between myself and my opponent,” he said.

Mr. Owens, meanwhile, said his main focus in Congress has been threefold. First is helping employers fill the 3,000 empty positions in the north country, which would lower the unemployment rate by another 0.5 percent, Mr. Owens said. Second is luring companies from Canada to the United States. The third is targeted tax cuts for certain industries, which would be tied in a measurable way to the number of jobs created.

But Mr. Doheny said that his small-government pitch has resonated with business owners.

“I sit around and talk to people in the district, on the street, no one says, ‘If you raise my taxes, I’m going to hire another person and add more jobs,’” he said.

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