Can it?
Can it?
A s a native of Portland, Ore., I often find myself defending my forlorn city against the derision of my fellow conservatives. Yes, the police force is often unwilling to enforce the most basic of our laws — but the food culture is just excellent. Sure, the mayor is an ineffectual toffee-nosed dweeb — but the Trail Blazers are going all the way next season. It’s true we have the worst homelessness problem in the nation — but have you visited the Rose Garden? (It’s beautiful this time of year.)
I love all of Oregon — from the towering mountain ranges to the Portland food trucks to the sleepy little beach towns scattered along the gray Pacific coast — but the state’s politics epitomize all of the problems with progressive governance. Our first-term Democratic governor is one of the most unpopular in the country, and we’re ranked as one of the worst states for everything from our taxes and regulations (business-killing) to our public-school system (abysmal). By any metric, our citizens seem genuinely unhappy with the current quality of governance. But there is a reason that Oregonians — unlike voters in deep-blue states such as Massachusetts and Maryland — have been consistently reluctant to try any Republican alternative to our one-party government: The Oregon GOP is insane.
As a number of traditionally red states have trended leftward in recent decades, many — though not all — local Republican parties have responded by doubling down on the most divisive and counterproductive instincts of their main voter base. California Republicans, for example, foolishly alienated the state’s rapidly growing Latino population by taking a hardline nativist turn in the early 1990s. The Arizona GOP seems intent on following its example, as Kelli Ward and her allies strive relentlessly to reduce their once-dominant state party to a rump as expeditiously as possible.
Unlike Arizona, which is still a nominally purple state, Oregon has been reliably blue for decades. Democrats have a supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature, and outnumber Republicans on the registered-voter rolls by 10 points. (Our last Republican governor, Victor Atiyeh, left office in 1987.) But rather than attempt to regain its footing by running on kitchen table issues like relieving heavy regulatory burdens on small businesses, cutting taxes for working- and middle-class families, and pumping the brakes on the more radical ambitions of left-wing social policy — all messages that have regularly proved effective for blue-state Republicans in recent elections — the Oregon GOP has devolved into wild-eyed, conspiracy-theorizing irrelevance. It will stage the occasional theatrical stunt to cater to a shrinking base in rural Oregon, but shows little interest in acting constructively to change its position as a permanent minority.
It’s unsurprising for a party that has been out of power for decades to act this way. “I think the Oregon Republicans are just tired of losing,” says Jeff Eager, a business attorney and the former Republican mayor of Bend, a midsized city in the center of the state. “They’ve been losing for a long time, so the official party at this point has chosen an illogical strategy.” But while there has always been a nutty element at the fringes of the American electorate (and in both party’s bases, in different ways), “the more conspiratorial folks now run the Republican Party in this state,” Eager says. “And they believe and say things that I don’t think are appealing to the more moderate or less partisan voters that you would need in order to win an election in Oregon.”
The most recent example of these self-destructive tendencies was the unhinged resolution that the Oregon Republican Party adopted on January 19. The resolution asserted that the pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol “was a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans,” providing “the sham motivation to impeach President Trump in order to advance the Democrat goal of seizing total power, in a frightening parallel to the February 1933 burning of the German Reichstag.” Of course, this rhetoric is hardly indicative of the views of the state’s entire Republican-leaning voter base: The Republican caucus of the Oregon House of Representatives released a statement condemning the January 19 resolution, and Eager tells National Review that “there is a significant portion of the party that is really concerned about what the Oregon Republican Party has said here, as well as just their abject failure to do a good job in recent memory.” But the fringe thinking that drove the “false flag” claims has deep roots in the state-party apparatus.
The Trump era seems only to have exacerbated the Oregon GOP’s embrace of its most extreme constituencies. Just a few weeks before the riot at the Capitol, for example, Representative Mike Nearman — a Republican from the deep-red Oregon House District 23 — was caught on a security camera opening a backdoor to let armed anti-lockdown protestors into the Oregon State House in Salem while lawmakers were in session, which led to the assault of numerous journalists and police officers. Three weeks later, two Republican state senators threw their support behind an effort to publicly name private citizens who filed complaints against businesses that were violating coronavirus restrictions, arguing that “these kinds of people need to be known, publicly . . . they have no right to anonymity.” (Citizens Against Tyranny, the official organization formed to lead the endeavor, lists the names of complainants online, describing them as “filthy traitors” in blood-splattered font). And in the past two years, the state party and its affiliates have wasted their political capital with five failed efforts to recall Governor Kate Brown, rather than organizing and running serious campaigns to return to power.
In the meantime, Oregonians are suffering under the increasingly poisonous legislation passed by Brown and her allies in the unchecked Democratic supermajority. “We have a governor that’s shutting down our businesses without any financial support for them or the working families that they employ,” says Cheri Helt, a moderate Republican who served in the Oregon House of Representatives before being unseated by a Democratic challenger as her suburban district moved left. “And so here she is, she has free reign — and instead, we’re fighting masks. Why aren’t we fighting for our small businesses? Why are we talking about being anti-vaccine? I mean, when did being anti-vaccine become a Republican principle? We’re allowing these fringe groups to run the party, and the price that we’re paying for that is the Democratic supermajorities that are expanding government exponentially.
“Oregon is last for mental health, we’re last for drug treatment, we’re second to last in graduation rates, but instead [the state Republicans] are pushing on these fringe policies,” Helt says. “We can move our state forward in a moderate, sensible manner — and our state needs us to, desperately. I mean, we’re in major danger: Our small business taxes are being raised even while we’re shut down. As a small business owner, my taxes have doubled, and I’m not even allowed to be open. It’s insane. Our economy is going to pay a huge price for the fact that [the Oregon GOP] wants to focus on random national social issues versus the issues that are really facing Oregon.”
The Governor Brown–led government’s toxic cocktail of destructive policies — draconian shutdowns, a legislature funneling taxpayer money into the pockets of powerful public-sector unions rather than the thousands of small businesses that are currently teetering on the brink of bankruptcy — and the results — failing schools, rampant drug addiction and homelessness — should be a golden opportunity for Oregon Republicans. The problems of Portland, in particular, have been well-documented in recent years. But the size of my home city’s population — upwards of two million people in the greater metro area — means that its problems become Oregon’s problems. Through its sheer number of voters alone, Stumptown imposes its political eccentricities on the entire state population.
But instead of mounting serious challenges to the Oregon Democrats’ monopoly on power by running on restoring sanity and common sense to state politics, local Republicans have nominated a slew of increasingly unserious candidates. Jo Rae Perkins, the most outspoken supporter of QAnon out of any of the national GOP candidates who have flirted with the conspiracy theory, won the Republican nomination for Oregon’s 2020 U.S. Senate race before losing by more than 17 points to Democratic incumbent Jeff Merkley in the general election. The 2020 Republican nominee for Oregon attorney general not only had no experience with law, but even had a criminal record himself — charged with felony assault for spanking his daughter in 2006 — and made headlines for speculating that Antifa might have been behind the wildfires that swept the state this summer. And Kim Thatcher, who ran on the GOP ticket for the most recent election for secretary of state, was infamous throughout Oregon for being one of the eleven Republican state senators who went into hiding for weeks to prevent a vote on a proposed cap-and-trade bill in 2019.
If Oregon Republicans want to win elections again, they will need to ease off the political-purity tests and commit to supporting more moderate candidates in their party primaries. “When we fight in our own party and we don’t appeal to the moderate center, this is what happens,” says Helt. “That’s what we’re allowing to happen when we want someone to agree with us a hundred percent of the time.” Eager concurs: “We need to get out of our own way so we can talk to those moderate voters that are alienated [by Oregon’s hard-left policies],” he says. “But if Republicans are saying, ‘Well, actually all those people waving Trump flags that were storming the Capitol were actually Antifa,’ that’s just blatantly false to anyone who was observing what happened that day. And then we can’t even get in the door with those voters to start talking about actual policies.”
Of course, not everyone in the state’s Republican base sees things this way. “We need to support our candidates who win the primary,” says Deborah Tilden, a local Oregon Republican activist who was at the January 6 “Save America” rally in Washington, D.C. “That’s one of the things that people are really frustrated with in Oregon politics, it’s that the party leadership doesn’t put their support behind those that win the primary. You’re not gonna like every candidate’s personality, but who would you rather have in those seats? Someone who holds at least a majority of your principles or someone who hardly believes in anything that you believe in? Who are the candidates that we’re putting forward? Do they follow, at least to a large percentage, the principles of the Republican Party? Or are they what we call RINOS — Republican In Name Only?”
Tilden’s concerns — and the concerns of many of her like-minded counterparts in the state — point to an important dilemma: The kind of moderates who could actually take back Oregon from the Democrats probably won’t be as conservative as Republican primary voters — or most National Review readers, for that matter — would like. But Oregon Republicans must decide whether they would rather be a handful of true believers in a deep-blue state, or a majority of moderates in a purple one. They might try William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous standard for picking a candidate in a Republican primary: choose the most viable, conservative candidate who can actually win. Otherwise, the best Oregon Republicans can expect is irrelevance.