Oregon’s Republican Hope

I was born in Portland, Ore., in 1998, eleven years after the last Republican occupant of the Oregon governor’s mansion left office. The last time that Oregon voters elected a Republican governor — Victor Atiyeh, a Syrian-American Reagan Republican — the Berlin Wall was still standing. The Red Sox were 17 years out from ending their championship drought of nearly a century. Email was just beginning to be widely used. No one knew who Mark Zuckerberg was. “Tweet” still referred to the sound that birds made.

Today, Oregon has a Democratic supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature, and Democrats outnumber Republicans by just shy of ten percentage points on the registered-voter rolls. Decades of one-party rule haven’t treated the Beaver State well: The state boasts the fourth-worst homelessness problem in the country, and the eighth-worst education system. (With the fourth-worst graduation rate and teacher-to-student ratio.) According to a 2021 CNBC analysis, it’s the sixth-worst for business friendliness, and the third-worst for cost of living. As one former Democratic state representative put it in an unusually candid interview with Willamette Week in March: “S***’s not working.”

So if there’s any year for a long-overdue GOP victory, it’s 2022. And long-suffering Oregon Republicans — who have often opted for fringe, unelectable nominees over broadly appealing moderates in recent years — tapped a serious contender for governor. Christine Drazan, a 49-year-old mother of three and former minority leader of the Oregon House of Representatives, made it out of a crowded 19-candidate field with the GOP nomination last Tuesday. As the general election kicks into gear, Drazan said she thinks this is the GOP’s year: “The political environment itself is reflective of the fact that Oregonians are seeing with a level of clarity, for the first time, what single-party control has meant in their own lives,” she told National Review. “Whether or not it was Covid or homelessness or rioting or affordability — you know, the price of housing, or labor costs, or just the price of goods and services in Oregon — the stark impacts of the last couple of years have been very, very kitchen-table-focused. And that has created this environment where Oregonians, in record numbers, are saying Oregon’s on the wrong track, because single-party leadership has not helped them.”

“They’re looking around saying, ‘I’m not better off,’” she said. “Democrats have had a decade now to get this right. And instead, things seem to be worse.”

It’s true that the national wave of dissatisfaction with Democrats is being felt in blue states like Oregon. A jaw-dropping April poll found that Oregon voters now favor a generic Republican gubernatorial candidate over a generic Democratic one by 18 points. (Oregon politics writer Jeff Eager called it “the most shocking poll of Oregon voters I have ever seen,” writing: “It’s not every day a poll comes out that makes Oregon look like, and I do not overstate this, a Republican state.”) The outgoing Democratic governor, Kate Brown, is the most unpopular in the country. The Democratic nominee, Tina Kotek — a close ally of Brown and the public-sector unions and progressive activist groups that run things in the state — is effectively running on a message of “more of the same.”

But like many blue-state rump parties, the Oregon GOP, in thrall to the most politically engaged members of its voter base, has struggled with presenting itself as the kind of center-right, broadly appealing party that could actually win in a state like Oregon. In January 2021, the Oregon Republican Party adopted a resolution describing January 6 as “a ‘false flag’ operation designed . . . to advance the Democrat goal of seizing total power, in a frightening parallel to the February 1933 burning of the German Reichstag.” Just a week prior, a Republican state representative was caught on security camera letting armed anti-lockdown protesters into the Oregon State House in the middle of a legislative session. (The protesters proceeded to assault numerous journalists and spray chemical substances at police.) And the state’s Republican primary voters have opted to nominate crackpots like Jo Rae Perkins, an outspoken QAnon supporter, for U.S. Senate, leading to humiliating double-digit losses.

Drazan chalks a lot of that up to “muscle memory”: “I just think it’s been a long time since we’ve been competitive,” she said. “And because of that, we have lost some of that institutional knowledge and some of the expectations for what effective grassroots leadership can look like. And I think this is the year to turn that around.”

A victory in the governor’s race would be a pivotal moment for the Oregon GOP. And they may have a real shot: The general election features an unusually viable left-leaning independent candidate, former Democratic state senator Betsy Johnson, who could peel votes from Kotek. “I view Betsy Johnson’s participation in the race as beneficial to my campaign, and the reason is because she is a lifelong Democrat,” Drazan told National Review. Drazan added that she’s “grateful” for the “opportunities that have presented themselves to work across the aisle with her — I think we need more of that in the state legislature. But Johnson’s “voting record — once Oregonians take a look at her voting record — it’s gonna be clear she was, in fact, a lifelong Democrat for a reason. She didn’t just play one on TV, she actually voted party line.”

I ask Drazan about voters like my dad, a 56-year-old, independent-minded Democrat living in the 8,000-person town of Hood River, perched in Oregon wine country, an hour or so east of Portland. Dad’s a prototype of the kind of independent and disaffected Democratic-leaning voters whom Drazan will have to sway to carry the day in November: He’s been willing to vote for Republican governors in the past — he backed both Mitt Romney and Bill Weld over their Democratic opponents when we lived in Massachusetts — and he agrees that our state is in need of new leadership. He likes what he’s seen of Drazan so far and is seriously considering voting for her but hasn’t decided yet.

What would Drazan say to him? “It really is about good government,” she said. “We’re talking about setting expectations for how our state serves Oregonians — the Employment Department needs to function, they need to get checks out to the unemployed in a timely fashion, and people need to pick up the phone. When you are interacting with the housing agency, they need to be able to serve your needs. Whether we’re talking about care for our foster kids or somebody standing in line for two hours at the DMV, government functions in Oregon have been at risk for far too long, because [Democrats] haven’t been minding the store. A Republican governor can uniquely hold Democrats in the state legislature accountable, and can uniquely bring compromise and negotiate durable solutions to address the significant challenges facing us in a way that the two variations of the Democratic Party won’t be able to.”

Drazan pitched a Republican victory as a chance to “restore checks and balances” and “recenter the governor’s office” away from a divisive political agenda, for the sake of Oregonians. “They deserve to have a government that functions — that is efficient, accountable, transparent, and provides core services.” I’m biased, of course. But I tend to agree.