In recent years, the Nike co-founder has quietly emerged as one of the long-suffering Oregon GOP’s most powerful allies.
In recent years, the Nike co-founder has quietly emerged as one of the long-suffering Oregon GOP’s most powerful allies.
O regonians have backed the Democrat in the last nine presidential elections, and by double digits in the last four. They’ve elected exclusively Democratic governors since 1982, giving the Beaver State the second-longest unbroken run of blue governor’s mansions in the country. Democrats currently control every statewide office in Oregon, with supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature. But this year, voters may have had enough. For months, polls have shown the Oregon governor’s race in a dead heat — and the last four consecutive polls show the Republican, Christine Drazan, pulling ahead of her Democratic opponent, Tina Kotek.
Given how unusually tight this year’s contest is, it’s not surprising that fundraising numbers are through the roof. National Democratic and Republican groups are spending heavily on their candidates in Oregon, and President Biden flew out to Portland to campaign for Kotek over the weekend, marking the first time in recent memory that a Democratic president has had to travel to the Beaver State to boost his party’s efforts. But the largest individual donor to both Drazan and Betsy Johnson — the Democrat-turned-independent who’s also in the race — is Nike co-founder Phil Knight. (Nike was founded at the University of Oregon, and its world headquarters sit just outside of Portland, making it one of the largest employers in the state.)
Knight, whose $35.9 billion net worth gives him the title of the richest man in Oregon, backed Johnson’s campaign to the tune of $3.75 million as it got going. But earlier this month — as Johnson’s polling numbers lagged further and further behind the two major-party candidates — the athletic-apparel magnate appeared to switch teams, making a $1 million donation to Drazan. Knight’s eleventh-hour shift to the GOP was trumpeted as a seismic change of heart from “Oregon’s most well-known billionaire,” as the Oregonian reported at the time, citing the fact that “polls have consistently shown Johnson trailing far behind Drazan and Democrat Tina Kotek in the race for governor.” But some have alleged that it was part of a broader, coordinated plan.
Among Republican operatives I’ve spoken to on the ground in Oregon, there’s a sneaking suspicion that Knight’s support for Johnson, whose “candidacy . . . has drawn far more support from Democrats than it has from Republicans,” according to the New York Times, was part of a strategic effort to weaken Democrats — and aid Republicans. Some Oregon Democrats have publicly voiced that suspicion: “I’m going to hazard a guess that this was the plan all along,” Dacia Grayber, a Democrat in the Oregon House, tweeted when the news of Knight’s donation to Drazan broke. “Oregon, we are better than this.”
In recent years, Nike has cultivated a public profile as a backer of progressive causes, but Knight, who currently serves as the company’s chairman emeritus, has a history of supporting Republicans: In 2016, Knight “contributed a total of $380,000 to seven House Republican candidates and one Senate Republican candidate in competitive races around the state,” the Oregonian reported. (That election cycle marked the beginning of a ramping-up of the billionaire’s involvement in politics, according to the paper: “The personal campaign donations are unusually large contributions to legislative races for Knight, who last gave to legislative candidates in 2012.”) In 2018, Knight donated a record-breaking total of $2.5 million to Knute Buehler, the Republican nominee in Oregon’s last gubernatorial election, who went on to lose to Democratic incumbent Kate Brown by nearly six and a half points. And in the New York Times, Knight more or less outed himself as something of a right-winger:
Mr. Knight, who rarely speaks with reporters, said in an interview on Thursday that he would do whatever he could to stop Ms. Kotek from becoming governor, describing himself as “an anti-Tina person.” He said he had never spoken with Ms. Drazan.
“One of the political cartoons after our legislative session had a person snorting cocaine out of a mountain of white,” Mr. Knight said. “It said, ‘Which of these is illegal in Oregon?’ And the answer was the plastic straw.”. . . Mr. Knight, in the interview, said he had abandoned Ms. Johnson’s campaign because she could not “get enough undecided voters to make up the difference” with Ms. Kotek and Ms. Drazan.
Asked if serving as a financial benefactor for an anti-abortion politician ran counter to his company’s well-manicured image as a champion of social justice causes, he replied: “Nike has good leadership. They make choices, whatever they want, but I think I’m more conservative than Nike.” Mr. Knight is the chairman emeritus of Nike’s board but does not run the company day to day.
The political cartoon Knight was pointing to, of course, was a reference to Oregon’s disastrously failed experiment with hard-drug decriminalization: Following a November 2020 ballot measure, the state decriminalized all drugs — including methamphetamine, crack cocaine, and heroin — despite boasting one of the highest rates of drug and alcohol abuse in the nation. The premise, according to the activists backing the measure, was that drug abuse should be treated as an addiction rather than prosecuted as a crime. But two years later, less than 1 percent of users ticketed for possession have actually gone to treatment; fatal overdoses, on the other hand, rose 41 percent in 2021, and are up another 20 percent this year. Both Johnson and Drazan have promised to work to repeal the measure, but Kotek has routinely defended it on the campaign trail.
Knight’s anger at Oregon Democrats, then, is understandable. Whether his support for Johnson was strategic or genuine, he has emerged — quietly, and with little public fanfare — as one of the long-suffering Oregon GOP’s most powerful allies. In previous years, the Nike co-founder’s generous financial support hadn’t managed to put Republicans over the top. But in 2022, it just may be enough.