Christine Drazen: Could GOP Nominee For Governor Make Oregon Great Again?

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.”

About the Author

Nate Hochman

Nate Hochman was a staff writer at National Review.

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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.”