A Baffling Endorsement from Oregon’s Paper of Record

Yesterday, the Oregonian — the Beaver State’s paper of record — endorsed Tina Kotek, the beleaguered Democratic hopeful in this year’s race for Oregon governor:

Kotek, who has trailed her Republican opponent, Christine Drazan, in the last four consecutive polls, is essentially running on “more of the same” in a state where only 26 percent of residents — down 13 points from 2020’s already-lackluster showing of 39 percent — believe that the state is “headed in the right direction.” And according to a new poll this week, an abysmal record low of 13 percent of voters in Portland — which Kotek represented a large segment of during her tenure as Speaker of the Oregon House — said the state’s largest city was on the right track: “Asked for their perceptions of downtown, respondents frequently used words like ‘destroyed,’ ‘trashed,’ ‘riots’ and ‘sad,’” the Oregonian, which commissioned the poll, reported. “Many cited homelessness as a particular issue, and said there is an urgent need for the city to find housing and support people living on the street.”

So you’d think that Kotek — a close ally of Kate Brown, the outgoing Democratic governor who has repeatedly polled as the least popular governor in the country — would be the last candidate that Oregon’s largest newspaper would point to as the state’s savior. Oregonians themselves are clearly desperate for a different approach. But Kotek — the woman whose “plan to address” homelessness is ostensibly a “case study” in her “unrivaled” “talent for developing specific policy solutions,” according to the Oregonian editorial board — was literally the chief sponsor of the bill that turbocharged the already-disastrous homelessness crisis last year, to the distress of even some Democrats in the state. As Willamette Week wrote:

During the course of Kotek’s tenure, Democrats consolidated power and moved aggressively on such measures as granting driver’s licenses and publicly funded abortions to undocumented immigrants and one of the nation’s most aggressive green energy mandates. They also passed statewide rent control and abolished single-family residential zoning — first-in-the-nation policies aimed at relieving the state’s housing crisis.

Such policies played well in deep-blue Portland. . . . But some Democrats say Kotek’s prioritization of social justice and environmental issues put her to the left of the average voter in a statewide race.

In 2021, Kotek was chief sponsor of House Bill 3115, which enshrined in state law the right to camp in public spaces—over pushback in Salem from critics who saw the bill as exporting Portland’s policies to the rest of the state.

The Oregonian, which was “founded as a Republican newspaper in 1850” and “remained editorially conservative for much of its history, endorsing its first Democrat for President with Bill Clinton in 1992,” according to a report from the Columbia University Journalism School, is the second-largest newspaper in the Pacific Northwest. (Although tragically, regional papers mean less than they used to). While the editorial board has a decisive left lean, it has also maintained an admirable independent streak, and — while its endorsements are certainly more heavily Democratic than Republican — it regularly backs moderate Republicans for local and state office. In 2016, for example, the board endorsed Allen Alley, a Republican, in that year’s gubernatorial race: “One way for Republicans to moderate the Legislature is to win more seats in the House and Senate, eroding the Democratic Party’s powerful majorities,” it wrote. “The other way is to win the governor’s office, replacing an incumbent who hasn’t vetoed a single bill — not one! — over two legislative sessions with someone who’ll use the threat of a veto to push lawmakers toward the center. The party’s best hope to that end is Allen Alley.”

That’s what makes this endorsement of Kotek — an unusually flawed, left-wing ideologue who is unapologetic about her desire to lean into the very policies that have sown so much destruction in Oregon over the past few years — so baffling. Traditionally, the Oregonian has not been a standard-issue partisan, Democrats-up-and-down-the-ballot paper. But in a moment in the state’s history where a break from the Democratic Party is most warranted, the paper’s editors went the other way.

Granted, the endorsement — titled “A difficult call, but endorsement for governor goes to Tina Kotek” — came with “deep reservations,” noting the numerous reasons “why so many — even in Kotek’s own party — are wary of her taking the reins, from broken promises to legislation she pushed that favors Democratic donors and allies. The abuses of one-party rule and Kotek’s own manipulations make this our most conflicted endorsement in recent years.” It’s good, I suppose, that you can sense a certain amount of embarrassment from the editors about their capitulation to partisan loyalty over principle and common sense. But their recognition of Kotek’s myriad flaws makes their ultimate decision to endorse her all the more incoherent. Contrary to the editorial’s title, this one isn’t “a difficult call.”