Amid a banner couple of weeks for the Democrats, worrying polls, and a clutch of less-than-competitive Republican nominees across the country, there’s been a recent dampening of Republican optimism about the scope and size of the projected red wave in November. As Matt Continetti noted earlier this month in a column titled “The GOP Summer Swoon,” Republicans “may have thought that the Democratic majority would collapse under its own weight. They learned this week that it won’t.” Continetti writes:
This caps off the worst week yet for Republicans in the 2022 campaign cycle. Their troubles began with Senate passage of the Chips and Science Act on Wednesday, July 27, and culminated in the Kansas pro-life rout on Tuesday, August 2. Before last week, the party was riding a red wave to victory in November’s elections. Now, one month before the campaign begins in earnest on Labor Day, aimless Republicans must fend off a Democratic Party that is playing offense.
I expressed my own pessimism about a particularly worrying candidate, Mehmet Oz, on the Corner yesterday:
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican Senate nominee in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, is flailing. He’s down by about eleven points in the polls, despite the fact that his Democratic opponent, John Fetterman — the goateed, heavyset, six-foot-eight-inch lieutenant governor of the state whose down-home, working-class public presentation is straight out of Pennsylvania central casting — was off the campaign trail for the past three months after suffering a stroke. (Fetterman held his first post-stroke public rally late last week.) Oz needs a course correction, and quickly. Whatever he’s doing right now clearly isn’t working.
But one little-noticed race where Republicans might have an unusually solid shot — and where the GOP nominee is, by all accounts, serious, focused, and competent — is my home state of Oregon. (This is on my mind because I arrived back here last night, and am currently writing from my family’s home in Hood River.) Christine Drazan, the Republican nominee for Oregon’s 2022 governor’s race, continues to poll neck-and-neck with her Democratic opponent, Tina Kotek. If Drazan wins, she’d be the Beaver State’s first Republican governor since 1987. I profiled Drazan back in May:
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.”
On top of the red-wave environment, Drazan is facing a specific set of political conditions in Oregon that benefit her, given that “the general election features an unusually viable left-leaning independent candidate, former Democratic state senator Betsy Johnson, who could peel votes from Kotek,” as I reported at the time. To be sure, this is still Oregon — it would be naïve to be overly confident about the prospect of a Republican victory. But if the GOP’s summer swoon does deliver unexpectedly poor returns in other parts of the country, Oregon could prove to be the surprising exception.