If recent polls showing a neck and neck race between the GOP and Democratic gubernatorial candidates had not already galvanized Oregon Democrats, a new story out this weekend about the Republican push to take back the state Senate via huge infusions of campaign cash should act as a defibrillator to the hearts of party rank and file. Over the past decades, the Democratic Party has steadily increased its hold on power in the state, to the point that it achieved a supermajority in the house in recent years that provided it with additional legislative heft, while also holding a majority in the senate. No Republican has been governor since 1978; in 2020, the state went for Joe Biden by 16 points.
But it’s not just that the same adverse national winds over economic concerns and the direction of the country are handicapping Democrats’ prospects in the state. In the governor’s race, the Republican candidate, Christine Drazan, has pulled into a dead heat with Democrat Tina Kotek in large part because former legislator (and former Democrat) Betsy Johnson is also vying for the governorship. Beyond this, Kotek is likely suffering headwinds due to the unpopularity of outgoing Governor Kate Brown, who has been rated as the least popular governor in the nation (a standing that traces back in turn to political battles tied to her handling of the covid pandemic). And for voters disillusioned with Brown’s tenure, Kotek is likely not helped by her solid position in the state’s Democratic political establishment — she’s been speaker of the House for the last 10 years, making her the longest-serving speaker in Oregon history.
As The New York Times reports, the Democrats are also being hindered by the massive amounts of cash Nike co-founder Phil Knight has given first to Johnson’s and now Drazan’s campaign, as Knight has recently determined that Johnson is not likely to prevail. Nike is Oregon’s largest company, and Knight clearly feels a billionaire’s proprietary interest in the state, including keeping the taxes levied on billionaires as low as possible.
But apart from these factors, Kotek is also running up against deep public concerns about crime, safety, and homelessness in the state — concerns that are largely focused on Oregon’s largest city, Portland. Indeed, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that both Drazan’s and Johnson’s bids for governor are based in significant part in running against the city of Portland as much as against the Democrats themselves, appealing both to fact-based and conjured fears of the city. As the state’s only large urban area, and with the greater Portland metropolitan area home to two and a half million people, the city possesses an exaggerated dual existence — home to the lived experience of much of the population, and the object of resentment, fear, and desire for the other half. It’s a split the that echoes in amplified form the rural-urban divide found in various permutations throughout the United States.
But running against Portland has great advantages for those willing to turn Oregonians against each other, exploit economic and cultural resentment, and entertain racist fear-mongering. Like much of the nation, the city has experienced an uptick in crimes of various kinds over the last few years; homicides are at record highs, with the city hitting 92 killings last year, and it’s on track to surpass that number in 2022. A hugely disproportionate share of those deaths have afflicted the city’s African -American community; though Blacks make up 6% of the city’s population, they’ve suffered almost half the killings over the past year. Simultaneously, the city has experienced serious and highly visible homelessness for years now, a situation that worsened and became even more visible during the covid pandemic and its aftermath. Even as long-term but slow-moving initiatives are underway to house the houseless (including a $600 million-plus county building program approved by voters in 2018), the city has continued a pointless wack-a-mole exercise against homeless encampments, shutting down camps without providing long-term housing to those displaced, so that the whole cruel process of rousting the impoverished is simply repeated again and again over weeks, months, and years. For much of the voting public, the daily sights of chaos and suffering have become tied to fears around personal safety and increased crime.
There is also a not-insignificant aspect to the Portland story that ties back to the 2020 protests against police violence and racism, which fed a vision throughout the state that the city is a zone of anarchy, and which did indeed amplify the sense of abandonment and danger of the downtown area, which was already void of its usual foot traffic and activity due to the covid pandemic. In the aftermath of the protests, the Portland Police Department has fallen below its previous levels of staffing, leading to the city having one of the lowest number of police per capita of major American cities. The lack of police staffing has in turn led to increased police response times (if they respond at all), which both in practical and psychological terms contributes to a public perception that the city is in a state of semi-lawlessness.
So while the many Oregonians who live in the Portland area have material reasons to lack their former enthusiasm for the local and Democratic leaders who they hold responsible for the state of the city, non-Portlanders are receptive to appeals by conservative politicians to protect the state from the contagion of Portland’s troubles. But when one stops to consider the relative poverty and lack of economic development in much of the rest of Oregon compared to the Portland metropolitan area, you begin to understand the useful function such scapegoating holds for those Republican politicians who represent areas of the state that face analogous challenges of drug addiction, rising crime, and economic hardship. It is all-too-convenient to tell voters that you will stand as a guardian against the Gomorrah of Portland when you don’t actually have a plan to bring prosperity to rural Oregon.
But let’s return to the specifics of the current governor’s race and the emboldened GOP in the state. First, I don’t think we can really overstate how much homelessness, and perceptions of elected Democrats’ failure to solve it, is damaging Democratic prospects in Oregon. The Oregonian just released a poll showing that a whopping 94% of Portland voters believe homelessness is a “very big problem.” Such perceptions suggest that Democrats will face challenges in driving the high Portland turnout they will need to put Tina Kotek in the governor’s chair. And outside of Portland, the continuing homelessness crisis supercharges the demonization of Portland, providing fodder for GOP politicians to point to the city as a sign of Democratic governance failure and the dangers awaiting the rest of the state. I would argue that the specter of homelessness is particularly resonant not simply for liberals in Portland who fear for their property values, but equally for less well-off voters in rural Oregon who can all too easily imagine falling down a few more rungs and finding themselves living out of their cars or on the street. It is in some ways the ultimate symbol of economic precarity, a sort of “living dead” state where you are still visible within our society but cast out into a state of maximum vulnerability and deprivation, to the point that even your basic humanity is called into question.
So I am not surprised if homelessness were to play a key roll in driving this supposedly blue state towards the decent possibility of a GOP governorship. On the one hand, it helps generate support among conservative voters (who, to generalize, tend to blame homelessness on the moral shortcomings and addictions of the homeless, and for whom homelessness amplifies fears of crime projected onto Portland). On the other, it’s at the root of lessened Democratic enthusiasms, as visible evidence of Democratic leaders failing to deal with a very real problem that is also entangled with perceptions of economic malaise and the reality of rising crime — just as GOP politicians scapegoat Portland, some Democratic voters are scapegoating the homeless as the cause (rather than symptom) of real economic and social challenges.
The other factor I’d highlight is the relative openness of some Democrats and independents who previously supported Democrats to countenance voting for a GOP candidate in our age of a radicalized, Trumpified GOP. Part of the reason seems to be Drazan’s at least partially successful attempt to present herself as a moderate Republican; the New York Times points to Maryland Governor Larry Hogan as a GOP politician with a similar approach. But as Willamette University professor Seth Cotlar discusses in an insightful Twitter thread, Drazan is the representative of a state party that has in fact gone far to the right in recent years, with many in the county-level GOP power structure embracing Trump’s big lie of a stolen 2020 election. Cotlar writes that “Drazan is trying to keep the Bundy- and Proud Boy-linked activists and organizations at arms length, but at the county level you'd be hard pressed to find GOP activists willing to denounce election deniers or far right militias. This is Drazan's base.” So Drazan has hardly challenged these insurrectionist factions of her party; in fact, she understands that their support is crucial to her gubernatorial hopes. And as the Oregonian reported last week,
Drazan has made clear she wants to hold onto every possible Republican voter, notably declining to disavow QAnon conspiracy adherent and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jo Rae Perkins.
And in September, Drazan stumped at an event for Republican candidates at which B.J. Soper, who participated in the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and is now a leader of People’s Rights, a far-right group launched by anti-government activist Ammon Bundy, urged the audience to “stand united behind our Republican candidates.” Her campaign also accepted $50,000 from David Gore, a major funder of Tea Party Patriots Citizen Fund, which helped pay for the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally.
As Cotlar importantly highlights, beyond Drazan’s necessary reliance on the party’s far-right adherents in seeking the governorship, she has also engaged in fear-mongering about Oregon’s well-established mail-in ballot program. Without actual evidence, she has suggested that the state’s system is vulnerable to corruption, and has indicated she would “Establish a permanent task force on election integrity to examine vulnerabilities in our system and make recommendations on how to enhance the security of our elections.” Though couched in anodyne language, Drazan’s suggestion that such a task force is necessary posits a problem where none exists, and feeds the party-wide assault on elections and the ruse that Democrats only win because of fraud. In doing so, she joins the broader Trumpist GOP crusade to undermine public faith in the fairness of election outcomes in the service of a GOP vision of authoritarian, minority rule.
While such aspersions are clearly self-serving for a GOP that has increasingly found itself on the losing end of elections in Oregon, its dangers should quickly come into focus for Oregonians when we stop to consider how close this coming election might be, not to mention that Drazan’s victory would position her to sow further doubts about Oregon’s electoral system and give her the power to attempt to implement “reforms” that actually undermine the state’s citizens right to have their votes count. And as Cotlar points out, in the near term, “The most worrisome scenario is that the 2022 governor's race is very close (thanks to Phil Knight's multi-millions given 1st to a 3rd party spoiler & then to Drazan) and then the right wing militias aligned with the OR GOP grab their guns to "take back" a "stolen election."”
While Oregon Democrats bear their share of responsibility for not hitting Drazan harder on her alignment with some of the worst aspects of the Trumpist GOP and the party’s far-right elements, it’s important to understand that state politicians are ultimately suffering from the failure of national Democrats to tar the entirety of the GOP with the brush of Trumpism. Drazan has political space to claim moderate status because the Democrats haven’t pressed the case that such assertions by moderate Republicans are meaningless when those politicians lack the political clout or moral courage to stand up to the party’s growing authoritarianism, and that such politicians are in fact part of the problem insofar as they help provide a sheen of normalcy to a party that is clearly fueled by racism, misogyny, and a drive to preserve white Christian power at the expense of an increasingly diverse America. Even giving Drazan the maximum benefit of the doubt, and taking her at her word that she would steer a moderate course against the extremism of her own party, how would it make any sense to elect her to serve this role as opposed to a Democrat untainted by association with such craziness?