Two longtime rivals seek new audiences in Oregon governor’s race. Who will persuade voters?

In her second quest to defeat Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, Sen. Christine Drazan, R-Canby, has gone straight into the political lion’s den. 

She has announced policy plans to reduce taxes and regulations in the heavily-Democratic Portland metropolitan area, emphasized the natural beauty of its waterfront and advocated against needle exchanges near schools in Multnomah County.

But those appeals haven’t always gone smoothly. At one speaking event in Portland, attendees peppered her with questions about her relationship with the national GOP. During a September meeting at a Southeast Portland church, one voter accused Drazan of misrepresenting her life story about politicians failing a timber industry that left her Klamath Falls hometown.

Despite the effective rematch from 2022, this year’s gubernatorial campaign trail has pushed both Drazan and Kotek to appeal to the opposite side of their ideological lanes. Polling a few weeks out from the Nov. 3 election showed the race in a statistical tie, and the two women’s rhetorical skills are being tested in ways that their allies say are naturally uncomfortable for the candidates.

Drazan’s has been campaigning in person while supporting downballot Republicans and focusing on metropolitan areas. She no longer has to fortify support in rural areas where she may have lost votes to nonaffiliated challenger Betsy Johnson in the 2022 race, but that has opened her up to at times hostile interactions from skeptical voters in the state’s most populous county.

“Is it easy? Absolutely not. Is it comfortable to go into those settings as a Republican? Absolutely not,” said former Republican Rep. Knute Buehler, a Drazan ally who lost to former Gov. Kate Brown in the 2018 election and has since left the Republican party. “But it’s absolutely essential to do.”

Kotek also faces significant headwinds. She is seeking to appease business-friendly voters in suburban and urban areas of the state while motivating a fractured progressive base in Portland. Many of her appearances have focused on interviews with sympathetic social media influencers rather than campaign press conferences or public events.

Ahead of her first term, Kotek named housing and homelessness, behavioral health and education as her top three priorities. But during her nearly four years in office, Oregon has struggled to make progress on each of those issues. 

Tens of millions in new state funding netted thousands of new shelter beds and kept tens of thousands of Oregonians from eviction, but the most recent federal count of homeless individuals found thousands more people lacked homes in 2025 than in 2023. Oregon students’ grasp of reading, writing, math and science has improved slightly since immediate post-pandemic lows, but they’re still far behind their peers.

The governor has spent most of the campaign trying to tie Drazan to the Trump administration and began to deviate from that messaging in her final two debates earlier this month. Her supporters say the task of showing progress is not within her natural skillset.

“She’s an in-the-weeds person, and she’s a big picture person, and she is terrible at taking credit for it,” said former Portland Democratic Rep. Barbara Smith Warner, who was House majority leader when Kotek was House speaker. “You can get plenty of stuff done if you don’t take credit, and yet there’s a point where it is different when you’re a leader.”

Kotek argues continuity will be key to solving Oregon’s challenges

Kotek first came onto Oregon’s political scene as an advocate for the Oregon Food Bank in the late 1990s after moving from Pennsylvania, eventually winning election to a Portland-area House seat in 2006.

She later became the state’s longest-serving House speaker from 2013 to 2022 and shepherded major progressive policies, such as the nation’s strongest set of sanctuary protections for immigrants and a universal paid leave program, through the Legislature. She’s one of the nation’s first two openly lesbian governors.

She’s also among the least popular governors in the nation, polling has shown throughout her term. 

In an interview, Kotek conveyed a sense of urgency for building on her work, such as getting Oregon to buck a national trend to increase initial housing starts for 2026. The estimated nearly 9,700 home permits pulled so far this year still puts Oregon far below her initial goal of 36,000 new homes per year to address decades of underbuilding. 

Kotek argues that she needs more time.

“I’ve never said that the mission is accomplished, but what I have said is we have to keep working together to make progress,” she said. “Progress takes persistence, that takes leadership and continuity.”

But that continuity has also been marked with some scrutiny over the role some of Kotek’s closest allies, including first lady Aimee Kotek Wilson and labor union leaders, have played in the Oregon government. 

Several of Kotek’s top advisers left her office over her 2024 attempt to elevate her wife’s authority by creating an “Office of the First Spouse” and giving Kotek Wilson, who has a background in social work and shared in 2024 that she was in recovery from alcohol use disorder, a role in crafting behavioral health policy. 

The Oregon Government Ethics Commission dismissed complaints against Kotek on the grounds that there was no evidence that Kotek or her wife would benefit from an unpaid volunteer position. The governor has since tapped the first lady to lead a council aiming to address workforce issues for behavioral health services in Oregon.

When it comes to unions, meanwhile, Kotek has faced backlash for their influence on a variety of issues, such as unemployment benefits, public projects and legislative districting. 

Her support for a 2025 first-in-the-nation law offering unemployment benefits to striking public and private workers, for instance, reignited longstanding concerns that she wasn’t serving as an effective check on their interests. Critics see the law as a giveaway to unions that will strain public agencies and the state’s unemployment insurance fund. 

Kotek also issued a 2024 executive order that required many state construction projects to be built with union labor, a type of proposal which industry groups have long criticized for driving up costs. After a coalition of organizations led by the Oregon-Columbia chapter of the Associated General Contractors sued, a Marion County judge blocked the order in March.

Unions were also thorn in the side for some in Kotek’s party during a special 2021 legislative session near the end of her tenure as House speaker, when state lawmakers sought to redraw legislative and congressional maps. 

Former Rep. Marty Wilde, D-Eugene, said he saw the hand of influential unions who support Democrats in the decision to redraw his Eugene-area district into one favoring Republicans and box him out of the Senate seat he was considering seeking. The Oregonian/OregonLive reported that the executive director of the state’s largest public employee union had been advising House Democrats during the session. 

“I never felt like it was personal on Tina’s part, but pretty clearly the public employee unions had given marching orders, and the Senate had a certain outcome that they wanted,” Wilde said. “When I objected to that, I became political roadkill.”

The governor has maintained on the campaign trail that donors and unions do not determine her decisions. While political action committees affiliated with the Service Employees International Union have given her more than $1 million so far this campaign, the Oregon Education Association that represents roughly 41,000 teachers has pointedly declined to endorse her. 

Political jockeying aside, Kotek allies say her strength remains in policy details. 

The governor notes that she has replaced many agency directors since taking office, and that her agencies have complied with several audits. Her plan for a second term focuses on improving affordability through more housing resources for renters and first-time buyers and more social services such as a universal state-funded preschool program, though how to pay for it remains an open question.

“I’m a very deliberate person,” Kotek said. “We have put some experts together. They’re coming up with a plan to look at what we have, look where we need to go, look at how we can get there in the next three to four years. That is, I think, a signature piece of a second term for me.”

Drazan makes the case for bringing more balance to Salem 

Next January will mark 40 years since Oregon’s last Republican governor, Vic Atiyeh, left office. During his two campaigns, Atiyeh managed to capitalize on his ties to business communities to spur economic development. 

That’s the brand of politics Drazan describes to Portland voters at a home featured in a September campaign video. Drazan, the former House Republican leader who butted heads with Kotek in 2020 and 2021, said national politics has its “own weather system that I have never been drug into.”

Drazan’s campaign did not respond to multiple interview requests over four weeks. 

The senator grew up in Klamath Falls and often talks about her family struggling to make ends meet and relying on food stamps after her father lost his mill job. She served as House minority leader from 2019 to 2021, and she resigned to run for her first gubernatorial bid the next year. She returned to Salem in 2025 and served as House minority leader again, joining the Senate in October last year to fill the seat of former Sen. Daniel Bonham, a Republican from The Dalles who left to work for the Trump administration.

She originally entered politics in the 1990s as a legislative aide and climbed the ranks to a chief of staff position with then-Oregon House Speaker Mark Simmons. Drazan became accustomed to a Republican Legislature working to earn the signature of a Democratic governor, an arrangement she argues can be replicated in reverse with her governorship.

But something changed, Drazan and her allies say, when she returned to Salem in 2019 as a freshman House lawmaker in the minority. 

She recounts for voters a committee chair telling her that she killed her anti-bullying bill that year “because I could,” an example of partisanship that left her feeling discontent with engaging in good-faith across party lines. 

Smith Warner, the chair of the committee where Drazan’s bill died, disputed Drazan’s account: “While it sounds like something I would say, it doesn’t sound like an answer I would give about that specifically.”

Lawmakers went on to pass similar legislation two years later following advocacy from the parents of a child who committed suicide, which Drazan describes as too little, too late. Her 2019 bill, which sought to notify parents when a child experiences harassment or bullying in an Oregon school, died in the Committee on Student Success without a vote. 

“I ran to be a Republican leader right after that session,” Drazan said. “Not because I am a partisan, but because I felt so shocked and offended by the power systems that I was operating in that I wanted more balance.” 

Drazan is already making an effort to show that she can work across the aisle, touting the governor’s prosperity council’s findings from earlier this year as a starting point for legislative conversations in 2027. Two of Drazan’s priorities are changing the estate tax, which taxes dead people’s assets beginning at $1 million, and the corporate activity tax on businesses for more than $1 million in commercial activity, taxes that the council identified as areas of potential change.

“Do you know how to play the game? Can you negotiate with the majority party? Can you do all those sorts of things?” asked Bryan Iverson, a Republican political consultant and husband of Rep. Vikki Breese-Iverson, R-Prineville. “I think Drazan has always been adept at both of those.”

Her actions in practice, however, have sometimes aligned with the more polarizing cultural and social priorities of the right. She has sponsored bills to overturn mail-in voting, bar transgender youth from sports in alignment with their gender identity and create criminal liability for abortion providers. She issued a statement decrying “domestic terrorists” and calling for “order” after Trump threatened to deploy the National Guard to Portland last year, though she has denied that her statement welcomed federal troops to Oregon.

At the same time, Drazan has said she is a supporter of Oregon’s status as the first-in-the-nation sanctuary state for immigrants and will respect Oregon’s abortion law. She has spoken out against the Trump administration’s tariffs and the war with Iran. She often says she is a person of faith who has her own standards she does not seek to impose upon others. 

“This is our place and I will serve the people of this state,” Drazan said in Portland’s Lents neighborhood, “no matter who’s in the White House, no matter who’s in majority control of the Legislature or anywhere else.”