With just over two weeks left until election day, Democrats can barely contain their glee.
Control of the House seems about to fall into their eager laps. Senate races in states that are normally cardinal red — Alaska, Iowa, Kansas and Texas among them — have grown fiercely competitive.
And, for the first time since 2010, a Democrat may soon be sitting in the governor’s office in more than half the 50 states. As recently as 2017, just 16 of them had Democratic governors — the lowest number in nearly a century.
The party owes a big thank you to President Trump, whose political standing seems to be sinking, like a depth charge, lower by the day. The only question is how much damage he inflicts on fellow Republicans.
There are, however, exceptions to every political trend, outliers in every election, a contest that zigs when races just about everywhere else are zagging.
Oregon, that crunchy and damp citadel of Left Coast liberalism, hasn’t elected a Republican governor since President Reagan was midway through his first term. In 2024, Kamala Harris walloped Donald Trump by more than 14 percentage points, extending a decades-long Democratic presidential winning streak.
And yet the state’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, is on the defensive as she fights for a second term in November, burdened by a dismal approval rating and a sense that things have been pretty lousy in Oregon under her leadership.
The state “hasn’t thrived in the last decade, and certainly hasn’t thrived since COVID, the way other states have,” said John Horvick, one of Oregon’s leading independent pollsters.
Kotek, a former speaker of the state House — and a highly effective lawmaker in that role — made some very concrete promises.
“She was going to build 36,000 new homes. She was going to improve our educational outcomes and make improvements to behavioral health in the state,” Horvick said. “Voters give her poor marks on all those.”
Most notably, perhaps, the epidemic of homelessness — which has curdled Portland’s hipster image and agitated Oregonians more than just about any issue in recent years — hasn’t abated under Kotek, despite a promise to make the problem her top priority.
The Democrat still remains the favorite to win reelection. Oregon’s gubernatorial races tend to be closer than presidential contests and voters have been shown a reluctance to heave their governor from office, even when they tell pollsters they’re not happy with the incumbent or the state of their state.
“We watch this movie every four years in Oregon, where it looks really, really close and then, in the end, the Democrat wins,” said Kari Chisholm, a political strategist in Portland.
That may happen again. But Kotek’s travails show the perils of incumbency this angry election season, even for a Democratic swimming with a blue tide.
Thirty-six states are electing governors in November. Most of the contests lean toward one party or the other, like in California, where Democrat Xavier Becerra appears a shoo-in to replace Gavin Newsom.
But a dozen races are at least somewhat competitive, including toss-ups in Georgia, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin. All of the hardest-fought contests are in states that Trump carried in 2024 — several by double-digits — with Oregon being the lone exception.
Kotek, who’s been rated one of the least popular governors in America, is facing a rematch against Christine Drazan, a former GOP state House leader who now serves in the state Senate. In 2022, she lost narrowly lost to Kotek, 47% to 44%, in a three-way contest.
Unlike four years ago, Kotek has a gubernatorial record to defend and the case Drazan makes against her is succinct.
“Tina Kotek told Oregonians that she would solve the problems and challenges facing our state,” Drazan said in the candidates’ first debate this month. “She hasn’t.”
In a recent Fox News interview, Drazan elaborated.
“We have record high businesses that have gone out of business, bankruptcies, businesses that are leaving, family bankruptcies are at an all-time high,” Drazan said, exaggerating some. “Oregon is uniquely bad right now. It’s not a national issue, it’s here at home.”
Suggesting the state’s problems are indigenous is an obvious effort to lay responsibility on Kotek and absolve Trump, whose policies — ruinous tariffs, a reckless war, budget cuts — have slashed healthcare benefits, stoked inflation and driven fuel prices to all-time highs.
Further distancing herself from the Republican brand, Drazan has undergone a distinct makeover since winning the GOP primary in May. “Tough. Tested. Conservative,” is no longer the descriptive shorthand she uses on her campaign website. Now it’s “Mom. Public Servant. Champion for All.”
Drazan’s revised campaign biography also omits her opposition to various Democratic-backed policies, such as gun control, and her culture-warrior vowto “protect girls’ sports and keep men out of their locker rooms.” Instead, the Oregonian newspaper noted, her emphasis is now affordability and relatability.
Despite that, Kotek has continued wielding her sharpest-pronged political weapon, tying Drazan — an “out-of-touch MAGA extremist,” in her campaign’s parlance — to the unpopular president.
“I think we all know that there have been a lot of challenges facing our state and they’re still coming at us because of the confusion and disruption coming from Washington, D.C.,” Kotek said during the candidates’ third and final debate last week. “It’s just a fact. It’s upending who we are as a state and it is … making it harder for us to solve the problems that we have ahead of us.”
Passing the buck and pointing her finger is not exactly a message of triumph, uplift and achievement, but it may be enough to win Kotek a second term.
Grudgingly.
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