Tina Kotek’s historic campaign meets Oregon at a crossroads – The Washington Post

And in any other year, the history-making possibilities of Kotek’s run might also be more pronounced: She is one of two women, along with Maura Healey in Massachusetts (D), who could become the country’s first openly lesbian governor.

But in 2022, divisions and bitterness linger over covid policies enacted by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown. There is continuing fallout from Portland’s intense racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Coupled with a housing crisis that has been mounting for years, crime and safety have become focal points in statewide races. Nor is Oregon immune to the so-called culture wars roiling other states: Hate groups have resurged, and right-leaning politicians have vowed to regulate how schools teach gender, race and history and embraced anti-trans policies that have taken hold in other parts of the country.

In this divisive climate, independent gubernatorial candidate Betsy Johnson has emerged as a third-party contender who, though unlikely to win, is appealing enough to left-leaning voters that she could siphon away crucial votes from Kotek. As of Friday, GOP candidate Christine Drazan held a slim lead over the Democratic lawmaker. If Drazan wins, she would be the first Oregon Republican elected to the governor’s mansion in 40 years.

This means that, in 2022, a state recently considered a liberal bastion may be at a political crossroads. And Democratic heavyweights are taking note. In the past month, President Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have joined Kotek on the campaign trail.

That kind of extra attention is unheard of in Oregon, said Alison Gash, an associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon. The campaign is showing that liberal blue bubbles “are not impenetrable,” she said.

“The margin of votes that separates the two sides is often relatively small and can shift,” she said. “And that’s an important story that I think Oregon is always telling. We just tend to forget.”

The last time Oregon elected a Republican governor, Kotek was a 16-year-old living in Pennsylvania. That governor, Victor Atiyeh, had just left office when Kotek moved to Oregon in 1987. Kotek was in her early 20s, was coming out as gay, and after dropping out of Georgetown University, was unsure what she wanted to do with her life.

In Oregon, she found herself: Moved by the state’s “love for independence” and self-expression and its physical beauty, Kotek also felt freed from the constraints she felt on the East Coast.

“I found a state that I could be myself and do great things,” she said in a phone interview.

Her first campaign to represent Portland in the statehouse ended in a Democratic primary defeat in 2004, but Kotek sought office again. She was elected to the statehouse in 2006, where she’s been ever since.

In 2013, as the country wrestled with the issue of marriage equality, Kotek became the first out lesbian to serve as legislative speaker in U.S. history. But what is more notable is how long she’s kept that role, says Barbara Smith Warner, a state representative from Northeast Portland for the past nine years.

It’s a credit to how tireless and focused Kotek is, but also how she views policy and nurtures relationships, Smith Warner said.

“She can both see the big picture and also dive into details like nobody I’ve ever met,” she said.

Nancy Haque, a former executive director of Basic Rights Oregon, said Kotek’s leadership has made a material difference in the lives of some of the most vulnerable Oregonians. She credits the lawmaker with helping to push through a sweep of LGBTQ protections, including a ban on conversion therapy, increased mental health support for LGBTQ students, and helping trans people change gender identifiers on their birth certificate more easily.

Much of this progress was made during Donald Trump’s presidency, when immigrants, Muslims and queer people like her became political targets, Haque noted. “To be able to work for impact change in our state during those Trump years was so important,” she said. “Being able to make Oregon a little bit of a north star. … It’s been really heartening to feel like we’re moving forward even when, in the rest of the country, it seems like it’s going backward.”

Despite Oregon’s status as a liberal safe haven, Haque feels uneasy about recent political events. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Haque realized: “Everything I worked for my entire life can be taken away that easily. And it was heartbreaking.”

That fear has bled into Oregon’s tight gubernatorial race, which Haque sees as a fight “for the heart and soul of our state,” she said. “I’ve never been so invested in a gubernatorial race in my life.”

But if the state prides itself on its progressive policies, as both Kotek’s allies and political experts say, why do polls suggest that the race is a toss-up?

The issues that are front-and-center for Oregon voters are similar to those defining other races around the country: the economy, crime and housing, which both of Kotek’s opponents have used to their advantage.

Kotek is from Portland, which is not only the center of the state’s housing crisis, but carries with it the stigma of being “out of touch” with the rest of the state, Haque said. As a Democrat and legislative leader, Kotek is also the candidate most closely linked to Brown.

Issues such as abortion rights, which Kotek has made central to her campaign, are “just not a central issue for Oregon voters,” Gash said. Drazan has said she does not plan to curb Oregon’s existing abortion rights, though she considers them “extreme” and would veto any expansion of them.

Meanwhile, Johnson has positioned herself as a moderate voice and “people’s candidate,” though Oregon Public Broadcasting noted that her run has been fueled by some of Oregon’s richest citizens, including Nike founder Phil Knight (who has also donated money to Drazan’s campaign). Johnson, 71, has painted Oregon as a state “in a death spiral,” and has pledged to “get control of Portland’s homeless,” to “stop taking jobs and job creators for granted” and to end state covid mandates.

Her campaign has appealed to more moderate liberals, including Kotek’s former Oregon Food Bank boss, Rachel Bristol. A former Democrat, Bristol is one of many Oregonians who have switched their party affiliation to independent in recent years. Independents make up the state’s largest bloc of voters.

“This is not the Portland and Oregon that I grew up in and love,” Bristol said. “I think older voters and property owners and more of my Democratic friends are feeling like I am.”

Smith Warner chalks these tensions up to a “broad unhappiness” sweeping the rest of the country. People are still aching to get “back to normal, whatever normal is or was or what we thought it was,” she said. “Things are still so tentative and so up in the air.”

Gash sees parallels between the state’s political climate now and in the 1980s and 1990s. While Portland was LGBTQ-friendly back then, groups like the Oregon Citizens Alliance, a defunct conservative group, harnessed anti-gay sentiment in other parts of the state to put initiatives that overturned anti-discrimination protections on the ballot. (It is much easier in Oregon for individuals to propose laws or amendments than it is in other states.) At the same time, Oregon experienced a wave of antigay hate crimes.

Some Oregon leaders, including Kotek, have grown increasingly concerned about the growth of alt-right extremism and its effect on state politics. In 2020, Timber Unity, a group that advocates for rural workers in Oregon’s timber industry, and that has been linked to extremist organizations, pressured Republican lawmakers, including Drazan, towalk out of the state’s legislative session.

Nor is Oregon immune from the surge of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and harassment gripping other states in recent years. Last month, a middle school in Central Oregon pulled its students from an outdoor camp over the presence of nonbinary camp counselors. While Oregon’s fierce independent streak means residents are likely to reject policies that make it harder to get an abortion, Gash says, it also means that fights over issues like “parental rights” in education could become increasingly bitter.

While most Oregonians take “a certain degree of pride” that those ideas were eventually shot down, those conservative pockets still exist, Gash said. “I think conservative folks in those spaces have been catalyzed and hopeful about what they’re seeing in the rest of the country.”

If Drazan beats Kotek, how she will lead — and how Oregonians will respond to it — is an open question. Like Gov. Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, Drazan has distanced herself from Trump. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan recently campaigned alongside Drazan, touting her as the kind of leader who can work with a heavily Democratic legislature, according to the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

“My state is more than two times more Democratic, and I’ve been elected overwhelmingly twice with just as much support from Democrats and independents as Republicans,” Hogan said. “Much of our plan was exactly what she’s talking about doing for this state, so I believe in her.”

Kotek has tried to undermine this argument, saying Drazan is “hiding” who she is. Earlier this year, Drazan said she supported religious exemptions that allow employers to deny jobs or insurance coverage based on their religious beliefs. In practice, these policies disproportionately affect LGBTQ people and those seeking reproductive care.

“That’s not okay for Oregonians,” Kotek said. “It is a right-wing version of Oregon that is not where people are.”

Kotek vowed to work on mental health, addiction and housing issues: “My message to voters is, let’s fix these problems together, but not leave our core values behind.”

What happens at the ballot box Tuesday will show where Oregonians land on this question, though political experts disagree about what’s at stake. Richard Clucas, a political science professor at Portland State University, notes that Oregon’s executive and legislative branches have been split in the past. Should Drazan win, it’s possible that less policy would get pushed through, should her agenda clash with that of Oregon’s more liberal legislature.

People would remember the election for the spoiler role Johnson played, Clucas said. “I don’t think it will all of a sudden change the character of the voters and what they want and support.”

Gash and others see it differently. “It will train an eye back on Oregon in the way that there was an eye trained on Oregon in the 1990s, and not necessarily for good reasons,” she said.

It would depend on the kinds of policies Drazan champions, especially through executive action. But Gash also wondered what it could mean for Oregon voters to elect a Republican: “Do they come back? Like, once they’ve done the thing that they never thought they would do, do they go back or not?”