Oregon Republicans just had their biggest primary day in a generation, and the historically deep-blue state is suddenly looking like it could flip in November. Democrats have controlled Oregon for nearly four decades — the GOP hasn't won a governor's race there since 1982 — and now the blue wall is crumbling from the inside out, thanks to years of progressive lunacy that turned Portland into a cautionary tale.
Let that sink in. Oregon. The land of kombucha, bike lanes, and "autonomous zones." Going red.
Conservative Brief reports that Tuesday's Republican gubernatorial primary drew a stacked field of serious candidates. Christine Drazan, the former state House Minority Leader who nearly won in 2022, is back and looking stronger than ever. She's joined by Chris Dudley, a 16-year NBA veteran who played for the Portland Trail Blazers and has since become a successful businessman. State Representative Ed Diehl and Marion County Commissioner Danielle Bethell also threw their hats in the ring. Even Nike co-founder Phil Knight has been circling the GOP orbit in the state.
The incumbent? That would be Democratic Governor Tina Kotek, who has presided over an Oregon that can't stop the bleeding — homelessness out of control, public safety in the tank, drug policy that basically legalized everything short of cooking meth in a school zone, and a cost of living that's driving working families out of the state.
And here's the part that should terrify every Democrat strategist in the country: the money is there too. Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters laid out the financial picture in stark terms. "The DNC has minus 4 million dollars," Gruters said, noting it wasn't the DNC alone but the "collective" that plowed "$70 million" into Virginia's redistricting fight. Meanwhile, the GOP is sitting pretty. "If you look at the collective on the right, we may have $800 million," Gruters said. The Democrats? "The collective on the left may have $350 million."
Read those numbers again. The RNC has $125 million in cash on hand while the DNC is literally in the red. Gruters put a fine point on it: "But this time, this cycle, we will either spend at parity or will outspend them, and that's never happened before."
The issues driving the shift are the same ones Democrats have been told about for years and ignored anyway — homelessness choking Salem and Portland, a revolving-door criminal justice system, education funding that goes everywhere except into actually educating kids, and transportation infrastructure that's falling apart while politicians debate pronouns.
Portland burned itself down with "mostly peaceful" protests and defund-the-police nonsense. Oregonians watched their neighborhoods deteriorate, their property values tank, and their kids step over needles on the way to school. And now — surprise, surprise — they've had enough.
Forty years of Democrat control. And all it took to break the streak was letting voters see what forty years of Democrat control actually looks like.
