Unexpected losses – The New York Times

Unexpected losses – The New York Times

The mid-term polls still look bad for the Democratic Party. Yes, it is possible that events – such as the overthrow of Roe v. Wade – will help the party do better in November than analysts expect. For now, however, 2022 looks like another wave election in which the president’s party will suffer huge losses.

In a golf election, big surprises are possible. In 2018, for example, Republicans lost every home seat in Orange County, California, which has long been a symbol of suburban conservatism. In 1994, Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley shockingly lost his own district to a political neophyte.

Unless the polls for the Democrats improve, they could suffer similar unexpected losses in November. It is by definition difficult to predict these surprises in advance. But even blue states and districts that are normally safe may not be this year.

Today, my colleague Reid Epstein presents a portrait of one such campaign: the governor’s race in Oregon. It has its own characteristics, including a third-party candidate, but many of the political themes in Oregon are also present across the country.

Almost no one in Oregon seems to be happy.

In Portland, only 8 percent of residents think their city is on the right track, according to a May poll by Oregon Public Broadcasting. East of the Cascade Mountains, nine provinces are so fed up with Democratic control of the state that they voted to leave the state to join Idaho.

Only Democrats have served as Oregon’s governor since 1987, but the party, plagued by rising gasoline prices, inflation and President Biden’s unpopularity, is in so much trouble in this year’s midterm elections that even deep – blue Oregon is suddenly competitive.

Portland, like many other cities in the US, has seen an increase in homelessness and violent crime. The visit to the city’s city center in recent years has been an exercise in navigating its sprawling homeless camps – an issue that polls show is most important to the state’s voters. And murders rose to at least 90 last year, from 36 in 2019.

In much of the country, that’s all Republicans have to say to arouse their voters: Joe Biden, crime and gas prices.

Amid their political headwinds, Oregon Democrats doubled.

As governor, the party has nominated Tina Kotek, a former speaker of the State House, who is widely seen as a status quo candidate who will maintain Oregon’s progressive direction. Last year, it sponsored legislation that limited Oregon cities’ ability to remove homeless people’s tents from public spaces.

In typical weak Democratic years, Oregon Democrats overcame dissatisfaction with the party. But things are so bad now that the party has splintered: Betsy Johnson, a veteran Democratic state legislator, left the legislature and left her party to launch an independent campaign for governor.

Johnson, a helicopter pilot whose distinctive Liz Claiborne goggles are embedded in her campaign logo, has raised far more money than both Kotek and Republican nominee Christine Drazan. Johnson also earned a variety of high-profile endorsements from members of both parties. Much of her fundraising came from Oregon’s corporate moguls, including more than $ 1 million from Nike founder Phil Knight.

Portland’s homelessness crisis is fueling Johnson’s campaign. One of her TV commercials shows her driving around the city’s camps. “No more tent cities,” she says. When I spoke to her, Johnson did not utter a word: “You can see the deterioration of the beautiful Rose City, now the city of cockroaches,” she said.

Democrats say they believe Johnson will get more votes from the Republican base than from their own. But they spend as if she is a real threat, creating a PAC to attack her as an obstacle to environmental progress and gun control. (Shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre, Johnson told a group of high school students that she owned a machine gun. She told me it was “a Cold War artifact” and said she still had it.)

The GOP nominee, Drazan, is anti-abortion and pro-Trump, a change from the moderates the Oregon Republicans have nominated for governor in recent years. Her campaign believes she can win the three-way race with just 40 percent of the vote – the same percentage that Donald Trump took in 2020. Some Republicans in Washington, DC, believe that Drazan has a better chance of winning than their candidates do in traditional battlefield states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Kotek and Johnson favor abortion rights – a position they both emphasized after Friday’s Supreme Court ruling that Roe v. Wade. Johnson served on the board of the local Planned Parenthood Division, while Kotek approved legislation in 2017 that expanded state-funded abortion access.

Kotek is still the favorite to win. Oregon Democrats have significant structural advantages – there are just more of them than anyone else. But that’s not a sure thing, and Democrats are sweating the result for the first time in years.

When we spoke last week, Kotek tried to steer the discussion to issues where she’s in line with Oregon’s progressive voters: environmental protection, gun control, and minimum wage increases, which Johnson is all opposed to. Kotek dismissed Johnson as an elected gadfly who achieved little during her two decades in the Oregon Legislature.

But in doing so, she sounded awfully much like another well-credited Democrat who looked like she was in a race the party could not lose.

“You can do what Donald Trump did and say, ‘Trust me,’ like Betsy Johnson,” Kotek said. “Or you can vote for the person who really has a track record of making sure people have what they need. So I think at the end of the day, people are going to go along with it. ”

The next four months will determine if she is right.

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  • The trial for Brittany Griner, the WNBA star detained in Russia, will begin on Friday.

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