Governor Tina Kotek should have participated in the debate hosted by the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association. I do not think a busy summer schedule is a strong enough explanation for declining an opportunity to answer questions from journalists representing communities across Oregon. She is the sitting governor. Oregonians are frustrated, people deserve answers, and she should be willing to defend her record publicly.
That does not mean Christine Drazan’s social media post tells the entire story. Kotek declined this particular event in advance. She did not unexpectedly leave Drazan sitting alone on a debate stage, and she has not refused to debate her altogether. Kotek’s campaign previously proposed three televised debates in Medford, Eugene and Portland. I can criticize Kotek for skipping this event without accepting the campaign narrative that she is refusing to face Drazan at all.
I keep repeating this because politics has apparently convinced us that supporting someone means pretending they never get anything wrong. I am completely capable of supporting Tina Kotek while also criticizing Tina Kotek.
I am frustrated too.
I am frustrated with Oregon Democrats. I am frustrated with the governor. I am frustrated with state agencies that announce investments, unveil plans and hold meetings while families are still waiting for something to change. I am frustrated that we have spent years talking about housing, homelessness, transportation, schools and mental health while so many Oregonians still feel as if the government cannot accomplish basic things.
I live here. I drive these roads. I pay these prices. I have spent years trying to navigate Oregon’s mental health system for my own family. I receive messages constantly from other families who are exhausted, frightened and trying to find help. My frustration is not theoretical, and it certainly is not something I invented because a Republican campaign told me to be angry.
The Oregon Democratic Party needs to understand that frustration. Democrats need to communicate better, organize better and actually excite people. They need to stop acting as though reminding everyone how terrible Republicans are will be enough. They need to give working people something real to believe in, and then they need to deliver on it.
Transportation is a perfect example. Democratic leaders spent years talking about a long term solution, failed to pass a package during the regular session, returned for a costly and chaotic special session, and passed House Bill 3991 with increases to the gas tax and vehicle fees. Oregon voters then rejected most of those increases through Measure 120. ODOT says lawmakers have temporarily stabilized core services, but the underlying funding problem remains unresolved. That was not good governing. It was poor timing, poor communication and a failure to earn public trust. (https://www.oregon.gov/odot/pages/hb3991.aspx and https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/19/oregon-gas-tax-lags-early-returns-primary-election/)
Democrats cannot simply respond by telling people they did not understand the policy. People understood that they were already struggling to afford groceries, housing, insurance, utilities and transportation, and their state government was asking them for more money. Democratic leaders did not make a convincing case that existing funds were being managed well, that meaningful accountability would accompany the new revenue or that the people carrying the largest burden would receive enough in return.
That failure deserves criticism.
Our mental health system deserves even louder criticism. Oregon has invested more money and is adding treatment capacity, but families are still being abandoned between agencies, hospitals, insurers, coordinated care organizations, developmental disability services and the criminal justice system. Kotek’s administration says Oregon is on track to add more than 1,600 residential mental health and addiction treatment beds, which is real progress, but it is not the same thing as fixing the system. (https://apps.oregon.gov/oregon-newsroom/OR/GOV/Posts/Post/state-behavioral-health-investments-create-more-than-1600-new-treatment-beds)
I have been in meetings with legislators, state officials, health care leaders and people inside these agencies. I have used my platform to ask questions that families like mine should never have needed a social media platform to get answered. I have criticized the Oregon Health Authority. I have criticized the lack of coordination. I have criticized the governor’s administration when the urgency has not matched the severity of the crisis.
I will continue doing that.
But here is the distinction I believe we need to make. There is a difference between a political party that broadly has the right values and policies for working people but repeatedly struggles to communicate and execute them, and a political party whose proposed solution is to weaken government oversight, cut public revenue, empower corporations and fall in line behind Donald Trump.
The Democratic Party of Oregon’s platform supports unions, collective bargaining, living wages, publicly funded childcare, fair taxation, public education, rural investment, affordable health care, behavioral health services, corporate accountability and protection of public lands. It states that the economy works when workers do well, that health care is a right and that corporations should be held responsible when they harm people or the environment. I do not agree with every sentence in a party platform, and having a good platform means very little when leaders fail to turn it into results, but the overall direction is unmistakably focused on workers, families, public services and protecting people from concentrated corporate power. (https://dpo.org/party/platform-priority-legislative-action-items/ and https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vS5aQyZSBkwUScaIPggShjG31G5MeG2BNMQhgpjZRdgMX7oxkf8aLZiq4Oou_mytQ0TdRtemhh3xJhw/pub)
My frustration is that Oregon Democrats have not consistently turned those values into visible, understandable improvements in people’s daily lives. They have the better framework for working people. They have not always shown that they know how to use it.
Christine Drazan is offering something very different.
Her campaign says she would lower taxes, repeal regulations, freeze new rules, fire officials she considers hostile to business, tear up Kotek’s executive orders, remove three regulations for every new regulation and generally get government out of the way. Her platform includes some proposals that could help certain families, such as childcare tax credits, first time homebuyer assistance and faster permitting. Those ideas deserve to be evaluated on their merits. The larger philosophy, however, is that taxes, regulations, public employees and government itself are responsible for most of Oregon’s problems. (https://www.christinefororegon.com/priorities/)
That is where the comparison to Trump becomes impossible to ignore.
Drazan promises no tax on tips and no tax on overtime, two of Trump’s signature tax messages. She promises to remove three regulations for every new one, while Trump created a federal policy requiring ten regulations to be identified for removal for every new rule. She promises to fire what she calls anti business bureaucrats, while the Trump administration has moved to make thousands of policy related federal employees easier to remove when they resist presidential directives. Drazan promises to tear up executive orders and unleash Oregon’s natural resource economy. Trump has used nearly identical language about deregulation, energy production and removing government barriers. (https://www.christinefororegon.com/priorities/ and https://www.whitehouse.gov/obbb/ and https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-launches-massive-10-to-1-deregulation-initiative/ and https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/06/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-increases-accountability-in-the-federal-workforce/)
I am not saying Christine Drazan and Donald Trump are identical people. They are not. Drazan is more disciplined, more polished and less chaotic in her presentation. That polished delivery may appeal to Oregonians who are exhausted with Democratic leadership and do not personally like Trump.
But Trumpism is not merely Trump’s personality. It is a governing philosophy.
It teaches people that public servants are the enemy, regulations are the reason everything is expensive, corporations would solve more problems if government stopped restraining them, schools are indoctrinating children and complicated social problems can be addressed through punishment and greater police power. It takes legitimate public frustration and channels it toward dismantling the institutions that are supposed to protect people from abuses of power.
Drazan’s campaign even uses the same culture war framing. Her platform promises to stop supposed indoctrination in schools, defend women’s sports, expand school choice and prevent children from being exposed to what it calls radical ideologies. Those are not uniquely Oregon proposals. They are central parts of the national Trump movement’s campaign against public education, LGBTQIA+ people and inclusive curriculum. (https://www.christinefororegon.com/priorities/)
That is why I am deeply concerned that a Drazan administration would not stand up to Trump when Oregon needed it. Donald Trump’s administration is not an abstract national issue. Federal decisions affect Oregon’s health care funding, food assistance, immigrant communities, public lands, reproductive freedom, LGBTQIA+ protections, schools and economy. Oregon’s state government has already passed legislation intended to protect health care, workers, immigrants and public lands from federal actions. (https://apps.oregon.gov/oregon-newsroom/OR/GOV/Posts/Post/governor-kotek-highlights-major-wins-for-oregonians-in-2026-legislative-session)
When the federal government comes after Oregon, I want a governor who will fight back. I do not want a governor who will look for ways to stay quiet, avoid upsetting Trump or translate his agenda into softer language for Oregon voters.
That is also where corporate power enters this conversation. Drazan’s governing message is built around making Oregon more friendly to business by reducing regulations and removing public officials whom she believes stand in the way. Sometimes regulations absolutely do need to be updated, simplified or removed. Government can be painfully slow and unnecessarily complicated. But there is a very large difference between reforming a broken process and treating corporations as though they are automatically more trustworthy than the public agencies responsible for regulating them.
During the 2022 governor’s race, the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems gave Drazan $320,000, reportedly far more than it had previously given any candidate. The hospital organization spent a combined $455,000 supporting candidates running against Kotek. That does not prove an illegal agreement or tell us how Drazan would decide every health care issue, but it certainly tells us which candidate the hospital lobby believed would be friendlier to its interests. (https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/01/13/the-oregon-hospital-association-sends-conciliatory-checks-after-betting-big-against-kotek/)
That matters to me because I have watched powerful health care systems avoid accountability while families are told there is nowhere for their children to go. I have watched hospitals, insurers, coordinated care organizations and state agencies pass responsibility back and forth. I have watched a lack of treatment become a law enforcement problem and then watched everyone act surprised when a family falls apart.
Drazan’s mental health and homelessness platform emphasizes addiction, audits, arrest warrants, law enforcement and what her campaign calls “fewer needles and more cops.” Oregon needs safe communities. We need addiction treatment. We need accountability when people commit crimes. But that is not a comprehensive mental health plan. It does not explain how Oregon will create enough youth residential programs, psychiatrists, therapists, crisis placements, direct support professionals and long term treatment options. It does not explain how families navigating trauma, mental illness and developmental disabilities will receive help before the crisis reaches the police. (https://www.christinefororegon.com/priorities/)
You cannot arrest your way out of a shortage of treatment beds. You cannot deregulate your way into having enough child psychiatrists. You cannot police your way out of hospital boarding, insurance denials and agencies refusing to accept responsibility.
I do not trust a government shaped by corporate health care interests to fix a mental health system that already gives those interests too much power.
This is why I keep coming back to the same conclusion, even while I remain frustrated.
Oregon Democrats need to do better. They need to stop taking voters for granted. They need to listen to rural communities, working families, parents, small business owners and people who feel as if Salem only notices them when it needs another vote or another tax. They need to explain where money is going, admit when programs are failing and stop confusing announcements with accomplishments.
They also need to excite people again. A big tent cannot simply mean asking everyone to stand quietly under it while leadership makes decisions. A healthy coalition includes disagreement, criticism, pressure and people demanding better. Unity that requires silence is not unity.
But I am not going to confuse frustration with equivalence.
One party needs to become much better at governing, communicating and delivering on a platform that broadly supports workers, unions, public education, health care, civil rights, rural investment, public lands and corporate accountability.
The other is offering tax cuts without clearly explaining which services would lose funding, deregulation without acknowledging who those regulations protect, more power for corporations, more culture war politics and a state level version of the Trump playbook.
Christine Drazan may package that agenda more calmly than Trump does. The wrapping does not change what is inside.
I will continue criticizing Tina Kotek. I will continue criticizing Oregon Democrats. I will continue demanding meaningful action on transportation, affordability and the mental health crisis that has directly affected my family. I am not interested in becoming a cheerleader for any politician or party.
But being frustrated with the people inside the big tent does not mean I am willing to hand the tent over to Donald Trump, corporate lobbyists and a Republican Party that has shown very little willingness to stand up to either.
Tina Kotek should have shown up for that debate. Oregon Democrats need to show up much better for working people.
And Christine Drazan still has not convinced me that replacing imperfect progress with Trump style deregulation, corporate power and political deadlock would make life better for the people of Oregon.
I completely agree!