Oregon’s Nasty Woman
20th May 2022
Tina Kotek could be well on her way to being the thirty-ninth governor of Oregon. The Democrat, who previously served as speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, won her party’s primary this Tuesday. And with a Democratic supermajority in the legislature and a governor’s mansion that hasn’t housed a Republican since 1979, that’s likely a one-way ticket to victory in November.
Kotek is, in many ways, a creature of the state Democratic establishment. Yet in Oregon — and in blue states like it — “establishment Democrat” means something very different than it once did. As a de facto one-party state, Oregon politics are effectively run by powerful progressive interests — teacher and labor unions, environmentalist organizations, progressive activist groups, and so on. As those groups have lurched left in recent years, the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has too.