Candidates for Governor: Bridget Barton

This month, we invited nine of the candidates vying to be Oregon’s next governor for interviews. The seat is open for the first time since 2015. Bridget Barton is seeking the Republican nomination. Barton lives in West Linn and has worked as a conservative writer and political consultant for many years.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: In about a month many Oregon voters will get their ballots for the May primary. It will be a busy primary with two open congressional seats and the usual slate of legislative seats along with a crowded field, especially among Republicans for governor. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to have a series of one-on-one conversations with the most prominent candidates running in both the Republican and Democratic primaries. We’re gonna talk to nine gubernatorial candidates in all. We start today with Bridget Barton. She is seeking her first elected office. Bartan lives in West Linn and has worked as a conservative writer and political consultant for many years. Briget Barton, welcome back to Think Out Loud. What issue is most important to you in this race for Oregon governor?

Bridget Barton: Well, you know, Dave, I’m coming in as an outsider, as you mentioned. I am not a politician. I haven’t held political office. And the reason I’m getting in the race is because as I travel around the state, everyone is saying the same thing ‘what happened to Oregon’. We are faced with, I would say, four major issues and they are intertwined issues of crime, substance abuse and homelessness. And then we have significant issues around our education right now, our public school system and how that’s being managed. We have significant problems with the inflation and the high prices that we’re all facing. These are coming together. It’s like a perfect storm. I always joke and say I was a working mom all my life so I can multitask. I don’t put one in front of the other. All of those issues are the things I am running to help solve problems and get away from this ideological partisan bickering and just get to work on these problems that are affecting all Oregonians.

Miller: Let’s take these one by one. We’ll go in the order that you put them in. You call them the related issues of crime, substance abuse and homelessness. What role do you think the governor should play in terms of addressing homelessness?

Barton: I have to take an absolute leadership role and I will. It’s time for some strong leadership on this issue. So as you may know, Dave, I am 40 years in recovery from alcoholism. And so this is an issue that is very, very close to my heart. And I know this issue at my core. For the past 40 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of people struggling with substance abuse and I myself, I started drinking at 14. I didn’t stop until I was 28. I was a chronic alcoholic by then. I had lost my job and I was very close to homelessness. I get that these people are committing slow suicide on our streets right in front of our eyes. And I know from my core that what we are doing is not compassionate. It is enabling them to do this to commit slow suicide.

We have to flip the housing-first model on its head and begin to address it. And this is going to take a reallocation of funds. It’s going to take significant leadership that I will bring to bear. And I understand these people. The majority of them are struggling with substance abuse. As I’m sure you know, Oregon is number two in the country for substance abuse per capita. And yet after all the money that supposedly has been spent on helping to stop homelessness, we are the number 50 in treatment beds per capita in the country. So we are not solving the core problem. We’re just funneling money into these housing initiatives and creating more government jobs and creating more non-profit jobs. And my position is this - that we have created a reverse incentive for these people to solve the problem. It’s a reverse incentive. So we have to flip the model on its head and come in with strong support for creating low barrier shelters who have to have a database so that law enforcement can get these people off the street and push them into these shelters.

Miller: A database. Just to be clear, a database of shelter beds?

Barton: Exactly [a database] of shelter space. And this needs to be statewide; the problem is not just Portland, this needs to be a statewide initiative. So I’m gonna grab (lost audio momentarily)

Miller: Bridget, are you still there? Well, I heard almost all of what you said and so did our listeners. I’m curious. What you’re saying is that you know about how to solve this problem that the people who have been trying to solve it don’t know. I mean in particular why you say housing first is a mistake?

Barton: Okay, because it’s not a housing problem. It’s a substance abuse problem. And it’s really that simple. We’ve been solving the wrong problem for all this time, pushing all the money into housing instead of into treatment options and dealing with the bottom line substance abuse problem. One of the important things that I will do, and I want to be able to say this clearly is I’ve talked to sheriffs all over the state, I’ve talked to police all over the state and the people in the communities. We have a crime problem and a substance abuse problem and a homeless problem that’s spiraling out of control.

They all point to the same thing. What’s made it worse in the last year and not better and is threatening to take the entire state down is passage about Measure 110, which legalized hard drugs. As the governor, I’m going to marshal the forces of law enforcement, parents groups around the state, and people in the treatment community to refer that portion of that measure back to the public and say I believe strongly and I’m hearing it everywhere I go that the voters feel they made a very serious mistake, legalizing hard drugs. It has brought more crime, more substance abuse and more homelessness into the state. And law enforcement across the state all agrees if we don’t turn this thing around, it’s going to threaten to take the entire state down. Our crime rates are skyrocketing - property crime, violent crime. This is just going to get worse. So we need strong leadership. I have the expertise, I have the experience and I have the guts to get in there and stay focused on these problems and not get distracted into partisan politics.

Miller: Let’s move on to education, which you listed second as all of your top priorities. How would you approach education?

Barton: Well, again, it needs strong leadership at the top. As you know, we’re 46 in the country in our education results, 47th in our graduation rate. In Portland half the third graders are not reading at grade level and in the communities of color those numbers are even worse. We must change this immediately. My position is that I would immediately put in a new deputy superintendent of public instruction under me as the superintendent and establish a completely new vision for Oregon public education that is laser focused on academics only.

No more ideology, no more partisan agendas being pushed into the classrooms. We’re going to get back to basics in the classroom and get our education results bumped up fast.

Miller: What is your diagnosis for what’s going wrong right now?

Barton: I was just going to go there, so thank you for asking Dave. I was happy to read - there’s a series being run right now in The Oregonian about reading issues in Portland public schools specifically. And you know, I almost had to laugh when I read that the supposedly “new curriculum” that they are beginning to introduce to maybe solve this reading crisis is called letters. But what it boils down to is phonics. Well, you know what? We have known for decades that phonics worked better to teach reading. And yet it has been ignored until just now when we are just down at the very bottom of the barrel. Communities of color should be rising up in outrage that their children have not been taught to read phonetically. It works.

It’s been used in Mississippi and Alabama to skyrocket their rates of reading performance. And yet here we are, still kind of dabbling with it. Well, guess what? As your governor, I’m going to come in and say, ‘look, we are going to get back to basics’. Our kids need to read. We’re going to look around the country - we’re not going to be so prideful here in Oregon that we think we know everything when we’re 46 in the country - and look at curriculums that are working. We’re going to bring them in for our math, for our science, for our reading and we’re going to get our kids back up to the top of the charts.

Miller: Meaning that you would actually, instead of just having state standards, you would say this is a curriculum that all the districts need to follow?

Barton: I would certainly strongly suggest that if phonics and letters works that the teachers teach that way. And through the Department of Education and through the new deputy that I’ll put in place and share this vision of academics first, academic excellence, what works best. Through the principles down to the individual school.

Miller: I want to turn to elections. It’s become kind of gospel in the Republican party that President Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. That’s despite the fact that federal and state judges dismissed more than 50 election fraud cases and election officials called the 2020 election the most secure election in American history. You essentially said, in an interview with KGW recently, that none of us knows for sure who the rightful winner of the presidential election was basically because we can’t trust the mainstream media. That was my read on one of your answers. I’m curious. I want to focus this on Oregon in particular. Do you trust Oregon’s vote by mail system?

Barton: I think anybody who trusts the vote by mail system that we have in place right now is probably being a little bit optimistic. You know, we wrote an article for the Washington Examiner, my business partner and I, back before the 2020 election. And they said at the time, ‘here’s what’s coming in 2020 the Biden Trump race’. The progressive left was putting in place, right before the election, a whole slew of new voting rules that were going to make it probably the loosest voting rules in history in the United States.

Miller: I’m specifically focused on Oregon and we only have three minutes left. So do you trust Oregon’s vote by mail system - a system where it’s never been shown that there have been any serious issues of widespread voter fraud in Oregon?

Barton: Oh, no, I’m sorry. That’s just not true. There have been people arrested and fined for dumping hundreds of ballots. So that’s just not true.

Miller: And there have been individual workers, but that’s not an example of widespread voter fraud. I can think of one example of a county election official who went against rules. We’re not talking about any allegations that would come close to overturning an election. And I’m wondering if you say we should have faith in the system?

Barton: I beg to differ on the very case that we brought up in our article, which was where they asked specifically about the Oregon vote by mail. What’s wrong with it? Where are the problems, where are the potential for voter fraud? And we listed two things - ballot harvesting and too lengthy of a window for voting. And we referenced the race between Shemia Fagan and Mark Hass, which was flipped right at the end, I believe. And most people agree actually on this, that it was because they were able to go in and ballot harvest at the very end and use that open window of voting time. Now, what happened? What was the response to that after the 2020 race? We extended the voting window instead of tightening things up so that we can be certain about these things. So yeah, I think there’s all sorts of potential for problems in the Oregon vote by mail system. And now the last thing that this legislature did is they made it almost impossible to clean up the voter rolls. You know, Now we can’t even go in and take inactive voters off of the poll. So, you know, the thing is, there’s a lot of problems in Oregon, but that’s probably why I told you what my priorities are. My priorities are staying focused on the kitchen table issues that everyone cares about, not just Republicans. Everyone. And those are the soaring crime rates, the problems in our education system, the homeless people laying on our streets not being taken care of.

Thank you very much for joining us.That’s Bridget Barton Republican candidate for Oregon governor. Tomorrow I’m going to be joined by another Republican in the race, Stan Pulliam, who is the mayor of Sandy.

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