Christine Drazan is ready for a rematch

Christine Drazan swears this time is different.

It’s been four years since Drazan, a Republican who lives in Beavercreek, came up short in her bid to block Tina Kotek from the governor’s mansion.

Plenty has happened in that span. Drazan won back her former Oregon state House seat — the one she gave up to run for governor — and immediately reassumed her old role of House minority leader. She scored an appointment to a vacant spot in the state Senate, ensuring she could fundraise for another gubernatorial bid while lawmakers met in session.

And she thought — a lot — about the reasons she came roughly 67,000 votes short of her greatest political rival in 2022.

Now, with at least one poll suggesting Drazan leads the pack of Republicans vying to take on Kotek in November, she is ready with plenty of reasons why 2026 can be different.

“For people that look at it now and say, ‘This is a repeat of that,’ — it’s not,” Drazan, 53, told OPB recently, addressing a persistent argument from critics. “It’s a different time. The state’s in a different place. The dynamics are different. I, personally, am different.”

Start with who’s not around this year: a viable third option.

The 2022 race saw an energetic campaign from Betsy Johnson, a former Democratic state senator who bailed on her party to run as an unaffiliated candidate. Johnson was never a threat to win, but she hoovered up 9% of the vote and complicated Drazan’s path.

“Betsy raised $17.5 million, none of which was from Tina Kotek’s donors,” Drazan said. “Structurally speaking, she was talking to the people that I talked to.”

Drazan herself has raised upwards of $2.3 million so far this election cycle, almost $500,000 of it from Ashland auto dealer Don Jones.

The candidate has also tweaked her game plan. She is spending more time talking to voters in small groups, as opposed to holding larger rallies. And she is putting more energy into wooing people in Portland, the state’s Democratic stronghold.

But the big difference, to Drazan, is she can now run against Kotek’s actual record as governor.

“She said, ‘You don’t have to vote red to clean up the damn trash,’” Drazan said, paraphrasing an argument Kotek made in 2022. “Turns out you do… The conversation with voters is: She isn’t doing the job, she’s shown she can’t do the job and I can promise you she doesn’t deserve your vote to continue to fail doing the job.”

Before she can have that conversation, Drazan needs to defeat a GOP field that includes former Trail Blazer Chris Dudley and state Rep. Ed Diehl.

The top candidates are virtually in lockstep on key issues — lowering taxes, slashing regulations, taking a firmer hand on homelessness and boosting public safety among them. Drazan’s campaign mailers to Republican voters have highlighted her opposition to abortion (“Christine Drazan will be our pro-life champion”) and her support of gun rights (“Clear aim, proven results”).

But more than anything, the race might hinge on who can convince voters they pose the most serious threat to Kotek.

Drazan’s pitch goes like this: She’s a lifelong Oregonian whose upbringing in Klamath Falls was marked by hardship when reduced timber production killed her father’s mill job.

She knows how to maneuver in Salem, having spent her entire career in and around politics. Drazan was a high-level legislative staffer and lobbyist before winning a House seat in 2018.

And she’s been a tireless foe and foil to Kotek, who previously spent a record nine years as the state’s speaker of the House. Drazan still points voters to 2020, when she led House Republicans on an extended walkout that wound up blocking Democratic climate change legislation.

“I have been in this fight and I have the scars to prove it,” Drazan said at an April 16 debate. “When we take this governor’s office, we can’t afford to have somebody that has to find the bathrooms. We have got to have somebody that can hit the ground running on day one.”

Drazan is also walking the fine line familiar to any Republican with statewide ambitions: working to signal an independence from President Donald Trump while not alienating her party’s base. Asked repeatedly about Trump’s policies in a recent interview, Drazan did not once use his name while answering.

“You have personalities in politics, and we’ve got a very big personality right now in the White House,” she said. “When it comes to how I will operate [with Trump in office], it’s going to be taking things head on as they come and not projecting one way or another in advance of that. I know that doesn’t satisfy anybody, but I’m not going to punch the president in the nose.”

OPB asked four leading GOP candidates for governor the same five questions. Here are Drazan’s answers, which have been edited for brevity and clarity.

OPB: What’s the biggest policy difference between you and your opponents?

DRAZAN: I have really not been listening that closely to what their policy proposals are. Is that terrible?

I think that we all want to see affordability improve in our state. I think we all recognize that education is failing and we would approach it differently than Tina Kotek. I mean, that list [in the April 16 GOP debate] did not have a lot of daylight between us.

If you just listen to Chris Dudley in particular, he’s just memorized a bunch of statistics and he has a philosophical approach to the world – and God bless him for that – but zero track record and no way for any of us to know what he would actually do if he ever actually had any responsibility for anything.

I would say Danielle Bethell has been at this county commission level and she is an established advocate at the county level and that shows, and Ed [Diehl] at least has served a couple of terms. I don’t agree with his approach on some of the healthcare issues. There are taxes he voted for that I didn’t vote for.

As the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement in Oregon, the effort has swept up undocumented people with no violent criminal history. Do you support enforcement against people without legal status who have been productive community members?

I do not want a world where I look at the laws of our country and our land and I say, “We’re going to enforce these laws and we’re not going to enforce those laws.” I am a person that believes that we should, in fact, be a nation of laws and it happens to be the responsibility and the appropriate responsibility of the federal government to ensure that we know who’s in our country. Do I want border patrol agents operating outside of the actual border? No, I do not. Is it their responsibility to know who’s in our country? Yes, it is.

I think that enforcement has always existed. I think the way it is operating today is not the way that it has always operated, and that’s not something that I’m comfortable with. [But] I don’t think removing people that are not here lawfully is new. Obama did it. Everybody does this because it’s the role of the federal government.

Oregon has one of the lowest performing education systems and requires among the least amount of time in the classroom in the nation. Are Oregon’s struggles a money issue, a staffing issue or an accountability issue?

I think it’s a leadership issue at its core because our staffing has grown. I don’t think it’s grown in the areas that have benefited students, but, by sheer numbers, the number of employees in our school districts has grown.

I would say that “accountability” is a hard phrase when it comes to schools. So for me, it’s leadership because we have right now an approach to schools where they talk about whole child education and the metric is driven by social and emotional learning. It’s driven by identity and it’s driven by all of these things where you would think that our teachers were trained to be therapists and not trained to teach math, reading, writing, science, civics.

Schools are the only place that we have this constitutional duty to provide an education, and I think that we should be there to provide the education. I don’t think that we should be there to do all of it. I think leadership should say, “Your job is this.”

Democrats’ legislative majorities are unlikely to go away in November. As governor, that means you would need to work with a party whose priorities you’ve been harshly critical of. How will you work with Democrats to actually make progress, as opposed to simply blocking their ideas?

That’s up to them as well. It’s not a one-sided conversation. We have to balance a budget. We don’t have to advance an agenda that I don’t agree with. So I will veto legislation that they are unwilling to compromise on, and I will have an open door if they’re willing to compromise.

President Trump continues to try to undermine vote by mail. Oregon has no other means of conducting an election, and mail elections here were initially pushed by Republicans. Do you agree with the president’s recent executive order on mail voting or the SAVE America act that he has pushed? Why or why not?

[Drazan began her answer by recounting a 2025 exchange she had with Secretary of State Tobias Read in a legislative committee hearing. Drazan asked Read whether he had all the tools necessary to ensure that people on Oregon’s voter rolls are actually eligible to vote. Read, who had just been sworn into office, responded: “I don’t feel confident about that yet.”]

I found that troubling, and I have always been a person that’s been supportive of vote by mail. I was the lone [Republican] vote to make every mailbox a ballot drop box. [Editor’s note: Drazan is mistaken. Two other House Republicans supported Senate Bill 816, the 2019 bill that approved prepaid postage on ballot envelopes.]

I have, since that time, had very real concerns about the Postal Service, very real concerns about the DMV [which automatically registers people to vote], and I believe that Oregonians deserve to feel confident in their system. I didn’t hear from Tobias Read that he was particularly confident himself, and that’s his actual job.

So I don’t want a federal takeover of our elections. I don’t think that that’s possible. I don’t believe that they can do that. But someone needs to be able to provide information to the Secretary of State’s office so that they can do the job.