FILE - State Rep. Ed Diehl, center, answers a question alongside other top Republican gubernatorial candidates at a debate in April 2026.
Eli Imadali / OPB
Ed Diehl is as surprised as anyone to find himself running for Oregon governor.
Until last fall, Diehl was the legislative equivalent of middle management — a two-term lawmaker from Scio who often spoke with fire about his conservative ideals, but who’d failed in 2024 to win enough support to be House Republican leader. He settled for a role as assistant leader instead.
That trajectory changed Nov. 10, the day Diehl, 61, launched a campaign to block a package of tax and fee increases that was a top priority for Gov. Tina Kotek.
In just seven weeks, the effort collected more than 250,000 signatures, stunning observers and effectively dooming Kotek’s tax plan.
“I’m the guy that took on Tina Kotek with this referendum and won,” he said in a recent interview with OPB. “I’ll tell you what: I’m hearing it from Democrats, Republicans, across the board. It gave them hope.”
Diehl’s path to victory in the GOP primary, if he has one, runs through the successful anti-tax campaign. It boosted the beleaguered Oregon GOP. And it gave Diehl a list of hundreds of thousands of voters, many of whom he believes are Republicans who often sit out elections.
“What I’m bringing to the table is the ability to rally people who have not been voting before,” he said. “We know who they are, and we know where they’re at.”
What Diehl doesn’t have is the kind of money it will take to elevate him from a little-known lawmaker to a household name.
The candidate is his campaign’s top funder, having loaned himself $190,000 in order to meet the $500,000 fundraising threshold to participate in a debate at the Republicans’ Dorchester Conference.
His war chest is far smaller than his two chief rivals, state Sen. Christine Drazan and former Trail Blazer Chris Dudley, both of whom have run as the GOP gubernatorial nominee in the past.
“I am the new kid on the block when it comes to running this,” he said. “So yeah, I’ve had to work really hard to get the support I have.”
A recent poll found that 37% of likely Republican voters had never heard of Diehl.
If they had, they might know Diehl grew up in western Montana, securing a scholarship to Stanford University following high school. Diehl got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering at the school and met his future wife, Jamie. The couple moved to her hometown of Scio after graduating.
Diehl spent much of his career as an entrepreneur and business owner. He helped found Concept Systems, a factory automation company that Diehl says has helped streamline the production of Boeing aircraft, Conagra French fries, and lots of two-by-fours. “I’ve worked in sawmills all over the world.”
Diehl sold his interest in the company in 2018 with a mind to retire. But in 2022, incensed by what he saw as the state’s restrictive COVID lockdowns and poor response to record-setting wildfires, he ran for an open House seat and won.
Diehl quickly got a reputation as a conservative brawler in Salem. One of his first fights was against 2023’s House Bill 2002, part of which proposed making it easier to access gender-affirming care. He says he was concerned the bill made it too easy for minors to receive irreversible therapies.
“As an adult, I really don’t care what you do,” he told OPB. “But I think we should be protecting children.”
In the years since, Diehl has shown he’s open to collaborating with Democrats – even some of those he’s battled most often.
“When that guy puts his engineering brain to something, he’s actually pretty thoughtful, good and useful,” said state Rep. Rob Nosse, a Portland Democrat who chairs the House Health Care Committee that Diehl serves on. “When he filters things through his ideology, it gets a little harder for me.”
Like every other Republican candidate this year, Diehl pledges to cut taxes and slash regulations if he wins the governor’s office. That would almost certainly require the cooperation of legislative Democrats, who are expected to keep their majorities in both chambers.
Diehl says he can work successfully with the opposing party. But if it doesn’t work out, he has a plan B: Going directly to voters, just as he did to upend Kotek’s tax package.
“I’m about policy and I’m going to try and form those alliances across Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “But if they’re not willing to go through with my agenda, I don’t have a problem being the first active governor to petition measures and put them on the ballot and bypass the Legislature.”
OPB asked four leading GOP candidates for governor the same five questions. Here are Diehl’s answers, which have been edited for brevity and clarity.
OPB: What’s the biggest policy difference between you and your opponents?
DIEHL: I really don’t know what Dudley’s policies are. When I look at where Drazan is, there’s some topics she’s avoided, but we’re probably pretty close on our policy positions. I think it’s more about who will be more effective in the position and who can actually beat Tina Kotek.
I have taken the strongest position on getting our agencies cleaned up. When I look at our issues at hand, to me, it really goes back to state agencies. It has to be permits, rulemaking, things that are really impeding progress in the form of building homes, expanding businesses to create great jobs, solving natural resource challenges that we’re locking up natural resources that are starving our rural communities.
All these things come back to agencies that I think are really, after 40 years of one-party governance, they’re just really not looking out for the best interest of the Oregon people. I’m pushing on that harder than any of my opponents, and I’m serious about it.
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 feel that our local law enforcement needs to cooperate and communicate with the federal government on these issues. Number one, to get violent criminals out. I hope everyone can agree with that. Our laws right now make it so that you can have a criminal here illegally, serve time in jail and just be released into the community when the common sense thing to do is make a call and get them deported.
But that said, we have people who have been here for decades. They’re paying taxes. They’ve raised their children here. I go to church with some of them and they’re not the target. And I’ve read a few cases that really concern me. And so yeah, I delineate between those two situations very much.
But let me clarify this. As governor, if we initiated that basic level of communication and cooperation with the federal government, the temperature on this issue would go way down, way down, because now we know who they’re going after, why they’re going after them. We can assist them in that effort. And so we’re not sweeping up innocent people.
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?
To me, the vast majority of it is an accountability issue. We have dumped tremendous amounts of money into our education system and we’re getting some of the worst possible results. We have to get back to just the basic fundamentals of teaching – reading, writing, and arithmetic. When the state has to spend millions of dollars to reeducate teachers on how to teach phonics, what in the world happened? What in the world happened with our education system for educators?
I want to work with teachers to restore their ability to maintain discipline. I can tell you that this is one of the top things for the teachers and the teacher’s union for their in- classroom environment, but yet I could not get the teacher’s union to support my legislation. I want to restore testing standards. I want to restore enforcement on truancy. We have some of the highest absenteeism rates in the country.
Mississippi figured this flipping thing out. We can figure it out. It’s not complicated.
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?
I will approach the Legislature like I did while I was in the building. I find common ground with everybody. And I really work hard at that. It’s about policy, not personality. I’ll team with, say, [Rep. Rob Nosse, D-Portland,] on a bill, and then I’ll fight with him like heck on another bill.
But when I’m elected, even if it’s by a slim majority, that comes with its own mandate because after 40 years, Oregonians are saying, “It’s time for change. It’s time for change.” I will use that and use the bully pulpit to promote an agenda.
And if the Legislature refuses to go along with that agenda, I have no problem running initiative petitions to bypass their agenda, and I’ll be the first sitting governor to be petitioner on [ballot] measures.
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?
I can’t speak to the executive order, but I do support the SAVE Act. I do think there’s some common sense things around voter ID and proof of U.S. citizenship that just makes sense. But I’m saying that also understanding that Oregonians are accustomed to vote-by-mail. We did kind of create the thing. And if you asked Oregonians today, “Do you want to eliminate vote by mail?” They would say, “No, we want it.” So my platform is focused on what election integrity efforts can we do to improve voters’ confidence in the system and then increase transparency over the mailing system.
