Oregon voters resoundingly rejected a statewide ballot measure that would have raised the state gas tax from 40 to 46 cents and doubled car title and registration fees to help fund road maintenance and other transportation projects.
Measure 120 was widely expected to fail, especially as gas prices continue to soar in Oregon and across the nation.
Last year, Gov. Tina Kotek and Democrats in the Legislature approved a bill that included the gas tax and fee hikes, but Republican lawmakers succeeded in raising enough signatures to put the issue before voters.
Democrats, however, countered by ensuring the measure appeared on the May ballot instead of in November, when Gov. Kotek is up for reelection.
Gov. Kotek will now face Republican state Sen. Christine Drazan in a rematch of the 2022 gubernatorial race.
On Tuesday, Republican voters selected Drazan to be their gubernatorial nominee over former Portland Trail Blazer Chris Dudley, state Rep. Ed Diehl, and other candidates.
OPB political reporter Lauren Dake joins us for more details about Drazan’s victory and the failed gas tax measure.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with a recap of some Oregon election news from last night. In the biggest statewide races, Oregon voters overwhelmingly defeated a gas tax increase and State Senator Christine Drazan won the Republican gubernatorial primary. That sets up a rematch against Democratic incumbent Tina Kotek in November.
OPB political reporter Lauren Dake joins us now with more. It’s great to have you back on the show – twice in one week.
Lauren Dake: Hey, Dave. Great to be here.
Miller: So let’s start with the Republican primary for governor. Christine Drazan won for the second time. What was the scene at Drazan’s watch party last night?
Dake: She held her campaign party at this family-owned and operated wine cellar. I do not like estimating the size of a crowd, but I think there were probably about 200 people there. A lot of them were drinking wine inside this well decorated barn. It kind of had wedding vibes. And there were a lot of very familiar faces there, a lot of longtime lawmakers, well known lobbyists. She has been in the Oregon political game for a long time. She served in the state House, she served in the Senate, so she has a lot of those well established lawmakers in her corner.
I moved around the crowd a bit talking to people and ended up talking to several business owners who said the exact things you would expect from a Drazan crowd: that they were looking forward to her lowering taxes, easing regulations and cleaning up Portland.
Miller: Can you remind us who the most prominent candidates in this race were?
Dake: The other two top contenders were State Representative Ed Diehl, whose primary platform was really “no more taxes.” That was his big thing. He’s a state lawmaker who really did make a name for himself by gathering a bunch of signatures in a very short time period to put the gas tax package on the ballot – we’ll probably get to that. He came in second last night in the primary.
And then the second candidate was former NBA Portland Trail Blazer, Chris Dudley, who also ran against John Kitzhaber in 2010. He got out of the primary that year and got close to beating Kitzhaber, came in third this year.
Miller: What does it tell you that Ed Diehl finished well above Chris Dudley, who, himself, has gotten closer to winning the governor’s race than any Republican since Vic Atiyeh won reelection 44 years ago?
Dake: It’s interesting. What it tells me is a few things. The Republican Party today is very different from the Republican Party in 2010, and Dudley’s campaign just did not seem to fully recognize that. He needed to reintroduce himself to today’s primary voters in a way that distinguished himself from Drazan and from Diehl. He’s a moderate candidate. He probably had a good shot at beating or at least getting close to beating Kotek in the general. But in the primary, he was running against campaigns that were better suited for more conservative audiences and he just struggled to appeal to that audience. He tried, but he just did not get there.
Miller: So as I noted briefly in my intro, this is going to set up a November rematch of 2022. Tina Kotek won that year by only about 2.5 percentage points. But it’s important to note that independent Betsy Johnson, in that race four years ago, got nearly 9% of the vote. Did Drazan’s primary run this year give us any clues about how she’s going to approach the general election?
Dake: Well, we do know she has a few things in her corner this time that she didn’t in 2022. Like you said, no Betsy Johnson, and that could help her.
The other thing she has this time is Kotek’s actual record to run against. Last time, it was all hypothetical. This time, Kotek has been governing for four years, and Drazan can and will hammer on this fact that we still have some really big unresolved issues in the state.
What’s going to be really hard in this race, I suspect, for Drazan, is the issue of the federal government and President Trump. Kotek is going to make a lot of this race about Trump and tie Drazan to the president. And the fact that it’s a midterm election and that usually doesn’t bode well for the party in power, Drazan is going to have a hard time convincing moderate Democrats or non-affiliated voters that she’s the right choice for this time.
Miller: So let’s turn to the other really big statewide issue: the overwhelming defeat of Measure 120. Can you remind us what this measure was and how it ended up on the ballot?
Dake: Measure 120 was really a series of transportation taxes that would have helped pay for road infrastructure, maintenance and public transit. It would have increased the per-gallon gas tax. It would have raised vehicle title and registration fees. And the entire thing was such a massive political debacle and failure by the Democrats in the state that it was truly rather stunning.
Just to sum it up, the Democrats in the state legislature, led by Governor Tina Kotek, pushed this measure through. Republicans really did not want to see this tax increase, and led by Representative Ed Diehl, collected enough signatures to ask voters to weigh in. Clearly, voters weighed in and they do not want to see more taxes.
Miller: Political watchers were expecting this to fail. But were they expecting a margin this big? The last time I looked, the “no” side was over 83%.
Dake: It was dramatic! I fully expected it to fail and I did not expect those margins. I think it was a real win for Republicans whose messaging has been, Oregonians are struggling right now with affordability and rising costs, and they cannot pay more at the gas pump.
But another thing worth pointing out here is that despite the Democrats spending months – and I cannot stress how much time and energy [it took] to get this gas tax through – once it got on the ballot, they basically just ignored it. They mounted no campaign against it and knew it would be unpopular. So everybody expected it to fail.
Miller: Where does this leave ODOT right now?
Dake: In the near future, it doesn’t seem like it’s really going to hurt Oregon Department of Transportation’s budget, because the agency and local governments knew this was probably going to happen, they balanced their budgets with that in mind. The agency has left job vacancies open in order to save money and they’ve taken money from other funds to help with any immediate needs.
But at some point, lawmakers are going to have to come up with another transportation package. That will probably be in this upcoming legislative session. The governor has convened a group of people to start thinking about this. She’ll probably take more of a leadership role on this than she has and, presumably, engage with the Republicans a little bit more than she did last time, with the hopes of actually getting it through the legislature.
Miller: Lauren, thanks very much.
Dake: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Lauren Dake is a member of OPB’s political reporting team.
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