Oregon’s GOP seeks an upset to replace Gov. Kotek. Who will break from the pack?

Fast-forward more than a decade as he seeks the position again, Dudley isn’t mincing his words. The organization put out a text criticizing his 2010 position supporting limitations on abortion while allowing it to remain legal in Oregon. Dudley, the only leading GOP gubernatorial candidate who doesn’t hold the group’s endorsement, didn’t hold back.

“The only thing that’s changed is my tolerance for the media and radical politicians who are weaponizing the issue around life and antiquated labels and terms for their own political gain,” his campaign said in a statement last week. “The political establishment and media want to use this issue to pit neighbor against neighbor, but Oregon voters are smarter than that and will not stand for their radical division.”

The heightened tension reflects a growing conundrum facing the GOP nomination race’s most well-funded candidates over their ability to withstand scrutiny on issues settled to more left-leaning Oregonians, yet which remain a political lightning rod in Republican primaries. While the leading Republican candidates agree that Oregon must cut regulations to improve its business climate, improve funding accountability for schools and work harder to enforce laws and prosecute criminals, they are unique in their personas and styles, political experts and analysts say.

Longtime GOP political consultant Rebecca Tweed, who isn’t working with any of the candidates, suggested that the primary outcome could be a bellwether for the future of Republican candidates in the Oregon Republican party. Dudley, for instance, has positioned himself as a more moderate candidate in a field featuring Sen. Christine Drazan, R-Canby, Rep. Ed Diehl, R-Scio and Marion County Commissioner Danielle Bethell. Among the less likely candidates is the conservative influencer and Jan. 6 participant David Medina.

“You have everybody from a January 6 rioter to a Trail Blazer, to people who’ve lost running before, but they all come from very different perspectives,” Tweed said. “I think that shows, really, it’s because there’s a lot of different voices in Republican voters right now. It’s not the same as it’s been before.”

Oregon hasn’t elected a Republican as governor since 1982, when then-incumbent Republican Gov. Vic Atiyeh capitalized on his ties to business communities and ability to navigate a severe economic recession. Following the successful push to get an anti-gas tax referendum on the ballot led by Diehl, the party sees another opportunity to win the position and seize upon growing discontent with incumbent Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek’s handling of issues such as low educational achievement, homelessness and economic development.

“It’s going to be a competitive race for governor in the general election, whoever wins the GOP nomination, just because it’s a coveted office, there’s a lot at stake, and the Democratic advantage isn’t so great,” said Chandler James, a political science professor at the University of Oregon. “I think the Democrats are probably slightly advantaged, given the Democratic support that we’ve come to expect in Oregon, but I don’t think it’s overwhelming.”

Although the primary race has pitted more conservative and moderate elements of the party against one another, it remains to be seen who can stand out amid political headwinds from unpopularity surrounding GOP’s control of Congress and the White House under President Donald Trump. The Capital Chronicle spoke with all of the leading candidates except Drazan to learn more about their positions and campaigns. Her team declined requests for interviews for this story, and she didn’t respond to a phone call seeking comment.

Inside the party, meanwhile, a recent poll from Salem-based Nelson Research found Drazan with a significant lead in the race at more than 31% of support, compared to Dudley who drew 14.8%, Diehl who had 15.6% and Bethell who had 1.6%. Another poll conducted last week by the Portland-based Hoffman Research Group found that Drazan had 35%, Dudley had 14% and Diehl had 18% of likely Republican primary voters. Bethell wasn’t an option in that survey.

Whoever wins will have to face the well-funded Kotek campaign, which has raised nearly $3.9 million in campaign contributions with more than $3 million in available cash. Kotek raised more than $30 million for her 2022 campaign against Drazan and nonaffiliated candidate Betsy Johnson.  

Dudley, for instance, has raised $2.3 million in contributions, with the assistance of $1 million from Republican megadonor and Nike co-founder Phil Knight. Meanwhile, Drazan has earned about $2.4 million in contributions and Diehl has received more than $680,000, $190,000 of which he loaned to himself. Bethell trails significantly, having raised more than $210,000 since the start of her campaign.

Christine Drazan

Drazan, 53, is a well-known Republican leader in Salem, having served as a thorn in the side of then-House Speaker Kotek as she attempted to push progressive policies through Oregon’s Legislature. She joined the House after winning election in 2018, serving as House minority leader and leading her party during a quorum-denying walkout over cap-and-trade legislation. 

But perhaps her most high-profile race was her previous candidacy for governor in 2022, when she came within 67,000 votes of defeating Kotek in a three-way race with Johnson, a former conservative Democratic state senator from the North Coast who ran as a nonaffiliated candidate. 

This time around, Drazan has declined interview requests and participation in some GOP debates, with her campaign comparing her attendance to Kotek’s lack of participation in town halls prior to the Democratic primary for the governor’s race. 

Drazan has positioned herself as the best candidate to take on Kotek again, particularly given her recent leadership of House Republicans during debates over transportation funding and gun control legislation. She joined the Oregon Senate in October 2025 to take the place of former Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, who left to D.C. for a post with the Trump administration’s U.S. Department of Labor.

“I have gone toe-to-toe with Tina Kotek. I have been in this fight, and I have the scars to prove it. I can lead our state. I am ready to lead,” she said at a governor’s race debate this month. “We cannot afford to squander one minute when we take this governor’s office.”

Drazan has said she supports increasing audits of state government, eliminating or reforming the state’s corporate activity tax, and reducing the burden of regulations to building housing in the state. On education, she supports holding students back in third grade if they cannot read, increasing teachers’ ability to remove disruptive students from the classroom and reinstating graduation requirements for Oregon high schoolers. Oregon lawmakers passed legislation in 2021 suspending those mandates, removing key literacy, math and writing proficiency requirements for attaining a diploma.

She has also taken more controversial stances on issues such as election security and the federal administration. Drazan was a sponsor of unsuccessful legislation in 2025 that would have replaced the state’s longstanding vote-by-mail system with a primary method of voting in-person instead, though she also supported a 2019 law to require the state to pay for ballot return envelopes.

And she has dismissed questions about her statement lending credibility to Trump’s false claims about violence in Portland following his attempted deployment of the National Guard. Shortly after the president’s announcement last fall, she issued a statement saying that “state and local leaders have allowed violent mobs and domestic terrorists to assault federal law enforcement, destroy property, and interfere with those seeking immigration services from obtaining assistance and case management.”

But when asked about that statement in a recent interview with the Oregonian/OregonLive editorial board, she was unaware of her use of the term “domestic terrorist” and said “that doesn’t sound like me.” 

She said she intended to share concerns about how local authorities and leaders “were not enforcing their standards equally across all neighborhoods because it was a political location.” When pressed to explain how she can carry her message from the primary to voters in a general election, she said she found the question “shocking and a little offensive.”

“I want to just ask something: Is this conversation about endorsing a Republican nominee in a Republican primary?” she said. “It just doesn’t sound like these are questions that would be relevant to a Republican.”

Ed Diehl

Diehl, 61, has consistently served as one of the top social conservatives in the Oregon Legislature since winning a seat in the House in 2022, openly flouting a rule in the Oregon House this year prohibiting lawmakers from fundraising for campaigns during the session. He’s a Stanford graduate with undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering and a self-described “son of sawmillers and loggers.”

He often rails against “woke” ideology in schools or culture war issues such as the participation of transgender athletes in female sports. While those are less likely to gain traction amid Oregon’s longstanding history as a beacon for LGBTQ+ rights, Diehl has also shocked some of the state’s political observers in the past with his ability to organize grassroots referendum campaigns.

Most recently, Diehl was a key leader in the successful push to refer to voters the gas and transportation tax increases Democrats had passed in a special legislative session last year to help generate billions in revenue for the state’s embattled Department of Transportation. The anti-tax campaign collected more than 250,000 signatures, and Democrats ended up moving the referendum to the May ballot, allowing them to avoid the political fallout of appearing next to the measure during the general election. 

The Scio Republican is pushing for another referendum to reinstate tax cuts halted by Democrats in Salem amid the fallout of the GOP’s 2025 federal tax and spending law. It’s a strategy he plans to replicate should he struggle to pass his agenda through what is very likely to remain a Democratic majority of state lawmakers in Salem, though such a move would require him to mount resource-intensive campaigns while balancing the duties of the governorship.

“I’m going to look to forge those alliances across party lines to get my legislation. And frankly if they resist, if they come to me and say, ‘Hey, we know you got elected to do this, but we’re going to oppose it,’ I don’t have any problem taking it directly to the people,” he told the Capital Chronicle. “I will make sure we win petitions, take it directly to people and let the people push the policy through (and) bypass the legislature.”

Diehl has also voiced support for revisiting the purpose of Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency, arguing that it’s currently trying to do too many things at once instead of focusing on bringing jobs to Oregon. He supports eliminating the corporate activity tax and the estate tax, as well as freezing property taxes for seniors.

He also believes there should be a partial repeal of the state’s 2021 sanctuary laws, which built on the state’s decades-long sanctuary policies to more explicitly bar local law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration authorities without a court order. The law empowers individuals to sue agencies in Oregon that violate the state’s sanctuary law, a provision he wouldn’t explicitly commit to keeping. The original 1987 law prohibits Oregon law enforcement agencies from conducting immigration enforcement within their duties.

“My main focus is protecting the public safety, and if you are releasing criminals that are here illegally into our communities, that’s wrong,” he said. “That’s what I’m focused on, and that’s the main part that I would change from that law. I’m open to if there’s other pieces to it that it doesn’t have to be a full repeal.”

When it comes to election integrity, Diehl said he supports having a voter identification system but accepts that Oregonians have already expressed support for the existing vote-by-mail system, which was enshrined into practice after voters in 1998 approved its expansion to primary and general elections. Diehl has broken with the president on the levying of tariffs and the use of the National Guard, while also expressing concern with immigration enforcement tactics against individuals in Oregon who do not have a criminal record. 

“I’m 100% Oregon,” he said. “Our problems that we’re facing are caused by failed Oregon leadership, and our solutions are going to come from new leadership.”

Chris Dudley

Dudley, 61, has presented himself as an outsider to Oregon politics who can bring a fresh perspective to Salem at a critical moment for the state’s progress. He came within 23,000 votes of winning the 2010 Oregon governor’s race, closer than any Republican in recent decades. Winning this year’s race would come with a mandate, he said, “and then you have to have the ability to work with the legislature towards that vision.”

But he has also drawn pushback from some of his fellow candidates for leaving the state after that loss to live in Southern California, moving back to Oregon in 2020. An early version of his campaign filings showed that his employer was based in Orange County, California, but that has since been changed to a wealth management firm in Sisters, Oregon. Dudley didn’t directly answer a question asking if he still owned property in California.

“I’m not sure why there’s criticism,” he told the Capital Chronicle. “After the election in 2010, my wife and I made the decision that I would not run for office again until the kids were out of high school. My wife had a job opportunity, and she had supported me throughout my NBA career, obviously in the race with the governor, and it was my turn to follow her lead and follow her.”

Rather than focusing on his specific policy proposals, Dudley has issued broader areas of improvement he believes Oregon must improve upon, such as education outcomes and economic development. He supports lowering personal income taxes on Oregonians’ first $100,000 of income, and he said he would declare a state of emergency over education when assuming office. He also wants to ensure schools are employing science-based methods aimed at improving literacy rates. 

“I am running on issues that I believe resonate with Oregonians across party lines. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat, Independent, Republican,” he said. “We want better for our schools. We want jobs available. We want our kids to be able to afford to live where they grew up. We want safe streets.”

Dudley provided few specifics on what kind of policy proposals he would put forward should he win the governor’s race, propose a budget and have to work with the Oregon Legislature. Compared to his previous run, he said that “in the grand scheme of the grand vision, it’s similar, but I’d have to think back on the exact policy positions.” 

He brushed off a question about the integrity of mail-in voting in Oregon, saying those issues would be solved in the courts and weren’t his focus. When it comes to the state’s relationship with the Trump administration, Dudley said he would do “what is best for the state of Oregon” and noted that there would be a change in administrations by 2028 during the next governor’s term.

Since his entry into the race, however, one issue he has sent conflicting messages on has been abortion. In 2010, he shared that he was open to proposals such as parental notification for minors seeking abortions, limits on late-term abortions and education and abstinence as methods to reduce the practice of the medical procedure. This campaign season, he told the Oregon Journalism Project that he was pro-choice but issued a fundraising text message to supporters in which he said he was personally pro-life, against late-term abortions and taxpayer-funded abortions.

“I’m a big proponent (of) adoption,” he told the Capital Chronicle about his abortion stance. “But this is an issue that, frankly, is not one that the governor is going to change either way, whoever’s elected.”

Danielle Bethell

Among the leading candidates who have been in the governor’s race the longest is Marion County Commissioner Danielle Bethell, who announced her candidacy a year ago in April 2025. She has decried the Salem-Keizer School District, where she served as a former school board member, as one of the “wokest” school districts in the state, and she is facing state ethics investigations into her involvement with a traffic violation issued against her daughter and a county contract awarded to a company that employs her son. 

But Bethell, 47, has described herself as among the most willing of the four leading candidates to take clear positions, answer questions and criticize the federal government under the Trump administration when she believes it’s necessary. She has also highlighted her experience working to govern within the confines of local government rather than as a lawmaker in Salem.

“I was very poor growing up in Oregon, experienced homelessness, growing up as a kid with my mom, and then without her, when she left when I was in high school,” Bethell told the Capital Chronicle. “And I’ve had the opportunity to really experience the failed systems of state government as a person and now as a county commissioner, I have a unique perspective inside the tent.”

For instance, she has raised concerns about how the federal immigration crackdown has affected Oregon’s hospitality and agricultural industries and spread fear in some parts of Oregon. She also said she doesn’t believe that the activity outside of Portland’s ICE facility reached the legal threshold necessary for Trump to invoke the use of the National Guard under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which allows the president to activate the National Guard in the case of a danger of foreign invasion or threat of rebellion. 

“Your right to free speech is a really big deal to me, and also it’s not your right to impose or thrust, a physical space on another person because you have a right to free speech,” she said.  “Law enforcement needs to be allowed to operate within the duties that they’re sanctioned by law, and I believe that they were restricted to do that over the last year up in the ICE environment.”

There is some overlap between Bethell and the policies of the federal administration, however. She has signed onto a conservative activist-backed petition to ask voters to create a constitutional amendment ending the state’s vote-by-mail system. 

She said she does not have confidence in the state’s current election system and supports requiring proof of citizenship to cast a vote in Oregon. She also said she would “maybe” do the same as Trump when it came to his March executive order encouraging the U.S. Postal Service to verify mail-in ballots, citing “distrust in the system.” Oregon, alongside several Democratic-led states, has sued in federal court to block that order on the grounds that the U.S. Constitution empowers states to conduct elections.

“I would wish for the governor and the secretary of state and the federal administration to have a different relationship than they currently have,” she said. “That could have maybe gone a different direction.”

She also defended a lawsuit Marion County filed against Kotek and the Trump administration last year, arguing that the state’s sanctuary law forced local governments to decide between conflicting state and federal laws. A federal judge in February dismissed that lawsuit, though Bethell said she and her colleagues are still working out a plan to respond to that decision.

“We need to have more representation in a collaborative space to understand people, and we just don’t have that,” Bethell said. “I mean, I’m just really sick and tired of all the political fighting at the state level and at the national level, and I don’t always understand it.”

Officials will begin mailing ballots for the May 19 primary election on Wednesday.

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