Christine Drazan and Tina Kotek, the two major-party candidates for Oregon's governorship, conflict over the role that unaffiliated candidate Betsy Johnson, a former Democrat, will play in next week's election. Ms. Drazan asserts that Ms. Johnson is a spoiler who will siphon republican votes away and give Ms. Kotek the win. Ms. Kotek's campaign equally vociferously claims that Ms. Johnson will siphon Democratic votes away and give Ms. Drazan the victory.
They can't both be right. Some recent polls suggest that Ms. Drazan is more successful at holding on to republicans than Ms. Kotek has been in drawing support from Democrats, which strongly implies that Ms. Johnson's views are closer to the Democratic center than to the republican center, and less strongly implies that Ms. Kotek is farther from the Democratic center than Ms. Drazan is from the republican center.
All three candidates agree, however, that the administration of Governor Kate Brown has been a failure. It's not surprising that Mss. Drazan and Johnson would campaign against Governor Brown; what's changed in the last three weeks is that Tina Kotek is also campaigning against Governor Brown. The Brown administration's failures and missteps may be the only subjects on which the three candidates agree, and polls show her to be the nation's most disliked governor.
The voters that really matter in Oregon's statewide races, however, are the non-affiliated voters. (They used to be called "independents" before an enterprising would-be politician grabbed the name "Independent" for a minor political party.) About a third of Oregon's voters are non-affiliated and another third are Democrats. About a quarter are republicans. The non-affiliated voters slightly outnumber the Democrats.
All three candidates are qualified by legislative experience to serve as governor. Except for their shared dislike of Governor Brown and their professed willingness to allocate state resources to ameliorate the crisis of the homeless camps and their attendant crime and filth, Mss. Drazan and Kotek share no ideological ground. Ms. Johnson is somewhere in between them. She does state, however, that she is willing to try to solve Oregon's problems without resorting to party lines, and as an independent governor she would have to try.
Despite Christine Drazan being in the reasonable wing of her party - unlike some of her legislative caucus she is not an election denier - I can't persuade myself to vote for a republican for governor until the party as a whole regains its moral bearings. Neither can I bring myself to vote for Tina Kotek, who is running against an administration that she spent the last several years supporting. This year I am voting for Betsy Johnson, whom I believe to be the best of the candidates to lead Oregon through its current mess.
By voting for Betsy Johnson do I increase the chance that Christine Drazan is elected? Perhaps. I'm willing to take that risk both because I believe that the Oregon Democratic party should return to the days when it earned support instead of demanding it, and because I believe that Ms. Kotek would take my vote for her, tiny though it be in the overall total, as an enthusiastic endorsement instead of a reluctant concession.