BEND, Oregon — Christine Drazan, Oregon’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, joined the ranks of prominent Republicans vowing to fight an effort by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to require COVID-19 vaccine doses for young children.
“Yeah, I will be pushing back against that as governor,” she said in a Thursday interview with the Washington Examiner. “We’re not talking about eradicating measles. We are not talking about polio.”
Drazan’s comments came hours after the CDC voted to add COVID-19 vaccines to the list of immunizations considered standard for children attending school. A number of Republican governors, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, quickly pledged to block the measure.
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Drazan promised to make vaccine doses “readily available to those that choose them.”
“But to mandate it as a condition of entering and remaining in our public school system is completely wrong,” she added, speaking after a roundtable on homelessness in a small city three hours outside Portland.
A former GOP state legislator, Drazan has mounted an unusually strong bid for governor in a state that has not chosen a Republican leader in 40 years.
Concerns about crime and homelessness — which has become a problem far outside of Portland, the state’s largest city — have helped propel Drazan to the top of a three-woman field in recent polls. She faces Democrat Tina Kotek, who has narrowly trailed Drazan, and independent Betsy Johnson, whose deep-pocketed donors and charismatic wit have helped siphon off a surprisingly significant share of support.
Drazan criticized state measures that have stopped law enforcement from making arrests for lower-level offenses such as open drug use.
“We need to go back to having our hard drugs be illegal again,” she said. “It just doesn’t make sense that heroin and meth and fentanyl would be legal.”
Echoing the rhetoric that helped get Youngkin elected last year in a blue state, Drazan also said schools should focus less on a progressive curriculum and more on boosting Oregon’s dismal test scores.
“Our schools need to get back to reading, writing, and math as far as the core focus of our education system,” Drazan said. “We need to get politics out of the classroom, get parents back in.”
“Oregon’s curriculum, in particular, has really shifted … to a focus on justice, in ways that have our kindergartners talking about their own identity and how they can seek justice,” she added. “I kind of think that they need to be focused on how to stay still during story time and be able to learn how to hold on to a pencil.”
In a sign of how close both parties perceive the race, Youngkin, a rising GOP star and one of the most in-demand surrogates of the midterm election, traveled to Oregon to campaign alongside Drazan just days after President Joe Biden traveled to the state to support Kotek last week.
A poll conducted this week found Drazan with a 2-point lead over Kotek as Johnson captured a double-digit level of support from voters — a rare feat for an unaffiliated candidate.
Johnson’s candidacy has helped create the conditions that could break Oregon Democrats’ decadeslong hold on the state by pulling more voters from Kotek than from Drazan. Johnson was a Democrat in the state legislature before leaving the party to become an independent.
For her part, Kotek has sought to distance herself from the unpopular Democratic Gov. Kate Brown.
In a gubernatorial debate this week, Kotek accused Brown of failing to address the state’s homelessness crisis and vowed to lead where the current governor has not.
Kotek has also pushed to focus the campaign on abortion. Oregon has virtually no limits on abortion at any point in pregnancy until birth.
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Drazan called the state’s law “an outlier” compared to the rest of the country.
“We have an extreme approach to this issue,” she said. “And yet that is the law in Oregon. I will uphold Oregon’s laws across the board. I believe in the even application of Oregon’s laws.”
Drazan said she has “never shied away from [her] pro-life values.”
