Bryan Reed, the campaign manager for Knute Buehler, Oregon’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, is not your typical Republican campaign flack. Reed’s slight, flat Midwestern accent betrays that he is from Illinois. But his long hair, jeans, and affinity for the Grateful Dead go a long way toward helping him pass as an Oregonian. Reed is in Oregon because he has a very particular expertise: electing Republicans in blue states. He cut his campaign teeth working for Republicans in the heavily Democratic suburbs of Chicago before ending up the number-three guy (out of 170 campaign staffers) on Illinois governor Bruce Rauner’s successful race in 2014. More recently, he was deputy campaign manager for recently resigned Missouri governor Eric Greitens.
But compared with those states, Oregon presents a much bigger challenge. “I got the voice message from somebody who got my résumé, and they said, ‘Hey, we got this candidate, here’s this race,’ ” Reed tells The Weekly Standard. “Now, I was thinking to myself, ‘Oregon governor’s race? There’s no way that this is competitive.’ ” But months later, sitting in the corner of a bagel shop in the Portland suburbs, Reed doesn’t regret taking the job. Polls since July have shown that Buehler is in a dead heat with incumbent Democrat Kate Brown. The most recent Clout Research poll from September shows Brown up one point, well within the margin of error. “More importantly than us being down 1 is the fact that an incumbent who is universally known is at 41 [points in the polls],” Reed observes. “It’s a rough place to be.”
In some respects, Buehler’s success shouldn’t be too surprising. Until about two decades ago, the state was largely governed by liberal Republicans and centrist Democrats, before massive out-of-state population influxes—including lots of progressive Californians—to the Portland metro area shifted the political landscape. Oregon has about 4.1 million residents, and 2.35 million live in the Portland region, so the entire state’s politics have moved dramatically leftward along with the growth of the urban population. This has created tension in state politics, because Portland isn’t just a liberal city anymore. It rivals San Francisco in progressive extremism, and this is decidedly at odds with the politics and culture of the rest of the state.
Most national observers tend to think the Portlandia television show image speaks for the rest of the state, but that’s a mistaken view. After years of holding up Portland as the model for urban planning and an incubator for cutting-edge culture, its boosters have had to reckon in the last few years with the city’s many dysfunctions. Portland’s homeless problem, exacerbated by obvious policy mistakes, is so bad that fixing it has become a statewide issue. The city was publicly called out this summer by President Trump after the mayor allowed “protesters”—who are not really distinguishable from the city’s aggressive vagrant population—to camp in front of the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement office for five weeks, threatening federal employees who work there.
Basic law and order issues in Portland, along with a raft of new state taxes and regulations, have outraged Oregon’s business community, the leaders of which are not necessarily inclined to support the GOP. And yet Buehler has earned support from some of them. Nike co-founder Phil Knight gave Buehler’s campaign $1.5 million.
Other significant issues, such as education, have undermined confidence in Democratic rule of the state. Oregon has the third-worst high school graduation rate in the country and the Buehler campaign has pledged to fix it in part by lengthening the school year, which at 990 hours per year for high school students is the shortest in the nation. “The current 165-day average translates into Oregon students attending one year less school [by the time they graduate] than students in Washington State,” notes a Buehler press release.
Oregon’s short school year is in part a byproduct of another enormous problem—the state’s exorbitant pension plan for public employees, known as PERS. In April, the New York Times ran an alarming report about how increased payments to PERS are responsible for, among other things, cutbacks in school days in rural districts as well as fewer road repairs and basic services in smaller towns such as Klamath Falls in southern Oregon. Meanwhile, the retired president of Oregon Health and Sciences University collects a pension of $76,111. Every month.
It helps that Buehler is an exceptionally good candidate. He played baseball at Oregon State before going on to become OSU’s first Rhodes scholar. He eventually graduated from Johns Hopkins medical school and settled in Bend, a booming ski town of 90,000 people, 162 miles from Portland. Though living in an outdoor mecca meant his skills as an orthopedic surgeon were in high demand, he entered politics and got elected to the statehouse in 2014, defeating a local Democrat.
Speaking to people in the Portland suburbs, where Buehler will have to win over a significant number of Democratic voters to prevail, the enthusiasm for Buehler seems real. That’s in part because he has done a good job of positioning himself in ways that appeal to Democrats. He’s avowedly pro-choice and has pledged not to change the state’s abortion laws. He didn’t vote for Trump. And as a doctor, he’s pledging to keep tinkering with and trying to fix key aspects of the Oregon Health Plan—the state’s proto-Obamacare attempt to provide health care to everyone in the state. The Oregon Health Plan has been a fiscal train wreck since it was conceived nearly 30 years ago, and it’s hard to imagine a more conventional market-oriented Republican wanting to prop it up.
Despite being an unorthodox candidate on the cusp of a possible upset, Buehler is flying under the radar, which is exactly how he and his advisers want it. His campaign insists Buehler isn’t personally doing any national press interviews because he wants to stay focused on local issues (even if the reporter in question was raised in Bend and wants to talk local issues). There are other strategic reasons for this. If he’s not discussed in the national press, Buehler is unlikely to be lumped in with conservative Republicans or otherwise conflated with Trump’s GOP. And a lack of national attention means that Democratic activists in the state are less likely to get energized by the competitive race.
In the meantime, Buehler’s able campaign manager is fielding questions and talking up his chances. Buehler would certainly be the continuation of a national trend—Vermont, Maryland, and Massachusetts all have low-key, centrist GOP governors who were elected in no small part to address the dysfunction of Democratic party rule. Reed says, “Anecdotally, people jump out at parades; when he’s doing fairs, people leap out of the crowd and say, ‘Hey, Knute! I’m a Democrat. I’ve never voted for a Republican in my entire life and I’m voting for you.’ ” Reed concedes that this kind of interaction isn’t always an abnormal thing for a good Republican candidate to encounter, but given the bitter national partisanship in this particular election cycle, it’s astonishing.
“It’s like we’re so far away in Oregon that it’s a different country. It’s really strange,” says Reed. “We never see it on the trail. And go back and look at the interviews, there’s just nothing about Trump.” The Buehler campaign is certainly hoping it stays that way between now and November.
