Democrat Tina Kotek, pictured in North Portland in late August, is running for Oregon governor. Kotek has long focused on the wellbeing of vulnerable Oregonians and she is close with the state's organized labor leaders. Mark Graves/The Oregonian
In any other year, Tina Kotek could expect the wind at her back running for governor in Oregon, a state that has chosen only Democrats for its highest office for more than three decades.
But she appears instead to be in a much tighter race than the state’s current governor, Kate Brown, now one of the nation’s least popular state chief executives, faced when she ran for reelection four years ago.
A key question that Oregon Democrats and unaffiliated voters will soon answer is whether the Democratic party has lost faith with enough of its voters to lose its grip on the governor’s office.
Top-of-mind concerns for many Oregonians this year include the state’s homelessness crisis, violent crime, the shortage of affordable housing and frustration that elected leaders don’t seem to be solving those problems.
“I don’t know if the Democrats are unhappy,” Kotek, 56, said of Oregon voters in a recent interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. “You have Oregonians who are frustrated and mad about things not working, that is true.”
She has pointedly tried to separate herself from Brown, calling out the governor’s lackadaisical oversight of fixes to Employment Department snafus, tolerance of education mediocrity and failure to remedy Oregon Health Authority missteps on addiction treatment as mistakes she wouldn’t make.
Kotek played a huge rule in shaping Oregon’s most high-profile progressive policies during her nine years as speaker of the 60-member Oregon House, a period in which Democrats always held a majority and mustered a supermajority for three years.
One of her proudest achievements was raising Oregon’s minimum wage to nearly $15 in the Portland area, with lower rates in rural regions. She helped pass a 2017 law that banned governments from restricting abortion access and expanded government insurance coverage for the procedure, and she shepherded multiple gun safety laws to passage including a ban on convicted domestic abusers purchasing firearms, expanded background checks and a mandate for gun owners to securely store their weapons.
As housing costs soared in Portland and around the state, Kotek sharpened her focus on affordable housing and pushed through a law in 2019 to allow denser development in large and mid-sized cities — something Portland leaders had discussed for years but hadn’t adopted. “The state’s housing crisis requires a combination of bolder strategies,” Kotek said in a statement at the time. “Oregon needs to build more units, and we must do so in a way that increases housing opportunity for more people.”
Kotek also long championed a more controversial housing policy that lawmakers ultimately passed in 2019: statewide rent control. Republicans and some Democrats opposed the policy, based on criticisms shared by economists that capping rent hikes scares away investors, ultimately cutting the housing supply and driving up rents.
Yet Democrats under Kotek’s leadership exercised little oversight to ensure one of their popular new programs would serve Oregonians in a timely manner. After passing paid family and medical leave in 2019, Democrats accepted without question almost from the get-go that significant delays launching the program were inevitable. When a Republican, then-Rep. Cheri Helt of Bend, proposed ideas to keep the paid leave launch on track, Democrats were uninterested, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported. The eight-month delay in the paid leave launch could cost Oregon workers approximately $453 million during the time the benefit won’t be available, the news organization calculated.
Mike McLane, a lawyer from Powell Butte who led the House Republican caucus during much of Kotek’s time as speaker, doesn’t fault Kotek for bowing to unions and liberals and for opposing Republican priorities.
“Sometimes she would just muscle things through on raw power because they had the votes and we didn’t,” said McLane, who led his party through many filibusters of high-profile Democratic bills. “At other times, she would be willing to make adjustments to legislation based on what the Republicans wanted to see done.”
Kotek said in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive that she does her best to take a variety of perspectives into account. Indeed, her legislative calendars show Kotek met regularly with lawmakers from both parties and lobbyists for a wide range of interests.
“If you engage people authentically and have good conversations, when you have to ultimately make a decision to move forward with something, even if people don’t all agree, if they feel heard, if they feel I’ve taken all perspectives into account, then they won’t be upset,” Kotek said. “At some point, somebody has to call the question and things have to move forward.”
Kotek’s track record of unapologetically doing what it takes to get Democrats’ priorities through the Legislature contrasts sharply with how Oregon’s current governor operates. Brown is known for being personable but appeared indecisive at some key moments including early in the pandemic.
The former speaker’s toughness was obvious in 2019, when House Democrats were under pressure to pass a public pension reform bill. Then-Democratic state Sen. Betsy Johnson insisted upon pension trims for her support of Democrats’ and public employee unions’ top priority, a $1 billion-a-year business tax to boost education spending. Johnson is now running as an unaffiliated candidate for governor.
The pension bill, which barely trimmed retiree benefits and primarily gave the state more time to pay its pension debt, was nevertheless a rare attempt by lawmakers to tackle the state’s staggering employee retirement shortfall. At first, enough House Democrats voted against the bill that it failed to pass; all Republicans, including governor candidate Christine Drazan, voted “no.” Kotek called a couple of Democrats into her office and more than one emerged shaken or tearful, then switched their vote “yes” when the bill came up a second time.
In the wake of the vote, at least two unions voted not to endorse lawmakers who supported the pension trims and at a labor-moderated primary debate this year an audience member demanded to know how Kotek would rebuild trust with union members.
Tim Nesbitt, a former president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, said that Kotek and Johnson demonstrated leadership by muscling through the pension changes, even if neither of them are eager to discuss it. “It was an interesting exercise in doing the tough thing,” Nesbitt said. “Ordinarily politicians get credit for that but not in this instance, which is so strange.”
Betsy Johnson: Unaffiliated Oregon governor candidate would bring longtime skepticism about government to the job
Betsy Johnson, the unaffiliated candidate for Oregon governor, spent two decades as a Democrat in the Legislature and even longer as a powerful presence in local politics.
In 2021, Kotek again faced Republican slowdown tactics, this time initiated by caucus leader Drazan, now the Republican nominee for governor who polls show is tied neck-and-neck with Kotek in their bid for the job. Kotek struck a deal with Drazan to end the bill reading in exchange for Democrats effectively giving Republicans veto power over the new congressional and legislative districts that lawmakers were drawing. But after Republicans objected to a congressional map that would have highly favored Democrats, Kotek yanked House Republicans’ veto power without explanation. Republicans assailed Kotek in floor speeches, with Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis, R-Albany, co-chair of the House redistricting committee, saying that “We tell this to our children: We don’t cheat to win.”
Kotek is a private person whose low-key personal life is centered on wife Aimee Wilson, with whom Kotek goes thrift shopping and antiquing in their free time. Wilson made an appearance in Kotek’s first political ad in which people from various backgrounds shared how they identify Kotek, including “policy geek” and “tough.”
Tina Kotek gets a first look at Oregon primary election returns in May, with her wife, Aimee Wilson.The Oregonian
Kotek often shows up at union picket lines to support workers in her free time. But she also does things that are more conventionally fun, including indulging her passion for Marvel Cinematic Universe movies.
For years before the pandemic, Kotek and her wife grabbed breakfast with former Portland City Commissioner Steve Novick and his wife Rachel and another couple. “Tina was much more conversant than I” in the Marvel Universe, Novick said, noting that politics rarely came up.
Kotek’s interest in mechanics — she handles minor fixes to her 2004 Honda Civic, thanks to skills instilled by her parents — helped Kotek connect with Rachel Novick’s family when the couples stayed with the family in John Day to view the total solar eclipse. “She bonded with Rachel’s mother’s husband, who I’m pretty sure is a Trump supporter, over machinery,” Steve Novick said. “A group of us went into town and she stayed, and ... we came back and Mike was showing her how to use his new chainsaw. They got along famously.”
Kotek would be the first governor in at least a generation who has lived a life most conventionally like other Oregonians in economic terms: Her household income has hovered around $100,000, according to her past three tax returns, and her one-story house in North Portland is valued at $580,000 by the county assessor. That is almost to-the-dollar Portland’s median home price over the summer.
After a successful career passing ambitious legislation, it’s unclear how content Kotek will be to shift her focus to the job of making sure state government is working for Oregonians. She told The Oregonian/OregonLive that she anticipates she would spend at least the first six months of her term intensely focused on improving implementation of the 2019 Student Success Act, which pumped more than $1 billion a year of new corporate taxes into K-12 schools and early learning with little accountability for results.
“I’m much more interested now in being the CEO of state government,” Kotek said. “I’m much more interested in making sure we can follow through on the things we’ve put in place.”
The school funding legislation “took a lot of work to get that done and there’s more money than we’ve ever had coming into schools to help improve graduation rates, fully fund things like career and technical education,” Kotek said. “My job is to make sure that stuff’s happening. So … my focus is going to be on are we following through ... is it having the outcomes?”
Kotek grew up in York, Pennsylvania, with a twin brother and older sister. Both of her siblings still live in the state. Kotek’s parents were the first generation in their family born in the U.S., after Kotek’s grandparents immigrated from what is now the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Croatia.
Florence and Jerry Kotek grew up during the Depression, which led them to be highly involved in the community and find ways to give back, Tina Kotek said in a recent interview.
“That was everywhere from my mom volunteering at the elementary school library, to my dad … volunteering at the junior stamp club,” Kotek said. Her father also served on the local zoning board and both Jerry and Florence volunteered as poll workers during elections.
“Volunteering was something that was expected,” Kotek said. “They weren’t necessarily political. It was more community engagement, being active citizens.”
The community where Kotek grew up is now heavily Republican, but her family did not have much affinity for either political party during Kotek’s childhood. “My dad never talked about who he voted for and my mom would switch parties” often, Kotek said. “Party affiliation was not a big deal for them.”
Kotek recalls casting her first vote in a school mock election for Jimmy Carter. “Still a big fan of Jimmy Carter,” she said recently.
In high school, she ran track and played basketball and, in her senior year, played tennis too. Kotek was an editor of the school newspaper and yearbook and graduated as salutatorian.
Tina Kotek, the Democratic candidate for Oregon governor, is pictured with her parents Jerry and Florence Kotek in 2004. Courtesy of Tina Kotek
“Then I went off to Georgetown University,” Kotek said. She attended for two years, then dropped out because she was coming out as lesbian and did not feel like she fit in at a Catholic university. She remained in Washington, D.C. for two more years and worked as a travel agent as she figured out what to do next. She then loaded all her belongings on an Amtrak train and moved to Eugene in 1987 to finish her bachelor’s degree in religious studies at the University of Oregon. Aside from the time Kotek spent at Seattle’s University of Washington studying for her master’s degree in international studies with an emphasis on comparative religion, she has lived in Oregon ever since.
“Religion is about ideas and how you see the world and, in some cases, how you make the world better, right?” Kotek said. “In some ways, it’s very much akin to what we do in politics.”
Kotek took a job advocating for the Oregon Food Bank, one that she often credits as a formative experience that set the trajectory for the types of policies she would pursue as a state lawmaker. She also worked as policy director for Children First for Oregon before she won election to the state House in 2006.
Public employee unions loom large in Oregon politics, where they are some of the biggest donors to Democratic candidates and progressive ballot initiatives. They also run voter turnout operations, fueled by a combination of volunteers and paid workers, that have foiled the hopes of countless Republicans.
Staffers for some of Oregon’s top Democratic officials have backgrounds working for the unions, in some cases going back and forth between government and union jobs. But Kotek has even more of a personal connection. Her wife held various jobs for the state’s largest public employee union, SEIU Local 503, as well as SEIU Local 49 and the SEIU Oregon State Council.
Wilson was a political organizer for the state council from 2005 to 2008, then managed Kate Brown’s 2008 campaign for secretary of state and served as a policy director for Brown after she won the election. Wilson worked as a legislative director in 2011 for co-Speaker Arnie Roblan. She then returned to political organizing at SEIU, followed by a stint as an outreach coordinator during the 2012 general election at the political action committee for Our Oregon, a largely union-funded political nonprofit.
Wilson has worked in the private sector since 2013, most recently as a behavioral health case manager and mental health counselor after she earned her master’s degree in social work in 2017.
Critics of Kotek have long pointed to her coziness with public employee union leaders, saying that could prevent her from making state government serve the interests of all Oregonians over the wishes of some union bosses and frontline workers.
In an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Kotek declined to give any example of an issue on which she as governor might take an opposite position from the unions.
“That’s hard to predict,” Kotek said. “What I will say is, I have heard that criticism and the reality is, and this goes back to my days at Oregon Food Bank, standing up for working people, making sure working people have what they need to be successful, that has made a very natural partnership with our labor unions because that is what our labor unions are about.”
Democrat Tina Kotek stands next to Oregon AFL-CIO President Graham Trainor at a Sept. 17 union voter canvassing event in support of Kotek and Democratic candidate for labor commissioner Christina Stephenson.Courtesy of Tina Kotek campaign
At the Oregon AFL-CIO-moderated primary debate, Kotek noted the key role of Oregon’s governor negotiating union contracts. “We don’t want people leaving public employment because they feel they’re not being treated well,” Kotek said, noting that as speaker she pushed for lawmakers to approve large pots of money from which the governor negotiated public workers’ future compensation.
Kotek counts one Oregon labor leader in particular as a trusted political adviser: Melissa Unger, executive director of SEIU Local 503. As Kotek and Democratic state Rep. Andrea Salinas wrestled with how to get Republicans to allow Democrats to pass their preferred legislative and congressional maps during 2021 redistricting, Unger advised the two women on how to proceed, according to Unger’s deposition in a related lawsuit. Kotek refused to answer The Oregonian/OregonLive’s questions about SEIU’s involvement.
Since Kotek first ran for election in 2006, she has reported raising more than $14.6 million, according to state campaign finance records. Unions have supplied $3 million, roughly 20%, of that funding. Kotek, like previous Oregon governors, will receive the full support of the union political organizing machine this fall, which includes phone banking and canvassing.
Kotek is known for working across the aisle with one Republican in particular, a relationship that has proven mutually beneficial. Rep. Greg Smith, R-Heppner’s collaboration with Democratic leaders has benefitted Smith personally, as well as landing plum spending in his district. Smith, who formed a consulting company on the eve of taking office in 2001, reaped hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars by contracting with local governments that received state dollars allocated by the Legislature, according to a 2019 investigation by the Malheur Enterprise. Smith still earns $9,000 a month for managing construction of a state-funded onion shipping center near Nyssa, the Enterprise reported.
With Kotek as speaker, Smith rose to a powerful perch on the Ways and Means budget committee and gained a reputation around the Capitol for casting key votes to help Democrats. For example in 2019, Smith helped Democrats keep their top priority — the $1 billion-a-year business tax to boost education spending — on track to pass by helping Democrats get past Republican parliamentary maneuvers, even though Smith ultimately voted no on the bill.
In an interview, Kotek said she does not see anything wrong with Smith’s lucrative work for local governments that regularly sought funding through the Legislature and state agencies. “I don’t have any information to say he’s misused his private sector job,” Kotek said. “He has done good things for his district.”
Kotek said her work with Smith over the years shows she would be receptive to anyone from rural Oregon or indeed anywhere in the state who approaches her with a request. “It’s that type of open-door policy I’m going to bring in as governor.”
State government played a crucial role in most Oregonians’ lives during the pandemic: health officials set COVID-19 mandates that cratered many businesses but achieved one of the lowest death rates in the nation, state lawmakers distributed hundreds of millions of dollars in relief payments and Oregon’s housing agency overcame significant delays and challenges to issue more pandemic rental assistance than many other states.
The pandemic also bared gaping holes and breakdowns in the state’s safety net and fundamental services, from a Reagan-era unemployment system that state lawmakers and governors had put off replacing to schools that were inequitably serving many students even before COVID-19 and did so even more amid some of the nation’s longest shutdowns. Kotek and other leaders embraced the misleading narrative presented by officials responsible for launching the state’s much ballyhooed paid family and medical leave program. Those officials blamed problems on the pandemic when in fact they built in the delay by tying the project to the unemployment technology overhaul, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.
Now Kotek says that addressing these and other problems is exactly why she wants to be governor.
“I want to solve problems,” Kotek told The Oregonian/OregonLive recently. “I want things to work better for people. That’s been my whole reason for being in public service and I think the two years in the pandemic have really shown how hard things have become for people and state government’s really had a hard time functioning.”
One of Oregon’s enduring problems is the overall low expectations and poor educational outcomes of its public education system, which particularly underserves Black, Latino and Indigenous students, rural students and students learning English as a second language, data shows.
Stand for Children Oregon, a group focused on eliminating those achievement gaps, appears to be staking a bet that Kotek is best suited to tackle the challenge. It’s injecting a huge sum into the race, far beyond what it has done for a candidate in any recent election: $590,000 so far. The group’s executive director, Sarah Pope, did not respond to requests for comment. Toya Fick, the group’s former executive director, said Kotek provided crucial support in recent years for measures that will help students of color.
For example, Kotek “was integral,” Fick said, in protecting a 2016 voter-passed mandate for schools to provide more career technical classes from being watered down by lawmakers, as many school districts and the teachers union wanted. “They could have torn it apart,” Fick said.
In 2021, Kotek got another Stand for Children priority passed: a law to protect teachers of color from often being the first to be laid off, due to schools’ “first in, last out” policies.
“She’s just been a great champion for what’s the best way forward in this situation,” Fick said.
With polls showing Kotek tied with Drazan about six weeks ahead of the election, Kotek’s popular appeal will matter in the coming weeks. She has been thinking about how the nation’s highest rated governors — mostly Republicans in blue states — get good marks. Kotek said other states’ governors have speculated to her that those with the highest approval ratings don’t pursue bold policy changes, something that could be anathema to Kotek.
“I think it’s really important to work for the people and sometimes … you might, you know, not be popular.”
Watch for the profile of the other leading candidate for Oregon governor still to come.
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