With just over two weeks left until election day, Democrats can barely contain their glee. Control of the House seems about to fall into their eager laps. Senate races in states that are normally cardinal red — Alaska, Iowa, Kansas and Texas among them — have grown fiercely competitive.
And, for the first time since 2010, a Democrat may soon be sitting in the governor’s office in more than half the 50 states. As recently as 2017, just 16 of them had Democratic governors — the lowest number in nearly a century. The party owes a big thank you to President Trump, whose political standing seems to be sinking, like a depth charge, lower by the day.
The only question is how much damage he inflicts on fellow Republicans. There are, however, exceptions to every political trend, outliers in every election, a contest that zigs when races just about everywhere else are zagging. Oregon, that crunchy and damp citadel of Left Coast liberalism, hasn’t elected a Republican governor since President Reagan was midway through his first term.
In 2024, Kamala Harris walloped Donald Trump by more than 14 percentage points, extending a decades-long Democratic presidential winning streak. And yet the state’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, is on the defensive as she fights for a second term in November, burdened by a dismal approval rating and a sense that things have been pretty lousy in Oregon under her leadership. The state “hasn’t thrived in the last decade, and certainly hasn’t thrived since COVID, the way other states have,” said John Horvick, one of Oregon’s leading independent pollsters.
Kotek, a former speaker of the state House — and a highly effective lawmaker in that role — made some very concrete promises. She was going to improve our educational outcomes and make improvements to behavioral health in the state,” Horvick said. The Democrat still remains the favorite to win reelection.
Oregon’s gubernatorial races tend to be closer than presidential contests and voters have been shown a reluctance to heave their governor from office, even when they tell pollsters they’re not happy with the incumbent or the state of their state. But Kotek’s travails show the perils of incumbency this angry election season, even for a Democratic swimming with a blue tide. Thirty-six states are electing governors in November.
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