Oregon

Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat, was re-elected over Republican Christine Drazan, 53.3% to 43.7%.¹ Democrat Jeff Merkley won the Senate race by 19.4 points over Republican David Brock Smith, keeping the seat for the Democrats. Kamala Harris carried Oregon by 14.4 points in 2024. No U.S. House seat changed hands, and the delegation remains five Democrats and one Republican. The closest House race was the 5th District, where Janelle S Bynum won by 9.8 points in a district Harris carried by 8.6; Val Hoyle won the 4th by 10.8. Democratic candidates won the statewide House vote by 18.4 points, against 11.1 in 2024.

The two statewide races moved in opposite directions from the presidential vote. Merkley’s margin was 5.0 points wider than Harris’s, and Kotek’s was 4.8 points narrower. The governor’s race, the most-voted contest, drew 1,966,357 votes in our count, 101% of the 2022 total and 89% of the 2024 presidential vote. Merkley drew 92 votes for every 100 Harris won, and David Brock Smith drew 83 for every 100 of Donald Trump’s.

Every part of the state moved toward the Democrats in the Senate race. The Portland area, which casts 47% of the vote, moved 4.3 points, from D+35.9 to D+40.2, and the Eugene area moved least, 3.5. The Medford area moved furthest, 6.5 points, from R+6.4 to D+0.1, and the Salem area moved 6.3, from R+2.4 to D+3.9. The small towns and rural counties, 15% of the vote, went from R+22.9 to R+18.0.

Marion County, in the Salem area, is the largest of the four counties that voted for Trump in 2024 and for Merkley this year. It went from R+2.0 to D+5.4 on 138,082 votes, the widest move of any large county. It is also where Democrats made two of their three legislative gains: Virginia Stapleton defeated Republican Tracy Cramer for a state Senate seat, and Michael Welsh defeated Rep. Kevin Mannix to flip a House seat, both in Marion County districts.² Jackson County, around Medford, barely crossed, from R+6.4 to D+0.1. The three Portland-area counties that cast the most votes all moved less than the state did: Multnomah County went from D+62.1 to D+66.7, Washington County to D+37.9 and Clackamas County to D+12.8.

Democrats keep the governorship and both chambers.^{2, 3} Our count could not read every legislative district. Willamette Week’s unofficial results of November 9, with nearly all votes counted, give Democrats 19 of 30 Senate seats and 39 of 60 House seats, a gain of one and two. The paper describes the supermajority as the 60% needed to pass tax policy in each chamber, which Democrats already met and now clear with seats to spare in both. Republicans did not flip a single legislative district. The third Democratic gain came in a Columbia River Gorge district, where Hank Sanders defeated Republican Scott Hege for the House seat Rep. Jeff Helfrich gave up; Helfrich won the Senate seat Drazan left to run for governor, over Democrat Nicole Bassett. Rep. Cyrus Javadi, who changed his affiliation from Republican to Democrat in 2025, was re-elected on the north coast.² On January 12 Democrats will have held the governor’s office for 40 years, OPB noted.¹

Oregon’s secretary of state, an elected constitutional officer, is its chief elections officer. Tobias Read holds the office, and it was not on this year’s ballot in our count, so the election did not change who runs elections.^{4, 5} In Washington, D.C., the change runs through the Senate: with the chamber controlled by Democrats, OPB reported, Ron Wyden is in line to chair the Finance Committee, and Merkley is the ranking senator on the Budget Committee.¹

Kotek set out her second-term plans to reporters on November 6, OPB reported: affordable housing production, slowing increases in health care costs, K-12 school results and groundwork for universal free preschool. She plans bills to recast Business Oregon as a Department of Commerce, to move the Oregon State Hospital out from under the Oregon Health Authority and to regulate data centers. “My call to the Legislature is that they need to do a bill around data center oversight and standards in the first 60 days of session,” she said. She must send lawmakers a proposed budget by December 1, and the session begins January 19.³

In Multnomah County, which OPB calls the state’s most populous, the race for county chair was counted by ranked choice, a system voters adopted in 2022, and OPB called it the first to use the system in four years. Commissioner Shannon Singleton led with 49.43% of first choices; once Sharon Meieran was eliminated, she had 56.2% to Julia Brim-Edwards’s 43.8% in the tally OPB reported on November 4. The office is nonpartisan, and all three candidates are registered Democrats.^{6, 7} Portland voters rejected a charter amendment that would have let residents decide 2% of the city’s discretionary budget, with 62.78% voting no.⁶

In Bend, Mayor Melanie Kebler had 68.83% of the vote in OPB’s count of November 4. In Clackamas County, James Rhodes, appointed interim sheriff in July, led Brad O’Neil 52.84% to 47.16% in OPB’s count of November 7 for the rest of the former sheriff’s term; both had said their first job was to renew the county’s public safety levy, which goes back to voters in May.^{1, 6, 8}

Republicans kept the one House seat they held: Cliff Bentz won the 2nd District by 23.1 points, in a district Trump carried by 27.2. In the Senate race 23 of the state’s 36 counties still voted Republican, among them Umatilla County, which moved 6.1 points and still voted Republican by 31.7. No county moved toward the Republicans. In the Legislature they defended some swing seats, Willamette Week reported, among them a Senate district spanning Scappoose, Astoria and Tillamook, where Clatsop County Commissioner Courtney Bangs defeated Rachel Armitage.²

The next Senate seat on the ballot, in 2028, is Democrat Ron Wyden’s, in a state that voted D+14.4 for president in 2024 and D+19.4 in this year’s Senate race. The constitution limits a governor to eight years in any twelve-year period, and Kotek has now won her second term, so she cannot run again when the office is next on the ballot.^{3, 9}

Two county races were not settled in the pages we read. The race for Washington County chair was within a few hundred votes on November 11, with Nafisa Fai at 50.08% and Pam Treece at 49.92% in OPB’s count, and no page read reports a winner or a recount. No page read says the Multnomah County chair result is final.^{6, 7}