Republican Christine Drazan would bring compassion, enthusiasm for deregulation to governor’s office

For decades working in Oregon’s Capitol as a staffer, lobbyist and lawmaker, Christine Drazan honed her political math.

As a high-level aide to a Republican House speaker, Drazan was a budget hawk who dug through the nitty gritty details of paying for Oregon schools, social services and other programs. Next, as a lobbyist, Drazan lined up the votes to block or pass the policies and spending her hospitality business and cultural and entertainment clients cared about.

Finally, as leader of minority House Republicans from 2019 to 2021, Drazan had to figure out when she had any leverage with Democrats.

“What I did on a daily basis was to advocate for the philosophical view that wasn’t being well represented and make progress where we can,” Drazan said in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. “Politics is simple math and so the math wasn’t always in our favor.”

Indeed, voter registration doesn’t favor Republicans in Oregon where registered Democrats outnumber them 1.01 million to 731,000. Membership in the state House also favored Democrats, who held 38-22 or 37-23 supermajorities throughout Drazan’s tenure.

But Oregon’s unusually high quorum requirement for lawmakers to hold votes — two-thirds of a chamber — allowed Drazan to bring House bill-passing to a halt in 2020 to protest a climate change bill up for a vote in the Senate, one of the most notable moments in her political career.

Now as Drazan, 50, runs for governor, the math is in her favor in a way it hasn’t been for any other Republican candidate in more than a decade.

Drazan is a socially conservative Republican who opposes abortion rights and might not stand much chance in a typical Oregon gubernatorial election. For the last four cycles, Republicans have garnered at most 47.8% of the statewide vote, and that was for local celebrity Chris Dudley, a former Trail Blazer who in 2010 finished just 1.5 percentage points behind Democrat John Kitzhaber.

But this year is different, thanks to well-funded unaffiliated candidate Betsy Johnson, who will split the vote so that Oregon’s next governor could be elected by as little as a 34% plurality. A survey from late September commissioned by The Oregonian/OregonLive showed Johnson was attracting more Democrats than Republicans to her candidacy, with 19% of likely Democratic voters saying they planned to defect to Johnson compared with 13% of likely Republican voters who lined up behind the unaffiliated candidate.

Three other recent polls have also showed Drazan just ahead of Kotek, although in a statistical tie, given the polls’ margin of error.

With just three years in office as a state lawmaker, Drazan has a much shorter public track record than Democrat Tina Kotek and Johnson, who spent 15 and 21 years respectively serving in the state Capitol.

Drazan has indicated she would both listen to and collaborate with leaders in the Legislature, which is likely to remain under Democratic control. But she’s also said she will block some Democratic priorities with which she disagrees. Drazan’s willingness to use high-stakes political tactics as House Republican leader, coupled with a steely determination that observers said underlies her friendly demeanor, suggest that Oregonians can take those pledges at face value.

“I will veto any (new) taxes that come through the legislative body and arrive on my desk,” Drazan said during a KATU televised debate on Tuesday. She wants to tear up Democratic Gov. Kate Brown’s wide-ranging regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and has promised to suspend the state’s “clean fuels” program that mandates biofuels and subsidies for other renewably powered transportation. At a Bend Bulletin editorial board interview, Drazan said she believes there are ways she could unilaterally weaken Oregon’s red flag law that allows judges to remove firearms from people deemed a danger to themselves or others.

Drazan, who opposes abortion and Tweeted “Life wins!” after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, has also said she would veto any new funding that lawmakers dedicate specifically to abortion procedures. In her Oregonian/OregonLive interview, Drazan said she only knew of one abortion expenditure approved by state lawmakers that she would be able to line-item veto if a similar plan crossed her desk as governor: $15 million to help patients travel from out-of-state or the Oregon border to get reproductive health care in the Bend or Portland areas, after Idaho banned abortion in nearly all cases.

“If there’s a move to provide specialized funding that’s dedicated, I will line-item (veto) it,” Drazan said. Drazan said she would not however, veto an entire Medicaid budget bill in order to block Oregon’s spending of taxpayer funds on abortions.

It’s not clear whether Drazan would approach the veto record set by the most recent Oregon governor who held office while the opposing party controlled both chambers of the Legislature: John Kitzhaber. In the 1990s, when Republicans controlled the Legislature, the former emergency room physician earned the nickname “Dr. No” for his many vetoes.

Even without vetoing legislation, however, Drazan could single-handedly roll back environmental regulations enacted by the Brown administration and remove state requirements that schools teach about issues that some conservatives want out of Oregon classrooms, such as white privilege and gender identity.

“What is taught in the classroom needs to get back to reading, writing and math in a very real way,” Drazan said in an interview with Fox News in late September, after the first Oregon test scores released since the pandemic showed that students’ grasp of the basics plummeted. Drazan drew a connection between poor educational attainment and the state’s progressive requirements to teach about gender identities and systemic racism. “My opponents voted to keep schools shut down and they voted to add more politics in the classroom at every chance they could get, and Oregonians and parents are done with it,” Drazan said.

“Our schools have an obligation to educate kids about the good, bad, and ugly of American history and to ensure they feel safe and welcome at school, but political agendas have no place in the classroom,” Drazan told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Drazan has made clear she wants to hold onto every possible Republican voter, notably declining to disavow QAnon conspiracy adherent and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jo Rae Perkins.

And in September, Drazan stumped at an event for Republican candidates at which B.J. Soper, who participated in the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and is now a leader of People’s Rights, a far-right group launched by anti-government activist Ammon Bundy, urged the audience to “stand united behind our Republican candidates.” Her campaign also accepted $50,000 from David Gore, a major funder of Tea Party Patriots Citizen Fund, which helped pay for the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally.

In contrast to Drazan’s current appeal to populist and even anti-government Republicans, her record in the Legislature included notable compromise and collaboration with Democrats. She supported multiple police reform laws and lauded two Republican lawmakers, both former chiefs of police, who helped shape the laws and voted to enact them.

And Drazan, who grew up poor, voted with Democrats to pass a law to provide free menstrual products in all Oregon school bathrooms, for which opponents in the Republican primary criticized her.

She also unified her caucus in 2021 to vote with House Democrats to expel Republican Rep. Mike Nearman for helping violent demonstrators breach the state Capitol in December 2020.

People who worked with and observed Drazan describe her as tough and gifted with innate political intelligence.

“Despite her not serving in the assembly as long as Betsy Johnson and Tina Kotek, she’s right up there with their capabilities,” said Shawn Cleave, a former Republican legislative staffer and 2010 Dudley gubernatorial campaign policy director who is now a lobbyist. “She doesn’t suffer any fools.”

As a top House staffer 20 years ago, “her reputation … was she really dug into the budget,” Cleave said. “So she’s been kind of a budget hawk from Day One.”

Jennifer Hing, a former staffer in the George W. Bush administration and deputy chief of staff for the U.S. House appropriations committee, got her start in politics working for Drazan in the Oregon House speaker’s office two decades ago.

At the time, Drazan was still in her 20s but her political chops and toughness were evident as she worked long hours at the Capitol while pregnant with her first child, Hing said.

“I’d never really seen a strong professional woman in a role like that before,” said Hing, who grew up in Tigard and Dayton and is now the federal affairs officer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “So she was a huge role model for me. She was wicked smart, she knew that building backwards and forwards. She knew all the people, all the players, all the procedures and the personalities.”

Hing described Drazan as “very measured and calm and thoughtful” and said that once the speaker made a decision, Drazan “wouldn’t … back down.”

Rep. Barbara Smith Warner, a Democrat from Portland who was House majority leader during Drazan’s tenure, agreed that Drazan is both charming and tough. “She is a hard ass,” Smith Warner said. When it comes to scoring political advantages for Republicans and embarrassing Democrats, “She’s very strategic, she does not miss a beat … Policy wise, she’s same old, same old. Anti-environment, anti-choice.”

Drazan’s public charm and politeness did not carry over in an interaction with a less powerful state worker, that employee alleged in a complaint to the Legislature’s human resources department. In August 2019, Drazan called the state entity that handles employees’ insurance to complain that she was at a dentist’s office and had just learned her child was not covered, according to notes taken by a legislative human resources staffer and obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive through a public records request. The incident was first reported by Willamette Week.

Drazan was angry and yelled at the worker, who explained that Drazan had failed to turn in documents on time to prove her child’s eligibility for coverage, according to the HR notes. According to the state employee, Drazan then contacted higher-ups including Oregon Health Authority Director Pat Allen, and her child’s insurance was immediately restored. “Anyone else doesn’t get that,” the employee told legislative human resources staff. Drazan ultimately hand-wrote an apology to the employee, writing in part, “I should have been more patient — and polite.”

Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis, R-Albany, described Drazan as a good listener. She said Drazan is not deterred by the difficulty of any potential endeavor. “I’ve always seen her make the right decision, even if it’s the hard thing,” Boshart Davis said, citing Drazan’s role in leading legislative walkouts. “That gave people a voice that they didn’t feel that they had in this state.”

‘Small town girl’

Drazan’s tie to her childhood hometown of Klamath Falls is a well-worn campaign reference at this point.

“I’m a small-town girl,” Drazan says over and over at campaign appearances.

Her parents, Dale and Ann, came from an even tinier community where they were high school sweethearts: Merrill, a few miles north of the California border where the population now hovers around 800 people. She has two older brothers who live in the Portland and Roseburg areas.

On the campaign trail, Drazan has spoken about the financial stress her family experienced.

“As a kid growing up in Klamath Falls, my family was less stable than they would have liked,” she said at a July debate. “The reason was the economy down there suffered, based on the fact that most of that economy was dependent on natural resources and … the ability to actually sustain rural communities in that particular sector has shifted over time.”

“My dad worked in a veneer plant. It disappeared, went away.”

It’s unclear whether the veneer plant where Drazan’s father worked closed during the time he worked there or later on after the family had moved west. Oregon went through a deep recession in the 1980s and timber jobs continued to take a hit from increased mill automation and export of whole logs for overseas milling.

“When I was growing up, it was always a challenge. We often didn’t have enough to eat,” Drazan said in comments provided to The Oregonian/OregonLive. “My mom had multiple sclerosis and you know, the bills pile up when you have a condition like that and certainly insurance and trying to figure out how to pay for stuff is always a challenge.”

Her mother mostly stayed at home with the children but once had a part-time job working overnight at a daycare where she would take Christine and her siblings and put them to bed while she worked, then wake the children up before dawn to go home.

“It created in me a real compassion for people that are going through struggles,” Drazan said. “It certainly gave me a sense of respect for my family and how hard they worked to take care of us. And always, always, always an obligation to work hard and to do my part to just … make a life where I can contribute and do something good in the world.”

Her parents “did talk a lot about politics” and not in an approving way. “They mostly thought that politicians were no good and rotten and that they didn’t see the problems that they created for real people and that they left people behind.”

“They made this connection for me personally between the lives that we were living and whether or not they could put food on the table or whether or not we had to move to a cheaper place and whether or not my dad could find a job, whether or not the folks in our community could find a job,” Drazan said.

By the time Drazan was in sixth grade, her family had moved to the Medford area and she graduated from Eagle Point High School. She wanted to go to college on the East Coast to experience something different, but at the urging of her parents, and because she was paying her own way, she agreed to attend George Fox University in Newberg.

As a result of her background, Drazan said she understands how government regulations, such as the 1990 Endangered Species Act listing of the northern spotted owl, hurt people in rural areas that historically made a living off natural resource industries. “Nobody backfilled that and decided we’re going to come in and we’re going to build new infrastructure,” she said.

Drazan is a mother of three children who are a sophomore in high school, freshman in college and senior in college. She lives in a rural area between Oregon City and Canby and attends Grace Chapel, a nondenominational evangelical Christian church in Wilsonville.

After graduating from George Fox, Drazan went to work in 1997 for a series of Republican state lawmakers who held majorities throughout the 1990s and early aughts. Drazan worked her way up to chief of staff for the majority leader and then the speaker of the House, Mark Simmons, a lawmaker from northeastern Oregon.

Kitzhaber, then the Democratic governor, was newly in office, “so we had a Democrat in the center and Republicans managing the legislative process,” Drazan said. “It gave me a front row seat to negotiations, bipartisanship, compromise, blowups, you name it.”

“I had the opportunity to see for myself exactly how that process worked, and I can tell you I learned a few things,” Drazan during the July debate. “I stand with my parents’ assessment that sometimes politicians that are elected to serve don’t help the people.”

By the time Simmons left office, Christine Deboy had married Dan Drazan, a lawyer, and they eventually had three children.

In 2006, Drazan returned to the Capitol as a lobbyist/political director for the Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association. She went on to serve starting in 2011 as executive director of the Cultural Advocacy Coalition, a nonprofit that lobbies for the state government to spend money on arts and cultural programs. Board members have included OPB president and CEO Steve Bass and leaders at performance venues such as Portland Center Stage and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Drazan left that job in fall 2018, just before she won election to a state House seat representing Clackamas County.

Leading from the minority

Once elected to the state House, Drazan quickly rose to the highest leadership position available to a lawmaker in the minority party: Republican caucus leader. In September 2019, She convinced the caucus to side with her and oust then five-term House member Carl Wilson of Grants Pass from the minority leader role, a little more than eight months after Drazan took office.

At the time, OPB reported that real estate, manufacturing and wood products lobbyist Shaun Jillions pushed the leadership change because he was upset that Wilson allowed Democrats to vote a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade bill through the House. Members of Jillions’ recently formed business association, Oregon Manufacturers and Commerce, and members like battery parts maker Entek, Freres Lumber and Roseburg Forest Products would have faced higher energy costs under the cap-and-trade plan.

House Republican lawmakers who picked Drazan as leader told reporters that they wanted a caucus leader who could pick up more seats in the next election, something Drazan did achieve in 2020. Rep. Kim Wallan, R-Medford, told the Oregon Capital Bureau at the time that Wilson had focused too much on appealing to voters by opposing gun regulations and vaccine mandates and promoting cutting government.

“I don’t think the same message that plays in some of the more rural parts of the state plays in Medford, Bend, Wilsonville, Beaverton, Hillsboro,” Wallan said, noting that Republicans need to appeal to swing district voters in metro areas with “a message of prosperity, looking out for peoples’ wallets.”

Drazan took a dramatically different approach from Wilson when Democrats brought the cap-and-trade concept back in 2020: she led House Republicans in a boycott. It was largely symbolic, however, because the plan to reduce climate-warming pollution was stuck in the Senate, where Republican lawmakers staged their own walkout and never returned.

Timber Unity, the populist public face of opposition to the cap-and-trade plan in 2019 and 2020 that brought protest convoys of logging trucks and big rigs to the Capitol, has endorsed Drazan for governor.

The Drazan-led House Republican 2020 walkout, days before Oregon’s first confirmed COVID-19 case, killed many bills, including $120 million for homeless shelters and affordable housing project that then-Speaker Tina Kotek, now the Democratic candidate for governor, had proposed. The Republicans, with the exception of then-Rep. Cheri Helt of Bend who remained at the Capitol, effectively shut down the remainder of the legislation session.

Republican walkouts didn’t just kill the climate bill. Proposals that died as a result included plans to increase government officials’ transparency, expand mental health treatment, hire more caseworkers to lower foster care caseloads and improve forest health by quadrupling the number of acres thinned and prescriptively burned. Lawmakers passed just three bills that session, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.

On the eve of House Republican’s walkout, Drazan preemptively addressed criticism about the other bills they would kill, in an op-ed in The Oregonian/OregonLive headlined “Republicans have no choice but to walk.” Democrats were to blame for holding back other important bills as they tried to force through cap-and-trade, she said. “We have had three weeks to work together and move these bills that are unrelated to cap and trade to the floor,” Drazan said. “We remain committed to these priorities but will not take the blame for the Democrats’ decision to put their political agenda ahead of the needs of Oregonians.”

The arrival of the COVID pandemic in Oregon began to sink in for residents and public health programs mobilized responses, as Republicans under Drazan’s leadership refused to return to the Capitol. “Quite frankly, I don’t know if I can do anything if I was back that I couldn’t do over the phone,” then-Rep. Greg Barreto, R-Cove, told a reporter at the time, even though Oregon lawmakers have never been able to pass bills without being physically present in the Capitol.

Lawmakers did eventually approve some version of a number of those proposals, but it took months up to two years as they dealt with the state’s pandemic emergency needs over multiple special sessions.

Pandemic times

With the climate bill dead and Oregon in the early grip of the pandemic, Drazan’s policy focus and tactics with Democrats shifted again.

She wrote another op-ed in The Oregonian/OregonLive in April 2020, in the midst of a more than monthlong complete shutdown of schools, calling for the state to keep credible standards for high school diplomas, plan for summer school and support high-needs students.

“We can continue down the road we’re on and teach students that when times get tough, they should sit out their own futures,” Drazan wrote. “Or we can lead by example, refocus our priorities and work with new partners and establish new patterns to serve students.”

After Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in May 2020, protests for racial justice erupted in Portland and across the state and nation. Drazan and members of her caucus, some of whom had long ignored calls for police reforms, worked with Democrats to pass laws in a June 2020 special session that reduced the power of arbitrators to overturn police discipline and required officers to intervene and report colleagues’ misconduct. As Republican leader, Drazan pointedly supported the bills — including introductory clauses that stated that Black lives matter.

At the same time, Drazan consistently rejected efforts by some Democrats to push the governor to release more incarcerated people early from Oregon’s prisons out of concern for the health risk they faced as COVID spread through corrections facilities.

Victims’ “needs and rights should be considered before any early releases are considered,” Drazan said at the time in a statement. “We must ensure justice is served, truth in sentencing is maintained and that our counties are fully prepared and have the resources they need to properly monitor and support reentry.”

In December 2020, lawmakers returned to the Capitol for a special session to aid to tenants and landlords and pay for responses to the pandemic and catastrophic devastation from wildfires. As work kicked off inside the Capitol, right-wing demonstrators including some armed with rifles protested outside against exclusion of the public during the pandemic. Some breached the Capitol and clashed violently with police. Later, surveillance video from the Capitol showed that Nearman, a rural Republican lawmaker, opened a door to allow the demonstrators in.

Democrats had been calling for Nearman, who by mid-2021 faced criminal charges, to resign. In the end, the entire House with the exception of Nearman voted to expel him — including every other member of the Republican caucus. That outcome was not guaranteed and instead resulted from a process led by Drazan, two other leaders in the caucus told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Nearman had Republican donor support, as a paid fellow of the anti-union Freedom Foundation which has ties to conservative billionaires, and plenty of Republicans in the Legislature had concerns about some of the same pandemic public health measures as people demonstrating against outside the Capitol.

Then-Deputy House Republican Leader Daniel Bonham of The Dalles told The Oregonian/OregonLive that Drazan used consensus building to shepherd the caucus to vote unanimously on Nearman’s expulsion. “The complexity of relationships and politics come into that, and she was just laser-focused on the behavior,” Bonham said.

Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis, R-Albany, said the question of whether Nearman’s behavior warranted expulsion was not an open-and-shut case for her and she appreciated the time that Drazan spent consulting each member of the Republican caucus. “She will take the time to make sure that everyone is heard,” Boshart Davis said.

— Hillary Borrud