QuickTake:

The general election contests for Oregon governor and the House seat representing Lane County features Republican challengers who lost their previous races. Republicans are left to hope the second time is a charm, despite a less favorable political climate for the GOP this year.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

So seems to be the mantra for Oregon Republicans in 2026. With the dust settling on last week’s primary election, the GOP’s hopes of recapturing political relevance in state and federal races is resting on candidates who have been there and haven’t done that — that being, of course, winning.

The race for governor is set as a rematch between Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek and Christine Drazan, the Republican state senator who lost by about 3.5 percentage points to Kotek in 2022.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle’s second reelection contest pits her against Republican challenger Monique DeSpain, the air force veteran and attorney Hoyle defeated by nearly 8 percentage points in 2024.

So what do Oregon Republicans think will be different this year? Here are a few ideas I imagine GOP campaign strategists are discussing — and why, five months out from November’s general election, I’m skeptical of each:

The economy sucks and schools are struggling

There’s an old political saying that goes, “All politics is local.” And if it were true, what an opportunity this year would be for the challengers.

Oregon currently ties for the fourth-highest unemployment rate in the country. It has dropped in a variety of student proficiency rankings since the pandemic. With Democrats pulling all the state’s political levers for a generation now, Drazan and DeSpain are looking to take advantage, attacking the incumbents over issues like crime, education and, most potently, the state’s affordability problems.

The problem? Donald Trump, whose flailing tariff campaign and war with Iran have made the economy worse by most measures today than it was before he took office. 

Kotek’s campaign has already released an ad tying Drazan to Trump’s immigration and health care policies. Naturally, Drazan has fired back, calling Kotek “confused” in framing the race around national issues instead of state ones.

It may be a cynical move by Kotek to make the governor’s race as much a shadow boxing match against Trump as a real one against Drazan. But it’s an irresistible weapon in a state with a quarter-million more registered Democrats than Republicans.

Both challengers will have to figure out how to separate the problems they see with Oregon’s economic competitiveness — some of which are very real — with the impact of Trump policies that have driven up costs and hurt small businesses across the country.

Unpopularity of incumbents

Polling on approval ratings for governors is limited, but the polls that are out there tell a consistent story: Tina Kotek is one of the least popular governors in America. Polling from late last year put her approval rating at 48%, with 42% disapproving.

Polling on approval of Hoyle’s performance is even harder to find — though there’s some evidence she hasn’t quite attained the popularity of her predecessor, Peter DeFazio, who served for 18 terms. 

Hoyle has won each of her two races for Congress by roughly 7.5 percentage points. Although DeFazio won his final election in 2020 by just 5 percentage points, that was his only single-digit margin of victory since his very first election to the seat in 1986, and he often defeated challengers by 20 percentage points or more.

But even if one considers Kotek and Hoyle weak, incumbent dissatisfaction cuts both ways. Expect Drazan and DeSpain to be challenged on how an ascendant Oregon Republican Party can represent positive change when some of the biggest looming challenges to everyday Oregonians — cuts to Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits — are the result of national Republican policy priorities.

These are the same issues Republicans face nationally heading into the general election, and they’re why Democrats currently hold an 8-point lead in generic congressional ballot polling. Drazan and DeSpain could fairly argue that they didn’t vote for those policies. But Democrats will surely connect their previous campaign statements on immigration, crime, abortion and a host of other hot-button issues to a range of current Trump policies. And Republicans won’t have the advantage of fresh faces to offer Oregon voters as an alternative.

Some historical precedent for successful rematches

With economic headwinds and Oregon’s political mood working against them, maybe Drazan and DeSpain are reading through their political history books? Depending on where you look, election rematches have historically worked out fairly well for challengers.

On the presidential level, there have been six rematches, and challengers have won four of them (had Joe Biden stayed in the 2024 race, it would have been the seventh rematch, and the first since 1956).

The last Oregon gubernatorial rematch went well for Republicans, too. In 1978, Vic Atiyeh – still the state’s last Republican governor — unseated Democratic incumbent Robert Straub, four years after Straub had beat Atiyeh. 

History is less rosy for DeSpain, if only because DeFazio made defeating Republican Art Robinson a biannual tradition across the 2010s, with five consecutive wins.

But history aside, a Drazan or DeSpain victory in an election most Democrats would base jump off Trump Tower to vote in will require true political magic. If 2022 wasn’t Drazan’s year, and 2024 wasn’t DeSpain’s year, how will 2026 belong to either?

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For more than a decade, Elon Glucklich covered business, government and health care for several dailies and online news organizations across Oregon. His reporting and commentary has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association.