3 Republicans vie for Senate District 6 seat after incumbent barred from running

Three Republican candidates are vying in the primary election for a spot on the November ballot to represent Oregon’s Senate District 6, which includes Creswell, Cottage Grove, Oakridge, the McKenzie River valley, Junction City, Coburg and the rest of eastern Lane County.

In Oregon, only a voter affiliated with the party may vote in a party’s primary. 

The Republican candidate who receives the most votes in the May 19 primary will proceed to the November general election and run against Democrat Sierrah Williams, a registered dietitian nutritionist with the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.

Republicans who live in the district, which also includes Linn County and a small part of southern Marion County, will choose between three candidates:

• Jami Cate, Linn County farmer and state representative for House District 11
• Nicole De Graff, Springfield School Board member
• Jack Tibbetts, Cottage Grove farmer and rancher 

The general election winner will succeed Sen. Cedric Hayden, a Republican who lives in Fall Creek. Hayden is barred from running for reelection this year because of his participation in a six-week walkout in 2023. Measure 113, passed by Oregon voters in 2022, disqualifies legislators with 10 unexcused absences from serving in the Legislature following their current term.

Senators serve four-year terms, and there are no term limits.

Hayden was elected to Senate District 6 in 2022, defeating Democrat Ashley Pelton. Before Oregon redrew its state legislative maps in 2022, Democrat Lee Beyer represented Senate District 6 from 2011 to 2023. 

Jami Cate

For Cate, running for the state Senate is about trying to help more people.

Senate District 6 comprises Oregon House districts 11 and 12. House District 11 primarily covers rural Linn County, including Lebanon, Sweet Home and Harrisburg, and a portion of southern Marion County.

“Working with those communities and letting them know that they have a resource and an ally fighting for them, that’s been my favorite part,” Cate, 39, told Lookout Eugene-Springfield. “And so being able to take the experience that I have and wanting to educate people and communicate, and being able to do it for more people, I think, is very worthwhile.”

Cate, who served on the Lebanon Strawberry Festival board for more than 15 years, first ran for state office — House District 17 — in 2020, besting five others in the Republican primary, then beating Democrat Paige Hook in the general election. 

After districts were redrawn, Cate ran for the House District 11 seat in 2022, beating one primary challenger before topping Democrat Mary Cooke in the general election. She was reelected in 2024, beating Ivan Maluski.

Cate, a fifth-generation farmer in Linn County, grew up north of Lebanon on property her grandfather purchased in 1930.

“It’s just a family business, and it takes a lot of time, and it’s a juggle with legislative work,” Cate said.

She graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in crop and soil science before returning to work on the grass seed farm.

Cate says she’s “always tried to be very district-first” in her approach to legislating. This session, after a constituent reached out to her about parking tickets, she sponsored a bill protecting Oregonians from liability for traffic citations for vehicles they no longer own. 

“Being able to solve problems that constituents are having, they’re not always the most newsy, like headline-catching, but that’s the kind of work that has really driven me to keep serving,” Cate said.  

As a representative, she’s most proud of Senate Bill 1520, which she was a chief sponsor of in 2024, that provides tax relief for wildfire victims.

She said the most challenging part of being a state representative is “how much the politics outweighs the actual work.”

“It was really disheartening when Oregon has so many major issues that we are facing, between being ranked some of the worst for our business-friendly culture, our schools being ranked some of the worst, being in one of the worst housing crises in the country, and yet, the overwhelming majority of bills, it felt like, were really trying to message against federal policies,” she said of the most recent session.

“It’s so easy to get caught up in just the politics of it,” Cate said. “But it’s also a way to fight for my livelihood and the things that matter to my communities. And that’s always what I’ve tried to do, is just be of service and try to make a difference where I can.”

When it comes to fighting for her livelihood as a farmer and business owner, Cate mentioned the cap-and-trade effort.

“I understand people want to have carbon neutrality on things and climate goals,” she said. “But when the technology isn’t there for me to do my job, and now I’m going to get punished because I have to run equipment that has diesel engines, that’s not fair when there isn’t an alternative.”

Cate said Oregon is tax-burdened and has a spending problem. When it comes to transportation funding, the state’s 2017 transportation funding package allocated 6% to maintenance. 

“Maintaining the roads we have needs to be a bigger priority than taking on other projects,” she said. “It becomes a priority issue more than a, ‘Oh, we need to bring in more dollars’ issue.” 

She said the state’s school funding formula is inequitable for rural districts with higher poverty and higher special education enrollment. The state’s funding formula caps reimbursement for special education at 11% of enrollment. But one of the school districts in her house district has 19% special education enrollment, Cate said. That puts those schools at “a stark disadvantage.” 

Because Democrats have a supermajority in the Legislature, Cate is familiar with reaching across the aisle to advance bills.

“Everything that a Republican does, it has to be bipartisan,” she said.

Nicole De Graff 

Before running for state office, Nicole De Graff read bills and contacted legislators with questions. 

“Sometimes you only hear, ‘Oh, this bill’s going to do this.’ And I’d be like, ‘What?’ And then I’d read it and be like, ‘Where does it say that?’ It was just somebody’s summation to get people outraged sometimes, and sometimes it was true,” De Graff, 52, told Lookout. “But I also wanted to see the nitty-gritty.”

The Springfield resident was elected to a four-year term on the Springfield School District Board of Education in 2023.

De Graff grew up in Cottage Grove and attended Willamette University and the University of Oregon before moving to Hawaii and working in real estate, where she met her husband, Jason De Graff. 

After spending seven years in Australia managing her husband’s family’s cattle ranch, the couple moved to Oregon. They have three children, ages 19, 18 and 12. 

Nicole De Graff volunteered doing grassroots planning and outreach for mutual benefit nonprofit corporation Oregonians for Medical Freedom from 2015 to 2021, serving as executive director for the last year. She then worked as a policy analyst with Oregon Moms Union, teaching parents how to contact their school boards and testify in Salem, she said. 

As a school board member, De Graff learned about state laws and requirements for schools in Oregon and how to implement those policies on a local level, such as responding to Gov. Tina Kotek’s executive order directing districts to adopt stricter student cellphone policies during the school day. 

As a legislator, she plans to take “the knowledge of how things operate in a school, because it’s like a little city.”

The Republican previously ran for the state Legislature, losing in the 2020 District 11 primary and the 2022 District 12 primary.

“That’s when I was interested in it, because I still kept thinking that a lot of the issues that I was concerned about were state-level issues,” De Graff said. 

De Graff said the state needs to evaluate its programs and would benefit from clearer, public-facing tools to audit state data. She said she would “love to create a dashboard” to track education programs and funding. 

She says the state needs to reevaluate the corporate activity tax, which applies to taxable Oregon commercial activity exceeding $1 million. Revenue is transferred to the Fund for Student Success for education spending.

“I know that when the CAT tax was implemented, the general fund went down,” De Graff said. “Everybody thought it was going to be extra money, and it wasn’t.

“I just think there needs to be a reckoning of evaluating systems and agencies.”

She said the state needs to look more at outcomes. 

“We funded the Student Success Act,” De Graff said. “What are the outcomes? We still have lower literacy rates. We still have low graduation.”

She said she knows how hard it is to make budget cuts that personally affect people, such as the midyear reductions in staff at the Springfield School District.

“It’s not like they’re just numbers,” De Graff said. “They are actual people that I would see in the school or the grocery store.”

When it comes to addressing the state budget, she said, “We do have to tighten the belt.”

“We just have to have a grown-up in the room that’s willing to make those hard decisions, even though they’re also people. They’re not just decisions,” De Graff said. 

She said she’s not afraid of being in the minority in the Legislature. 

“I think that having that attitude of, I’m here to work, and I’m here to be a grown-up about it …, and also knowing that we’re going to disagree, but you can still make progress, even if it’s small steps of progress, even while you disagree,” De Graff said.

She said her school board experience has shown her the importance of staying focused on the outcome when board members have “different roles and unique perspectives.”

De Graff said she would host town halls as a legislator, “because that’s what I was going to when I was being engaged as a citizen.” 

“I think the type of legislator I would be is, I like to be involved,” she said. 

Jack Tibbetts

Jack Tibbetts got his start in politics at age 25 as a city councilor in Santa Rosa, California. 

“What drove me to want to do this is that I feel like rural voices in Senate District 6 are really underrepresented,” Tibbetts, 36, told Lookout. “And to me, it’s to do just that.”

The Cottage Grove resident is a farmer and rancher. He grew up in Santa Rosa and received a political science degree from University of California, Berkeley. 

He was elected to the Santa Rosa City Council in 2016 and again in 2020.

“I did that for about five years and navigated through three devastating fires,” Tibbetts said. “It was very much a trial by fire in government.”

While in Santa Rosa, he worked as the executive director of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul District Council of Sonoma County. 

He resigned from the City Council in 2021.

“I really enjoyed serving people and serving my community, but at the time, I was a Democrat, and I was getting really disenchanted with the values and the policies of the Democratic Party and the direction that I feel like they were taking the community and the country as a whole,” Tibbetts said. 

He said there were a couple of council votes that swayed him, including an ordinance to require city employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccination or be placed on unpaid leave. Tibbetts was a swing vote and the ordinance “luckily” didn’t pass, he said. 

“I said to myself, I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I can’t try to balance my growing conservative beliefs with a constituency that was largely moderate to left. And so I felt that the only honorable thing to do at that point was to resign so that they could get a representative that better represented their values.”

Not feeling at home in California anymore, Tibbetts and his wife, Ali Tibbetts, moved to Oregon, where both of their families are from. They purchased Terraglen Ranch, where they raise Angus beef cattle, and Saginaw Vineyard. The couple has two sons, ages 2 and 5. 

“I started reading the paper and tracking what was going on, started seeing taxes coming down the pike that definitely have negative impacts to my business and my employees,” Tibbetts said. “And that kind of motivation, that frustration turned into, well, I’d like to get back in the fight and try to set Oregon on a correct course.”

Tibbetts said cost of living is the biggest issue facing Oregonians right now. To address this, he said he’d “love to see property taxes get capped for people 65 and older.” 

“Obviously, that has impacts to local jurisdictions that really rely on that property tax revenue,” he said. “You got to do your due diligence, talk to city managers across the state, but I would love to see us work toward something like that.”

He also said he opposes new taxes and believes the state is headed toward a “doom cycle” where high taxes drive jobs and employers out, shrinking the tax base and prompting even more taxation. He said the Legislature should spend less time figuring out how to implement new taxes and more time reaching out to employers and retaining businesses. 

“I’m passionate about it because I decided to relocate my family back to our homeland, where we’re all from, and we’ve invested heavily here and invested in our communities, and this idea that there’s not going to be a lot of opportunity for my two sons when they turn 18, 20 really breaks my heart,” Tibbetts said. 

To address its budget, he said the state needs to cut back.

“The state of Oregon is awash in money,” Tibbetts said, adding that the state needs a third-party audit, which would allow it to assess its expenses and programs.

“And that doesn’t happen enough in government,” Tibbetts said. “There’s not enough revision of our programs and services, in my opinion, to actually identify savings for the programs we do need.”

If more money is needed, he thinks timber is the state’s greatest resource. 

“You see these taxes getting applied when we’ve heavily curtailed our ability to monetize our greatest resource in the state,” Tibbetts said. “I really think that needs to be brought back.”