Christine Drazan appeared at a Washington County Republican fundraiser in 2021.

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. “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 to 22 or 37 to 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 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, who grew up in Klamath Falls and lives near Canby, 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 Portland Trail Blazers player 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 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 Democrat Tina 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 Kotek and Johnson, who spent 15 and 21 years serving in the state Capitol.

Steely determination

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 debate this month . 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 an editorial board interview with The Bulletin in Bend, 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 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. She 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: 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.

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.

Tough and gifted

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 … Policywise, she’s same old, same old. Anti-environment, anti-choice.”

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.”