Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek found herself in an unusual position last month, asking her fellow Democrats in the state legislature to repeal a bill she’d pressured them to pass during a special session she’d forced them into late last year.
The bill had to do with transportation funding. Legislative leaders started the 2025 session intent on generating more money to build and maintain roads, bridges and public transit, and they thought they had a clear path to do it. Democrats have full control of the Oregon government, including supermajorities in both the state House and Senate. That means they can pretty much do what they want without having to get any Republicans on board — but only if they all want to do the same thing.
Despite releasing an outline of their transportation funding priorities last April, Democratic leaders struggled to hash out the finer points of the legislation. They didn’t introduce a bill until a few weeks before the end of the session. By that point there were a few Democratic defectors, balking at the size of the tax increases proposed to pay for the package, and no Republican votes. Nothing passed.
By most accounts, Kotek wasn’t closely engaged on the transportation negotiations until the last days of the session. In her defense, it’s not what she ran for governor to do.
A former speaker of the Oregon House, Kotek won the governorship in 2022, at a time when Oregon was still dealing with the COVID-19 fallout, rising housing costs and a spiraling homelessness crisis. She campaigned on a few key things: building more housing, improving education outcomes and increasing access to mental health services. She has put state money and new policy into those priorities. But there isn’t much to show in terms of results. The state had fewer homes built last year than the year prior, and only a fraction of the 36,000-units-per-year goal Kotek set at the start of her term.
And the state has some of the worst education rankings in the country. Politicos say the lack of progress on those priorities has contributed to Kotek’s lukewarm approval ratings, and rising disapproval in recent months as she faces re-election this year. According to one recent poll, Kotek is the third-least popular Democratic governor in the country. Her campaign is still confident that Democrats’ strong advantage in the state and broad opposition to President Donald Trump will work in her favor.
“Oregon faces real challenges, from the rising cost of living to homelessness, and they won’t be solved by Trump’s illegal deployment of the Oregon National Guard, ICE terrorizing communities, or his cuts to healthcare and food assistance,” Marissa Sandgren, Kotek’s campaign manager, said in a statement.
In the scheme of things that Oregonians care about going into the 2026 election, transportation funding barely ranks, says John Horvick, an Oregon pollster. But that doesn’t mean the issue doesn’t pose political risks for Kotek.
The legislature’s failure to pass a transportation package last spring was not just a failure to address long-term funding challenges that many states are facing. It also sparked an immediate crisis, with potential layoffs at the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and the prospect of unpaved, unplowed roads if there wasn’t more money available before the next session.
Kotek called the legislature into a special session, and by all accounts was much more engaged in getting a deal done. It required every Democratic vote, including that of a seriously ill state representative who died not long after the session. The package they approved was much less ambitious and less costly than the one they’d considered in the spring. Still, Republicans opposed it. And after the vote, a handful of Republican lawmakers vowed to use a feature of Oregon law that allows them to put proposed tax increases directly to voters. Because of that threat, Kotek waited as long as she could to sign the bill, aiming to give opponents as little time to gather signatures as possible. They gathered enough to put it on the November ballot anyway — twice as many as they needed, in fact.
While transportation funding is not the top political issue in Oregon, Democratic lawmakers, Kotek included, would prefer not to be on the same ballot as an antitax referendum. Gas taxes are perennially unpopular. The only transportation funding mechanism that comes anywhere close to getting majority approval in polls is increased fees for electric vehicle owners. Some voters are also skeptical that ODOT needs all the money it says it needs, especially as it works to carry out huge, controversial highway expansions like the Rose Quarter project in Portland. Besides all that, recent polling in Oregon shows most voters are pessimistic about the direction of the economy and disapproving of Democratic leaders’ performance, with most voters saying taxes are too high. And the measure is coming up at a time when virtually every candidate for political office is promising to fight the rising cost of living.
That’s why Kotek, who has also called for a three-year moratorium on new local taxes in the Portland area, asked Democrats to repeal the bill. Now, having abandoned that strategy amid legal challenges, Kotek and legislative Democrats are pushing to move the referendum to the lower-turnout May election. They have until the end of the month to get it done. The effort is at least a tacit admission that they don’t want to drive antitax voters to the polls in November.
Even with her low approval ratings, Kotek may not need to worry. In 2022, her Republican opponent, state Sen. Christine Drazan, came within 3.5 points of beating her. Drazan has announced she’s running for a rematch. But the 2022 election also had a third-party candidate who peeled off nearly 9 percent of the vote, mostly an anti-Kotek vote, and who won’t reappear in 2026. And the Republican primary already has lots of contenders, including Chris Dudley, a former NBA player for the Portland Trail Blazers and 2010 gubernatorial candidate, and state Rep. Ed Diehl, a conservative champion of the antitax referendum. A primary fight for Republicans means most of them will be tacking to the right as they seek the party nomination, which could hurt them in the November general, which is already shaping up to generate a midterm backlash against President Trump. That dynamic is heightened in Oregon, a progressive state that Trump has repeatedly targeted with verbal attacks and militarized immigration enforcement. Oregon hasn’t elected a Republican governor in more than 40 years.
Oregon voters might be unhappy with Kotek’s performance as governor. That doesn’t mean they’ll be willing to replace her with an ally of Trump. “If this election were a referendum on Tina Kotek, she’d be in a very dangerous position,” says Horvick. “It won’t be a referendum on Tina Kotek though.”
