Kotek gives it to Oregon "good and hard"
The Governor's budget explicitly sticks with an approach that's failed entirely except in getting Democrats elected
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
- H.L. Mencken
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek fired the first shot of her 2026 re-election campaign with a “stability budget,” unveiled in early December, that turns big projected revenue increases into big spending increases to maintain Kotek’s approach to governing. After running, implausibly, as something of a change agent in 2022 as she sought to replace fellow progressive Kate Brown, Kotek’s 2025-2027 budget has her digging in to defend her record, doubling down on policies that have cost Oregon taxpayers billions but have failed to fix the problems Kotek said they’d fix.
Kotek herself called her budget a “stability budget” in a briefing offered to some but not all (ahem) members of the Oregon press corps, emphasizing that it avoids layoffs of state employees and “strategically deepens our commitment to building progress on Oregonians’ top priorities while remaining disciplined when it comes to new programs.”
Meet the new budget; same as the old budget.
Kotek’s new budget explicitly builds upon the main themes of her first. The Governor called her first budget, for fiscal years 2023-2025, “Mission Focused,” an echo of her campaign pledge to make the same type of policies that had garnered Brown an historically bad approval rating work via sheer force of message discipline. “Mission Focused” focused on three missions: fix the state’s housing shortage, fix the state’s burgeoning mental health and addiction crises (together, “behavioral health” in the vernacular), and improve public school performance.
Billions of dollars and three-quarters of the way through “Mission Focused,” the three foci have all gotten worse. Housing starts were actually 10% lower in 2023 than 2022; overdose deaths were up 33% from 2022 to 2023; student standardized test scores continued their years-long slide in the 2023/2024 school year. By any reasonable measure other than gross spending, “Mission Focused” failed.
Yet Kotek’s 2025-2027 budget, titled, apparently with a straight face, “Building on Progress,” explicitly continues the course. She explains, “I passionately believe the Oregon Legislature needs to pass budgets for the next two years that build on the progress we have achieved together.” Left unsaid is what, exactly, that progress was. But then, by now we should understand the passion, and the spending, is the point.
Elections have consequences
The progress Kotek and the legislature achieved together over the past two years is electoral. Last month, Oregon voters elected a full slate of Democrats to statewide office and restored the party to supermajority status in both houses of the legislature, while much of the U.S. swung toward Republicans. While pluralities of Oregon voters continue to tell pollsters they believe their state is headed in the wrong direction, they didn’t vote that way. It would be bizarre indeed if Kotek changed course after Oregonians said they were happy to keep dancing with the Dems who brung ‘em.
Political trends seem permanent until they’re suddenly not, however, and there are signs of weakness in the Oregon Democrat juggernaut. The first is personal to Kotek. She, like her predecessor, is extremely unpopular: she has the lowest approval rating of any governor in America. Relatedly, no Democrat in a competitive race in Oregon in 2024 campaigned with Kotek, or even listed her as an endorser. Democrat gains in this year’s election happened in spite of, not because of, Kotek.
Thematically, Democrats in competitive races ran away from drug decriminalization, soft-on-crime policies, big tax hikes and other progressive policies. In the Attorney General’s race, for example, victorious Democrat Dan Rayfield ran on repealing drug-decriminalizing Measure 110 even though the repeal was forced upon Rayfield, then Speaker of the House, and other legislators by a well-financed ballot measure repeal effort. Democrat gains in this year’s election happened in spite of, not because of, the party’s hard swing to the left in recent years.
Another turn in the doom loop
Kotek is betting that Oregonians have at least two more years of the status quo in them. Viewed strictly through the prism of her own re-election prospects, this is almost certainly a good bet. Recent history strongly suggests doubling down on pronouncements of passion generally aligning with voters’ top concerns and protecting public sector union jobs at all costs is a winning strategy, regardless of on-the-ground effect.
The big threat to the ongoing success of the “stability budget” and similar strategies is the truth. None of it is working. Oregon’s state government is, by progressives’ or any other measure, failing to deliver for the Oregonians it insists it is focused on helping.
The reason I’m banging away on my laptop this Saturday afternoon is because I think the truth will and must win, eventually, in Oregon. In H.L. Mencken’s formulation, Oregonians’ view of what they want in elected officials will pull closer to the kind of public policy they want. When that happens, Oregonians may look back on Kotek’s budget as yet another anvil pulling us inexorably to the bottom.
And the only job growth is in government, and healthcare (which is largely supported by Medicaid and Medicare). We’re circling the progressive drain.
Look at a couple issues that can be easily measured - crime and the worst results of drug abuse (overdose deaths).
In 2019 The Democrats (minus only State Sen Betsy Johnson) with the help of 6 Republican legislators gutted the juvenile parts of Measure 11, the twice passed law that means "real time for real crime." For a quarter of a century 17 year olds that committed manslaughter, murder, violent rape, kidnapping and armed robbery actually served sentences ranging from 6 to 25 years (until age 25 in the Oregon Youth Authority) then in Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC),
As a direct and proximate result of these laws, which forbid using race, class, or social position to vary the sentences, violent crime dramatically dropped in Oregon. But as first Govs. Brown, now Kotek have gutted these sentences, renaming inmates "Adults in Custody." the overall Oregon prison population has dived from about 15,000 when I retired at the end of 2018, to barely 11,000 now.
Are you safer now than in 2018? Not likely, and murders and other violent crimes are up, as ODOC closes parts or entireties of state prisons. The victims of homicides are overwhelmingly people of color.
Connected to increased violent crime are the state's fatal drug overdose rates. While national rates have leveled off in the last three years, Oregon, along with its neighbor states north and south, has managed to keep increasing the fatal drug rate, while at the same time functionally legalizing fentanyl and methamphetamine. Oregon's fatal overdose rates have tripled since 2016. Measure 110 made this even worse and the anemic response in the 2023 legislature has created a new category of non-crime called "deflection," which is so ineffectual Oregon continues to kill more of its addicted population than any other state.
The Attorney General-elect, Dan Rayfield was a big fan of Measure 110, until it became clear Oregonians were fed up, at which point he helped patch together a half-measure that is currently in effect.