Big Brother is watching you

White House Office of Public Liaison to 3,000 conservative groups, in highlighted yellow:

"As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations."

There is a reason that so many Republican candidates went down with the Trump ship: Trump demands loyalty. They were afraid of Trump.

Wall Street Journal

My posts this week argued that Trump was on the ballot. Presumably electable Oregon Republicans like Christine Drazan, running for governor, and Brad Hicks, running for the state Senate, had big campaign treasuries behind them and lost anyway, because voters saw them as proxies for Trump. Which raises the question. Why didn’t they break free? Why not show a little independence? Why go down with the ship?

Because Trump is watching. He is alert to disloyalty, and he doesn’t nip it in the bud. He stomps on it. You are with him or you are a RINO, and whoever disagrees or disappoints gets the full force of his displeasure. The smart, indeed necessary, strategy is silence.

Oregon’s lone Republican congressman, Cliff Bentz, showed me and my fellow Rotarians how it’s done. He told us at a Rotary meeting that he disagrees with Trump on some things. Then he steadfastly refused to say which things. There was nothing disloyal to get back to House Speaker Mike Johnson or the president. In fact, a statement like that is worth more than gushing agreement.  Agreement doesn’t require loyalty, only alignment. Loyalty is agreeing in public when you disagree in private.

Now Trump sees a problem coming. Presidential aspirants will start staking out positions of their own. The Trump/MAGA coalition is held together largely by the walled garden of conservative media and thought leadership, and Fox News sits at its center. That is why Trump polices the edges of its apostasy. He complained when Fox interviewed Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. On election night he complained that Fox put Bill de Blasio on the air, then blamed the network for the losses. He threatens to switch his affection to the smaller rival, One America News Network.

The new rules are already showing.

-- JD Vance, on X, named the Iran war as the reason Republicans lost. Notice what he didn’t say. He called the war unpopular, not wrong. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.”

-- Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, term-limited and leaving office in January, told Laura Ingraham: “This midterm, no question, was a rebuke of the president and the Congress by Democrats, independents and some Republicans that crossed over.”

-- Texas Senator Ted Cruz, now the only Republican left in statewide office in Texas, called it a “blue tsunami” and a “Watergate-level repudiation.” Then he went to policy. Tariffs, he said, have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long.

I suspect a great many defeated Republicans are feeling remorse about bad timing and lost opportunity. Before the election they lived by the rule that no public dissent from Trump was possible. Now there are new rules. Public dissent is possible, even necessary.

Those inside the conservative media walled garden were slow, or afraid, to pick up signals that were obvious to most Americans: that Trump’s war and tariffs had damaged the economy, and that his corrupt wealth-seeking had aligned him with his fellow billionaires at the expense of people like themselves.

The Trump era did not end on November 3, 2026. It ended in the weeks before, when voters decided that Trump was dangerous and that Trump-compliant politicians had to go. It would have taken courage to read that and act before the November 3 vote confirmed it. Most didn’t. They stayed compliant. And Republicans running anywhere without a Republican edge of 10 to 15 points lost.

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In praise of free will

American politics had a shock on Tuesday.

Americans discovered we aren’t stuck. Voters have agency. Voters took off their chains.

We have free will!

The election had a lesson for both parties: Old alignments aren’t frozen, and policy-making isn’t trapped between two sides dug into trench warfare. Texas, Kansas, Alaska, and even Mississippi are battleground states, if voters want them to be.

Fox News: Trump said the Democratic gains were Fox's fault.

The losing side in a tsunami election is the one most likely to adjust. Vice President JD Vance was quick out of the gate, breaking with Trump and calling for a new direction: End the Iran war, focus on the cost of living, change our relationship with Israel.

Republican candidates and officeholders also have new cautionary tales. The old ones were Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger, whose careers ended because they defied Trump. The new ones are Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Senate candidate Ken Paxton, and Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who trails in a race still too close to call. Their ties to Trump sank them, and they are in red states. Republican politicians learned something new: Even in “Trump country,” voters will change their minds about Trump.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s strategy once made sense. Keep the GOP coalition 100-percent compliant with Trump. It proved dangerous, indeed fatal, in any district with less than a 10-point Republican registration advantage.

There was a broad shift in voter behavior. Democratic House candidates who made the race a referendum on Trump -- and most did -- moved the balance their way.

The election will change Democrats, too. The 2024 election taught Democrats the peril of getting too far out in front of the average American on cultural issues like gender and affirmative action. Still, Democrats remained the party of well-educated coastal urbanites and it largely represented their sensibilities. Political consensus said that was the geography for Democrats. The only question was whether the Blue Wall line moved a point or two one way or the other.

That is different now. Voters left the trenches and their traditional party affiliation. Republicans voted for the Democrat. The field has opened up. Voters can vote for change. It can happen. It did happen. 

That changes what it means to be a Democrat, because Democrats now include representation from red-state America. Once again, Democrats will represent farmers and ranchers. They will represent cultural conservatives. Five years ago Democrats were furious with U.S Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) a moderate. Now they have elected representative from states almost as conservative as is West Virginia. They will need to adapt. Some Democrats won't want them to. Something new will emerge out of that conflict.

Readers in Oregon may think I am wrong about breaking free of closed-minded party-line thinking, at least among Democrats. How else could Republican gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan have lost the governor’s race? How else could Republican Brad Hicks, with his extraordinary campaign advantages, have lost his state Senate race? Republicans fled Trump, but Democrats did not flee their party.

I think many Democrats wanted to, at least on the governor's race. There is substantial fatigue and dissatisfaction with Oregon’s Democratic leadership. Entrenched parties (and Texas and Oregon both experienced this) slide toward unpopular excesses. The interest groups that shape policy get too much of what they want. We saw it during Covid, when the teachers union, the OEA, made teacher health and safety, not student education, the state’s priority. That sows seeds of discontent.

So why did Drazan and Hicks lose so badly, if their campaign theme of restoring balance in Salem reflected what a critical mass of Oregon voters were thinking? Because Democrats and a critical mass of voters think Trump-compliant Republicans can not be trusted with power; Trump abuses power and Republicans let him do it. Trump looms larger in voters’ minds than Governor Tina Kotek or the Oregon Legislature. Kotek got reluctant votes. Better Kotek than a go-along Republican. Neither Drazan nor Hicks dared to break free of Trump, so they spent a fortune and lost decisively. They didn't read the room. 

Both major parties are going through a realignment. A week ago it didn’t seem possible. Now it seems inevitable. It is happening in real time. The 2026 election accelerates that process because voters see that they can make change. They can move the needle. We have government by the people. What a heady thought. 

We are free.

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Trump: "Pretend, please, that I am on the ballot. Just pretend."

The election was a referendum on the person at the center of our politics, Donald Trump.

Hicks' campaign got his opponent elected.

Denise Krause should send thank-you notes to Hicks' campaign donors. 

"Good news. After 13 long months the ads, the texts, the mailers, and the phone calls are finally going to end."

In Senate District 3, Democrat Denise Krause defeated Republican Brad Hicks by about 13 points, 54.9 to 42.1 percent. Clay Bearnson, the Independent and Green Party candidate, got 3.9 percent.

The Senate District 3 race was a natural experiment testing my theory of political marketing. The theory is that a candidate’s denoted message is less important and less persuasive than the meta-message, that unspoken, often-unintended brand expressed by tone, image, identity, and the form of a message.

Brad Hicks had near-infinite money to spend defining himself and his opponent. He ran so many ads that he certainly reached a point of sharply diminished returns. If a voter hears a single message, let's say 157 times in the six weeks before Election Day, is there any positive value in the iterations after the 100th or the 120th? Maybe. If one has infinite money, one gives it a try. Why not?

My suggestion to Hicks, offered openly in this blog as good advice, was for him to donate most of his campaign money to a couple of appealing local charities. I preferred Krause, but I had no worry that I might be helping Hicks with my advice. I knew his campaign would ignore it and would instead raise and spend money on ads pounding the idea that Denise Krause was a morally flawed Democratic rubber stamp and Portland-loving extremist who would join in the failed, job-killing policies of the Democratic majority. And moreover, they would claim Hicks is a friendly, nonjudgmental, unpretentious citizen of bipartisan nature eager to work cooperatively with the Democrats he had just trashed. 

And that is exactly what his campaign did. 

Great wealth blinds people. Surely more is better. What is advertising for if not to persuade? His campaign saw money’s power to deliver a message, but failed to see that its meta-message contradicted and overpowered the message. The natural experiment was a good one, because they had the capacity and will to run a full-on brute-force campaign. 

My theory and proposition was that the real brand Hicks communicated to voters contradicted his denoted message. The sheer size of the campaign marked him as part of an aggressive Republican army. The experiment would have been a cleaner test of my theory had Hicks stuck to nothing but friendly assertions of bipartisanship, two million dollars of it. Would voters have noticed the heavy GOP hand if the denoted message had been  solely positive? We don’t know. In fact, the Hicks campaign expressed disapproval and contempt for Democrats in the front half of its ads, so voters did not need to infer bare-knuckle partisanship. They absorbed the meta-message from the entire context.

His campaign showed Hicks to be a Republican scrapper at the worst possible time, the year voters rejected the Trump-led GOP. Hicks never broke with Trump. A few words of public disagreement with Trump might have changed everything, but he is a loyal Republican, as voters saw clearly in the meta-message. He clung to the Republican ship and went down with it. He is who he is.

A brute-force campaign, no matter how big, even with that 157th iteration, is not persuasive. 

Here is the irony: Denise Krause won this election in significant part because the Hicks campaign was so very effective. They showed voters who Hicks was; it showed them what they did not want. His ads won the election for her.

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Killjoy.

"So you see, I'm not naive
I just would like to believe
Ah, what you tell me.
You see I, I don't want
To be hurt by love again." 

Frederick Knight, sung by Leonard Cohen,"Be for Real," 1992

Pardon me while I lower expectations. 

I am used to being disappointed at elections, but I am not good at it. 

Democrats on TV's talking panels are trying to suppress their giddiness. The polls look good. Democratic voters are hearing about waves. No, better yet, tides. No, plan for a tsunami! I am not  thinking about tsunamis. I am repressing thoughts that perhaps, finally, Americans have had enough Trump. I remember election night 2016, when Trump, despite nearly every poll to the contrary, won the election. I don't want to be disappointed again.

I try not to live in a news bubble of people disgusted by Trump’s character and policies. I watch enough Fox News to know that a great many people consider him a picked-on hero. They know nothing about his crypto grift, his "sale" of pardons, the conflicts of interest deals with his family. They know the Bidens were shamefully corrupt. 

Trump defines our era. I saw it coming and I think I see it ending, but he is still the center of action. On the morning of Election Day, 2016, amid every consensus report predicting a Hillary Clinton victory, I published a blog post titled “Prediction: Trump.” It was a lucky guess based on the observation that Trump intrigued people. They liked his frank, spontaneous, give-’em-hell talk. He had some of what people liked about Archie Bunker. And about Hugh Hefner. And about Tony Soprano. I predicted that there was a silent group of people out there who would not be captured in polling data.

Now there is a silent group of people who have decided Trump is a malicious crackpot. I predict we will see that opinion in the vote this evening.

Democrats should prepare themselves for what is to come.

-- It will still be the Trump era because he is still president and he is still more popular than Congress. He can operate decisively. He will make executive orders while Democrats in Congress will be in hearings. I expect the basic template of political battle to be Democrats trying to legislate and Trump confounding them. Plan to be frustrated that Democrats cannot do more.

-- Plan, too, for the very real possibility of peace and prosperity, and Trump taking personal credit for it. He won’t be miserably unpopular forever. The magic of a capitalist economy and markets is that eventually the system resolves itself and people find a way to make a living. And eventually wars end, the one between Russia and Ukraine, and ours with Iran. In the aftermath of some end to the fighting, the public will sense things are better. Prepare for people applauding Trump.

-- Make one last preparation: Democrats are deeply divided over the war that will not end because God is fighting it on every side, the wars between Israel, Palestine, and Israel’s neighbors. There is probably no way a Democratic presidential candidate can thread a needle on the issue of our best policy toward Israel. Some Democrats have given up on Israel and decided it is a dangerous, rogue state. Others think it the set-upon good-guy victim, just trying to defend itself. The mess in Michigan, with AIPAC-supported Haley Stevens endorsing a Republican over the Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, is a harbinger of the future. The Democratic Party may split up like the Whig Party.

Whatever the news tonight, it ushers in problems. There will always be problems. Young people in school and in first jobs will look back on this period as those exciting years of youth. They won’t have a sense of fatigue and hopelessness. The political ones among them may remember this day as they looked forward to election news with a hope for the open-ended future when all good things are possible.

"Anticipation, anticipation
Is makin' me late
Is keepin' me waitin'
And stay right here 'cause these are the good old days
(These are the good old days)"

                      Carly Simon, "Anticipation" 1971

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More bait: Will Democrats fall for it?

Republicans are promoting Clay Bearnson, a candidate running against their own Republican candidate in Oregon’s state Senate District 3 race.

It is deceptive, clever, hardball politics. They are playing to win. 

I wonder why Hicks’ side waited so long to do it.

Here is what popped up in my text messages Saturday afternoon:

The link takes you to Bearnson’s legitimate website, but Bearnson did not send or pay for this advertisement. It came from a Republican PAC dedicated to electing Republicans.

The text is an invitation to disaffected Democrats. Some of the most politically passionate Democrats are frustrated with their party. Some of the disaffection is a continuation of the Bernie-Hillary split from 2016. Those voters are confident we can and should implement Medicare for All and other redistributive aspirations sooner rather than later. Some of it is residue of the Biden-Harris loss and a feeling that Democrats are weak and incompetent, which is why Trump steamrolls over them. The internal debate now shows up as a split between Democratic Socialists of America activists and “regular” Democrats.

There are also local Democratic activists who want to punish Democratic nominee Denise Krause for defeating their preferred candidate in the primary.

My sense was that the normal erosion away from Krause would be about equal to the Jill Stein and Cornel West vote in 2024. Together Stein and West got just over one percent of the vote in Oregon. Those were protest votes, gestures from people on the disaffected left. That was my estimate of the baseline erosion from Krause due to Bearnson’s place on the ballot.

I am revising that upwards.

I suspect this late burst of GOP ads for Bearnson will push his share above that baseline. The Hicks campaign did a good job of demonizing a grainy black-and-white caricature of Krause, calling her a future rubber stamp for failed policies. (Krause is doing the same thing to Hicks, presenting him in grainy black and white as a tool of his corporate funders. Hicks has twice her money, so the overall impression is of Krause as the underdog getting pummeled, but that she is fighting back and is not a doormat.) While I typed a draft of this post, with MS NOW playing in the background, I heard, in a single half hour, two 30-second Hicks ads bashing Krause as a Portland-loving pawn of Democratic Governor Tina Kotek, yuck, and one 30-second Krause ad asserting that Hicks is a Republican, yuck. This is a microcosm of this campaign.

In a very close election, the Democratic protest votes Bearnson takes from Krause could be decisive. But this GOP text blitz is too little, too late. Bearnson was never visible and credible enough to become the real alternative to Krause’s left. A significant chunk of the political left is eager to support such a candidate, confident that the country is ready for a real progressive. Republicans could have spent several hundred thousand dollars from their cornucopia building up Bearnson with no loss to the Hicks campaign. Bearnson would have been the “good guy outsider” in the ad war voters are watching. Hicks and Krause are the fighting thugs; Bearnson would be the guy saying campaigns shouldn’t be so big and nasty. That would have some appeal, and I can imagine him getting 10 percent of the vote, likely securing a Hicks victory. Republicans did not do this.

Instead, the Hicks campaign repeatedly ran harsh ads condemning Democrats as corrupt and incompetent, then immediately saying that Hicks respects Democrats and would work across the aisle with them.  That is supposed to be credible. Very strange. It is as if they don’t watch their own ads. 

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Easy Sunday: A request for guest posts from Christians.

I don't get it.

Isn't Donald Trump the opposite -- flagrantly so -- of everything that Jesus preached?

I am not the one to write about what Christians are thinking. I am no longer a “person of faith.” I was brought up in a Protestant home and learned the standard version: the Jesus story, Christmas and Easter, original sin, the teachings ascribed to Jesus, and salvation through belief in Christ as God. Then, in college, I learned how Christianity was constructed by squabbling groups over its first few centuries, then refined and re-refined ever since. Oh. It’s all made up, I decided. It was made up at the start by opinionated, disputatious people we know very little about, and the documents are full of forgeries and later writings passed off as earlier ones, created as propaganda, not history.

I likened the creation of Christianity to a centuries-long argument built from the same mix of politics, group dynamics and ideology I saw in the squabbling anti-war groups of the late 1960s: SDS, Progressive Labor, the Eugene McCarthy liberals, the peace Republicans, and so on. It was just people arguing.

Christianity, I decided, is real the way the English language is real: a foundational cultural artifact. But it isn’t real the way rocks are real.

I keep thinking of a scene from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, which I saw as a child. The Israelites, tired of waiting for Moses, have made a golden calf. The narrator intones: “They bore him upon their shoulders and rejoiced, saying ‘This be our god, oh Israel.’”

Have Republican Christians simply given themselves up to sin and the worship of a golden calf? Maybe that’s it, and they are on a binge they will later regret. But that is a harsh judgment, and I am an outsider.

I know there are people of faith among my readers. Maybe they can explain the Christian/Trump deal from the inside.

So I am asking for guest posts. Maybe I can hear from Trump-supporting Christians who can explain their thinking, and from Christians who don’t support Trump who can tell me what they think is going on.

Send your guest post to my email address: peter.w.sage@gmail.com

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Yeah, so the USA took Venesualia's oil. So what?

"Thou shalt not steal.”
         Exodus 20:15

Are we really OK with taking Venezuela’s oil? 

We are strong. They are weak. They cannot stop us.

But is expropriating oil from poor countries because we can -- is that the kind of country we understand ourselves to be?

Trump:

We took over Venezuela very successfully. And they’ve sent me as a gift a boatload of a million barrels of oil, and I’m giving that to the United States of America. We’re going to accept a million barrels of oil, and I’m going to give it to you people to use it the way you want.

In January the U.S. invaded Venezuela and arrested its president, Nicolás Maduro. The U.S. did not then install María Corina Machado, leader of the popular opposition and winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for that work. It installed Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, as interim leader, keeping the same corrupt regime in place. The U.S. got a compliant Venezuelan leader.

Trump makes a cursory effort to put a veneer of justice or mutual benefit on our taking control of Venezuelan oil. The deal gives the U.S. the right to buy a fifth of the output “at cost,” from fields the White House says are concessioned for 100 years. At the United Nations in September he called it an oil “deal.” Then he proudly described it as plunder:

Last month, we signed the largest oil deal in history, covering 65 billion barrels of oil, which will benefit both Venezuela and the United States enormously and helped drive down the cost of energy all over the world. And that is starting to perk right now. It’s coming out. The biggest oil companies in the world are going in, and the numbers are absolutely incredible. When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60 percent of the oil in the world. So it’s perhaps the biggest deal. It was a war, but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made. To the victor belongs the spoils, you’ve all heard that.

Some of Trump’s wealth-seeking is private. He made some $600 million from selling a crypto coin with no intrinsic value. Individual investors lost some $3.8 billion as the coin fell from a peak of about $75, days after launch, to about $1.58 today. He simply cheated his loyal supporters: a private matter, not a matter of state. The large buyers are different. Their purchases were bribes in disguise. They were buying influence or “protection” for themselves and their businesses, a corruption of the public interest for private gain. Americans can observe this open corruption and be disgusted by it. I am. Trump is selling the public trust.

This oil “deal” is different. It directly involves every American citizen, and it changes the polarity of benefit. Trump is plundering Venezuela for us. In his telling, Venezuela is “giving” him oil, a personal gift, and he is re-gifting it to Americans.

Americans need to sit with this and decide if we are OK with it. The U.S. has been openly exploitive of smaller countries throughout our history, most openly in Latin America -- the Banana Republics, as we called them. But the way that history is taught in school, and framed today, says that is the past. Yes, the CIA or the U.S. Army did bad things, but we have learned our lesson. We are good and well-disciplined now. We are the good guys. There is enormous hypocrisy and self-delusion built into that framing, but at least it was hypocrisy. Plunder wasn’t the stated norm.

Now it is. Trump identifies the U.S. as a predator. We are the danger that the rest of the world protects against. We are the smash-and-grab criminal.

I am not OK with that. It makes me feel ashamed of my country, and I don’t want to feel ashamed of it.

And if it seems naive to cite morality in matters of state, I will cite practicality. I have enough experience in business to trust the childhood chant when a player cheats on the playground: “Cheaters never prosper.”

At least not for long. Bad behavior and a bad reputation catch up to them.



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Spoiler alert: It might work

Who is this Clay Bearnson guy?

Republicans in the Oregon Senate District 3 race just changed tactics.

If Democrats don’t want Republican Brad Hicks, there is an alternative: Vote for a third-party candidate.

Clay Bearnson website photo

Regular readers of this blog know the situation well by now. Democratic state Senator Jeff Golden did not run for reelection. Denise Krause won a contested Democratic primary to replace him. Brad Hicks won an uncontested Republican primary. After a few weeks this summer of soft, positive ads introducing the two candidates, both switched to “comparison ads,” i.e., harsh characterizations of the other candidate’s values and future positions. (Hicks claimed Krause started it. No. He is being dishonest. I received a nasty Hicks door-hanger on September 8, five days before the TV slugfest began on September 13.) It does not surprise me that both candidates might want to distance themselves from the ad war. Between Hicks’ $2.5 million from Republican and corporate PACs and Krause’s $1.3 million from Democratic party and union sources, voters may feel exhausted by the vitriol. I do.

That is the opportunity for a third-party spoiler. Clay Bearnson, a Medford bar owner and former Medford city councilor, filed as a candidate and got onto the ballot with the endorsements of the Independent Party and the Pacific Green Party. I have heard repeated rumors that a few local Democrats, disappointed that Krause narrowly defeated Tonia Moro in the primary, encouraged him to run. It looked to me like a bit of score-settling involving very few people, and I saw almost no activity from Bearnson, so I dismissed his campaign. His candidacy was being buried by the huge campaigns of Hicks and Krause.

Recently the situation changed. Republicans sent a postcard to Democratic households, pretending to "warn" them that Bearnson was positioned to the left of Krause. The gist: Don’t vote for this person who wants healthcare for all! 

Sent as a text to Democrats

Now Republicans are promoting Bearnson openly. Democrats are getting text messages praising him for not taking campaign donations, contrasting him with Krause, and identifying him as the Pacific Green candidate.

You learn who paid for the texts by unsubscribing from more texts. It is The Leadership Fund, the campaign arm of Oregon’s Senate Republicans, which funds Republican Senate candidates, Hicks included.

Paid by: The Leadership Fund

Irony is not dead. Republicans who have helped pour more than two million dollars into Hicks’ campaign are praising Bearnson for not stooping to raising money like that terrible Denise Krause.

Will this tactic work? It does have potential with late voters who may have developed a “pox on both houses” feeling about the campaign. I suspect it is an admission that Hicks cannot get Democrats to vote for a Trump-supporting Republican this year. The national GOP has a message: Democrats are communist, socialist, tax-wasting, police-hating, baby-killing freaks. Democrats know when they are held in contempt.

A vote for Bearnson has only half the value of a vote for Hicks, since it is only a vote denied to Krause. But in a close election, those lost votes can be decisive. Word has gone out to local Republican activists to start promoting Bearnson. Former Republican County Commissioner Dave Dotterrer now has a Bearnson sign in front of his house, along with a Hicks sign.

My own sense is that this is too little, too late. And their messages contradict themselves. Republicans are now selling Bearnson as a good choice for Democrats after spending enormous sums to call Krause as “just another loyal Democrat,” cementing the message that Krause is the Democratic choice. 

I recognize that the Hicks campaign is gigantic. If you can sell anything by spending enough on advertising, then Hicks can win this election. This is a natural experiment for that proposition.

I might be wrong, of course, but I still expect Krause to win. Why? Because Hicks ended up sending an implicit message that no amount of money can sell this year, and he did it with his own advertising. He demonstrated that he is a Republican soldier in a Republican army that will spend whatever it takes to win for the party. Mr. Republican. He sold the wrong thing.

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Regime fatigue: What could go wrong for Democrats in Oregon

Oregon and Texas have one-party rule.

Parties that hold power a long time get careless. 

Oregon Democrats will probably escape the consequences this time. 

Opinion journalist Matthew Yglesias said it so well I will simply quote him:

Beyond that, Abbott’s problem is that he’s been in office a long time and he’s the third Republican governor in a row and there’s been a G.O.P. trifecta for a long time and it’s just hard to govern for a really long time without eventually overreaching and pissing people off. The longer any party coalition governs, the more scandals accumulate and the more undisciplined its leaders become. It gets easier for voters to take for granted whatever they like about them and harder for aligned interest groups to take “no” for an answer about their most unsound ideas. You see a version of this in the relatively tight polling for the Oregon governor’s race. I think Tina Kotek will probably pull it off, but if there were a Democrat in the White House, she’d be in real trouble.

Texas has been reliably red for decades. With no real opposition, the party’s allied interest groups and its demands for loyalty have let Texas be carelessly extreme. Take abortion. Texas violated its own culture of Western independence with a law that puts a bounty on anyone who helps a woman get an abortion. Some counties went further, making it illegal to transport someone along county roads on the way out of state to get one. The anti-abortion lobby felt unrestrained so it got a policy it could hold up as a trophy.

One-party rule also closes ranks. The Texas House impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton on corruption charges. The Republican state Senate refused to convict him. His power intact, and with Trump’s backing, he won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, ousting John Cornyn. He is a weak candidate with a giant flaw, and he got there because of one-party solidarity.

Too much strength becomes a weakness. It covers up mistakes of policy and personnel.

I support Governor Tina Kotek. I have donated to her campaign. I consider a Republican governor too big a risk for Oregon, at least while President Trump is in office and keeps making demands on state and local officeholders.

It was different when Mark Hatfield, Tom McCall, and Vic Atiyeh were governor. They were Republicans, and I considered that no great problem. Having both parties in positions of real power meant both parties had buy-in. Each had to act like a responsible governing party. 

A party that sees itself as part of the government does not pretend Oregon roads will maintain themselves. Republican opposition to the Democrats’ transportation package was good politics. Nobody likes a higher gas tax or registration fee, and voters threw the package out in May. But someone, somehow, has to pay to maintain the roads. 

I suspect Kotek will win reelection, but by a closer margin than Democrats usually enjoy. The argument for “bringing balance to Oregon” will make sense to some swing voters. Oregon interest groups that back Democrats -- unions, environmental groups, LGBTQ groups, reproductive rights groups -- have not faced hard opposition. Unions pushed through a law that pays unemployment benefits to striking workers, public employees included -- an idea at the far edge of union aspirations.

Democratic billboard. Drazan did a joint appearance with Ron DeSantis

Still, I am supporting Tina Kotek, even though I wish Republicans had buy-in in Salem. The problem is that gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan, and Republican legislative candidate Brad Hicks, have not separated themselves from the national Republican brand. They don’t dare say they aren’t Trump-obedient -- or at least they have not done so through months of campaigning. Trump might notice. MAGA voters might notice and be disappointed. The active partisans in the GOP want a loyal Republican, not a RINO.

The race may be close, and incumbency-fatigue gives Drazan a real shot, but the 2026 election is about the man who demands to grab center stage from Kotek: Donald Trump. 

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Brad Hicks caught a break, then threw it away

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Republican state Senate candidate Brad Hicks had the formula for victory: Say he isn’t a Republican soldier. 

But there was all that money. So much!

He fell into the same trap that buried Republicans before him in Oregon Senate District 3. 

Character reveals itself.

The Beatles sang about getting by with a little help from your friends. The irony of this campaign is that help from so many friends seduced Hicks into sabotaging himself. His friends meant well. Republican PACs, corporate PACs, industry trade association PACs and generous individual donors poured money into the Hicks campaign. At some point that money became a weapon he turned on himself.

The Hicks campaign started out with a Mr. Nice Guy bipartisan message. It wasn’t wholly implausible. He had been president and CEO of the local chamber of commerce, and most chambers of commerce steer clear of overt partisanship. The Medford chamber is an exception, effectively a Republican lobby with its own PAC, but that isn’t obvious to the general public. If pressed, Hicks could have said he was just the CEO and the board set the politics.

Hicks could have run a brute-force campaign, spending two-plus million dollars telling us what a nice guy he is. It would have gotten tiresome. How much Andy of Mayberry can we stand? How many rainbows, puppies, and testimonials from friends? Still, it would have been a consistent message, and a welcome note of comity in politics, a contrast to the slugfest in the governor’s race between Democratic incumbent Tina Kotek and Republican challenger Christine Drazan.

The problem was excess. The GOP money machine made ads that vented its frustration with Democratic majorities in Oregon. The result was angry, hostile, contemptuous ads. Take THAT!

A new brand emerged. Hicks became a Republican warrior. He hardened the partisan lines. Several times every hour, voters in a district with a Democratic majority hear that Democrats and their leaders are wasteful, incompetent, corrupt, evil and dangerous. It isn't how to win friends.

The race became a slugfest just like the governor’s race. Democrat Denise Krause’s campaign switched to nasty ads too. Don’t trust Hicks. Hicks would sell public land to corporations. Hicks won’t protect women’s reproductive rights. Hicks is a Trump toady.

The ugly battle clarified what the campaign is about: Republicans versus Democrats, both full of rancor. This year, with an all-too-visible Trump defining and damaging the Republican brand, a partisan brawl helps Democrats. Voters move to their respective corners of the ring.

As with Drazan’s campaign for governor, I think there is a public appetite for an independent-minded Republican who would offer an alternative to decades of Democratic control in Salem and the fatigue that comes with it. Hicks started with that message of independent bipartisanship. In my opinion, he could have won. He had the money to sell it, even if it wasn't remotely true.

But the richer his campaign got, the more capacity he had to show the underlying reality. Character reveals itself when given enough time and money. By campaigning as a Republican brawler, Hicks demonstrates to voters he would legislate like the loyal Republican his original message claimed he was not.  

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Christine Drazan can't catch a break

"You can go by foot
You can go by cow
Marvin K. Mooney, will you please go now."
       Theodor Geisel, as "Dr. Seuss," 1972

President Trump won’t go.

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, the Democratic incumbent, won’t let us forget it.

Trump said it himself: “Pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” He meant it as a favor to Republican candidates. It is a curse.

Christine Drazan, the Republican candidate for governor in Oregon, is one of the victims of Trump’s narcissism. Trump is not sending out bipartisan signals, nor is he doing anything to ease Democratic suspicion of a repeat of 2020, when he tried to overturn an election. He is still posting up a storm and talking about ballrooms and a triumphal arch. He is promising $5,000 payoffs if Republicans win, an offer so outrageous that even some Republicans dismiss it. He keeps insulting and picking fights with Canada. Canada! Our peaceful, reasonable, no-trouble neighbor and ally. He confirms every suspicion Democrats carry that Trump is careless and desperate. The moment they wonder whether they are being alarmist, whether everything is normal after all and they have simply fallen into a habit of derangement, Trump says something crazy at a rally. He praised Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ohio ad featuring his opponent’s estranged mother! It is as if he is trying to sabotage Republican candidates.

                               

Poor Christine Drazan.

Governor Kotek is vulnerable. Oregon has its own problems, made worse by Trump, Kotek argues. Democrats have been in charge, and Kotek carries the malaise that hangs over every incumbent in this period of high prices and low consumer confidence. Bad feelings still linger from the Covid shutdowns. Nike and Intel are laying off people, and Portland office buildings have empty floors. Oregon has lost some of its luster.

Kotek has a Trump card: Drazan has been a good Republican. She isn’t aggressively MAGA, and she has not promised to bring Oregon into sync with Idaho and Alabama,  but she is Trump-compliant. She is on the Trump team bus, even if she isn’t waving pom-poms and shouting “attaboy!” Kotek has seized on that compliance. A Kotek TV ad drives the point home, and it appears to be her closing argument. A mother talks about her daughter who was born with Down syndrome, and about how the family relies on the Oregon Health Plan. It puts a sympathetic face on Trump’s Medicaid cuts. The mother says:

     "President Trump tried to cancel that funding. It would be catastrophic. Christine Drazan follows everything Trump wants to do. She tried to cut Medicaid, too. The most vulnerable are left in the dust, scrambling to survive. That's not right. That's the difference for governor. Christine Drazan will never stand up to Trump."

Drazan won’t stand up to Trump. Frustration with Oregon government falls to insignificance next to Trump, who would do God-knows-what and doesn’t even pretend otherwise. Oregon is a target.

Drazan has an escape route but does not take it. Apparently Republicans think they cannot. Look at Mike Pence and Liz Cheney. Better to lose as a Republican than break free of Trump. Suppose Drazan were to denounce Trump forcefully -- his Medicaid cuts and tariffs and the harm they do Oregon, his crypto grift, his sale of pardons. Suppose she said Oregonians won’t tolerate Trump's blatant corruption, and said it so clearly that Trump condemned her as a RINO turncoat. Then I suspect she would win this race. I think there is a public appetite for an independent-minded Republican with the spunk to stand up to Trump. She might not need to take the scary step of breaking with Trump if he would just disappear for a while.

But Trump stays front and center, a wild card menace, but he won't go now.

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Picking the Malbec grapes

[Skip this post if you want politics, not agriculture.]

 

Monday we pick the Malbecs.

The starling pressure has gotten overwhelming. 

The grapes are netted, but the starlings come in swarms and they are doing what they can to get into the nets. 

I drive my tractor up and down the rows and ten or fifteen birds flush out and fly away in alarm. It works for the moment, but then they return. They are looking at the seams of the nets, trying to find a way in.

I set up a flopping man scarecrow on Sunday, but it won't work for long. 

Nets work, but imperfectly. What works to protect grape clusters is picking them, getting them into bins, and driving them to Valley View Vineyard's winery and out of harm's way. 

Picking involves cutting the grape clusters with hand clippers and placing clusters in a bucket.

Here is what they look like, freshly picked and still in the field. These are the Pinot Noirs we picked last week.

Then at the winery, fermentation started, a small pump recirculates the juice, pouring it back over the grape skins to extract color and grape-skin flavor notes.

My vineyard froze hard on Thursday and Friday nights. The vineyard is colder than most of the Rogue Valley because my place is along the Rogue River, i.e., the point of lowest elevation, where the coldest air settles. Here is one of the alarm notices I was texted every half hour from my electronic thermometer.

A freeze this hard doesn't ruin the grapes, but it finishes off the still-greenish living grape leaves that were delivering carbohydrates to the grapes. The Malbec and Cabernet grapes are as ripe as they will get, although as they dehydrate on the vines they will get sweeter.

The Valley View Vineyards owners and winemaker are attempting to make excellent wine, not just good wine, so their plan for now is to leave the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes on the vines for another few days. The crew is hand-picking the grapes, not machine-picking, because, again, the quality if better. Machine-picking shakes frosted grape leaves along with the grape clusters; the leaf fragments cannot be separated out and they change the taste of the wine. 

I share these posts about growing wine grapes because many people who drink wine have no clear idea about where those nicely finished bottles come from. Wine is an agricultural product. Every agricultural product in every region on Earth addresses problems getting stuff grown and marketed. Melons have their problems. Grapes have different ones. Farming is complicated.

I have a second purpose. Grape prices are down. Wine sales are down. We don't have a wine-glut problem; we have a drink-imported-wine problem. There is more wine consumed in Southern Oregon than is produced in Southern Oregon. The boycotts of American wines by foreigners retaliating to Trump tariffs are damaging the grape and wine markets, and wine exports are down.  That is part of the problem. Nationwide  domestic wine consumption is down because of the ebbs and flows in consumer tastes. (Maybe wine isn't health food after all.) Markets will settle out at some new equilibrium over the next few years. The U.S. is a net importer of wine. American wines, including ones grown here in Southern Oregon, do not need to apologize for their quality on world markets. Local wines are fully equal to imported wines and those from California. We are a high-quality wine region, recognized by wine experts, but less so by local residents. People who consciously "buy local" when buying other food forget that policy when shopping for wine. Local restaurants showcase foreign wines. What a shame. Southern Oregon is a superb wine-growing area, and I am trying to show how that is accomplished. 

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