Why I’m Running Against Tina Kotek
I want to be clear and respectful about this from the start.
Tina Kotek is a good person. She has been a committed public servant for decades. She has worked hard for Oregon, and she has led during genuinely difficult years. I do not question her integrity or her dedication to this state.
I do question whether the approach that shaped her leadership is still sufficient for the moment we are in.
And that is why I am running against her.
This Is About the Moment, Not the Person
Oregon is at an inflection point.
We are facing overlapping crises — housing, healthcare, labor, climate, public safety, and civic trust — that are not discrete policy problems. They are systemic failures interacting with one another in ways our current political toolkit is not equipped to handle.
Tina Kotek’s entire professional life has unfolded inside the old system.
Before elected office, she worked in public policy and nonprofits in the early 2000s — a fundamentally different economic, technological, and social era. That experience produced real wins. It also produced a governing style oriented toward managing systems, rather than redesigning them.
That distinction matters now.
Too Late, Too Lite, and Missing the Forest
What finally pushed me to run was her economic plan.
It is cautious. Incremental. Familiar.
And in this moment, that makes it inadequate.
We do not need another round of narrowly targeted public system interventions layered onto structures that are already failing under the weight of complexity, demographic change, and precarity.
We need to go upstream.
We need to invest in people before they are in crisis — not just manage the fallout afterward. We need to create conditions where Oregonians have enough stability, time, and cognitive space to innovate, collaborate, and build.
Right now, too many people are exhausted just trying to survive.
The Core Disagreement: Management vs. Redesign
The difference between Tina Kotek and me is not values — it is orientation.
Her leadership is rooted in:
programmatic fixes
institutional continuity
risk aversion in the name of stability
Mine is rooted in:
redesigning systems around real human limits
treating care as infrastructure, not charity
and acknowledging that precarity itself is a drag on productivity, innovation, and civic life
You cannot ask people to build the future when they are drowning in the present.
Oregon’s Missed Opportunity
Oregon has always been more than a set of programs.
We are a geography with distinctive advantages:
cultural creativity
environmental leadership
experimentation at the edges
and a population willing to try things other places won’t
But we are not capitalizing on that.
We are not thinking strategically about how Oregon competes in a global market — not by racing to the bottom, but by exporting what we do uniquely well and bringing revenue into the state to balance what flows out.
That requires imagination, not just administration.
A Message to Younger Democrats (and the Tired Ones)
If you feel like:
politics keeps asking you to wait
reforms arrive after damage is already done
and leadership feels allergic to naming the scale of change required
You’re not wrong.
Many of you love Oregon. Many of you want to stay. Many of you want to build here.
But the current system is not making that easy — and incrementalism is not keeping up with reality.
Why I’m Running Anyway
I am running because I believe Oregon Democrats are ready to tell the truth about the moment we’re in.
That we need:
bolder economic imagination
earlier intervention
and leadership willing to redesign, not just defend, the systems we inherited
This is not a rejection of Tina Kotek’s service.
It is an acknowledgment that the world has changed faster than our politics has, and that good leadership in one era does not automatically translate to the next.
I’m running because I believe Oregon can do better — and because I believe many Democrats already know it’s time.
