By Dr. Eric Fruits, Economist International
Republicans haven’t held Oregon’s governor’s mansion since January 1987. That is a stretch long enough that a child born when Vic Atiyeh left office is now old enough to have kids in high school or heading off to college. Republican Sen. Christine Drazan faces a steep climb against Tina Kotek in November, and an even steeper climb against a Democratic legislature that will keep, and may expand, its supermajority.
The common reading of those facts is that the governor’s race is essentially symbolic. If Democrats keep the legislature, the argument goes, a Republican in Salem becomes a governor in name only – vetoing bills that get overridden, signing budgets written by other people, mostly cutting ribbons.
That reading is wrong. It misunderstands how Oregon’s executive power actually works. Much of the state’s policy machinery sits on the governor’s desk rather than in the legislative calendar, and most of it does not require the legislature’s permission to operate.
Start with the veto. The Oregon Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in each chamber to override. Democrats can’t clear that threshold. They currently hold 37 of 60 House seats and 18 of 30 Senate seats – comfortably above the three-fifths needed to raise taxes, but just shy of the two-thirds needed to override a veto. Even an unusually good Democratic year in November is unlikely to clear two-thirds in both houses. That means a Republican governor’s veto sticks.
Veto threats change what gets written. Bills the governor has signaled they will reject tend not to make it out of committee. The threat reshapes the legislative calendar before a gavel falls. Consider the 2025 transportation package. HB 3991 – the gas tax, registration fees and payroll tax doubling that Republicans referred to the May 19 ballot as Measure 120 – was passed in special session by exactly the required three-fifths majority in each house. A Republican governor would have made that bill politically impossible long before it reached their desk. Democrats would have had to negotiate, scale back, or wait. Some version of road maintenance funding might still have moved. The version voters turned back in May would not have existed.
The line-item veto is narrower in scope than legislators sometimes pretend, but it matters. Under Article V, section 15a, the governor can strike individual items from appropriations bills and emergency clauses. That power does not extend to policy bills, nor does it allow the governor to edit tax statutes. It does give the governor a scalpel within the budget that lawmakers spend half their session writing. Pet projects tucked into omnibus appropriations are exactly the kind of thing a Republican governor would have leverage over – and exactly the kind of thing legislators stop attaching once they know their pork will get sliced.
The ability to strike emergency clauses means that bad bills can be referred to the voters. The first day in office, a Republican governor should declare, “No more fake emergencies.”
The executive order is the tool that bypasses the legislature entirely. After Republican walkouts denied quorum and killed cap-and-trade in 2019 and 2020, Gov. Kate Brown issued Executive Order 20-04, directing more than a dozen state agencies to set sector-specific emissions caps, expand the Clean Fuels Program and reweight transportation spending around greenhouse gas reduction. The legislature never voted on any of it. Most of what Oregon now calls its climate policy descends from that order signed by one person rather than from a statute passed by the legislature. A Republican governor has the same authority to rescind those orders, replace them and issue new ones in directions the legislature would never have voted to take.
Appointments are where the office quietly becomes the most powerful position in the state. The governor staffs the agencies. Education is the most striking case. Under a 2011 statute, the governor of Oregon also serves as Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the deputy who runs the Department of Education day to day serves at the governor’s pleasure. K-12 takes among the largest shares of the state budget, and the agency that administers it answers to the governor by design.
Across the rest of the state government, after two generations of Democratic appointments, the top of every agency is populated by people whose median sits well to the left of the median Oregon voter. A Republican governor inherits the authority to clean house. A useful exercise for any Republican candidate is the “keep, fire, or arrest” question. Who would they retain, who would they fire, and who would they investigate for malfeasance? Most answers will fall in the first two categories. A few may not. That triage, done seriously, would do more to change Oregon policy in a year than a decade of legislative skirmishes.
Boards and commissions are the part of state government that most voters underestimate. The Oregon Transportation Commission decides which projects move and which do not – projects like tolling or the Interstate Bridge Replacement. The PERS Board sets the assumed rate of return – a single technical decision that shifts billions of dollars in unfunded liability between today’s taxpayers and tomorrow’s – with no legislative vote required. The TriMet board makes capital and service decisions that shape every commute in the metro area – whether to expand light rail or cancel bus routes. None of these bodies reports to the legislature in any direct way. All of them are appointed, in whole or in part, by the governor. Rulemaking by such boards has the force of law and rarely gets meaningful legislative review.
Judges round out the list. Oregon governors fill mid-term vacancies on the circuit courts, the Court of Appeals and the Oregon Supreme Court. Most appellate judges in this state first reached the bench by appointment rather than by election. Those choices shape how every statute, rule and administrative decision gets read for a generation.
None of this is to wave away the difficulties.
A Republican governor would walk into a building where, by any honest measure, almost no one currently working there has ever served a Republican administration. Institutional memory of how a non-Democratic executive operates Oregon’s machinery has effectively been lost.
A Republican governor’s first job will be to figure out how to turn on the lights. The legislature will be hostile. Some agency heads will resign rather than serve, and some may refuse to leave. Litigation will arrive promptly, and parts of the judiciary will not be friendly. These are real costs, and a serious candidate should plan for them. The campaign should already be drafting personnel lists, vetting board appointees and identifying the lawyers who will defend the first wave of executive orders. None of that work happens automatically on inauguration day.
The reason to take the race seriously is that the governor’s powers do not depend on legislative cooperation. They depend on a Republican showing up at Mahonia Hall with a plan, a personnel list and the willingness to use the authority the office already carries. Oregon has spent 40 years assuming the governor’s chair would be filled by someone who shares the legislature’s priorities. Salem’s operating model now depends on that assumption, and most of the people in state government have stopped noticing. It is worth finding out what happens when a Republican holds the governor’s pen.
Eric Fruits is a senior scholar at the International Center for Law & Economics, an adjunct professor of economics at Portland State University, and the president and chief economist of Economics International Corp. Follow him on X at @ericfruits and ericfruits.substack.com.