PORTLAND — Oregon voters on Tuesday elected Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber to a historic fourth term.
Kitzhaber already is the state’s longest-serving governor, and he will extend his run after defeating Republican state Rep. Dennis Richardson.
Kitzhaber overcame ethical questions about his fiancee’s role in his administration and the revelation that she was in a fraudulent marriage years ago. He also was damaged by the state’s massive spending on its failed health insurance website.
Kitzhaber has touted Oregon’s steady economic recovery and his work overhauling the systems of delivering public health care and education.
Richardson hammered Kitzhaber on Cover Oregon and his fiancee’s consulting work. He has conservative positions on abortion and gay marriage but has downplayed them, saying he’d uphold current laws.
Richardson hoped voters had enough dissatisfaction with Kitzhaber’s performance to pick a Republican governor for the first time since 1982.
Richardson, a retired lawyer from Central Point who flew helicopters in Vietnam, has represented a southern Oregon district in the state House for more than a decade. He has become one of the Legislature’s top budget experts and promised to be an honest, trustworthy steward of the public trust.
Richardson criticized Kitzhaber over the failure of the Cover Oregon health insurance website, slow progress on education, and the lack of a new Interstate 5 bridge over the Columbia River.
Most recently, he aggressively slammed Kitzhaber and his fiancee, Cylvia Hayes, over Hayes’ work for organizations seeking to influence state policy. Richardson said Hayes’ work violated federal law and constituted corruption. Kitzhaber has maintained Hayes carefully avoided conflicts.
On Tuesday, some voters interviewed as they delivered their ballots said the Hayes revelations held little sway over them.
“That’s his personal business; it was just a media scandal,” said Allison Dumas, 22, after dropping off her ballot in Portland. Dumas said she voted for Kitzhaber.
“He got grilled for something that was not his responsibility. And even if Hayes did do some of those things, we’ve all done things in the past that we’re not proud of,” Dumas said, referring to a past sham marriage Hayes publicly admitted to.
Richardson struggled to overcome his socially conservative views in a state that strongly supports abortion rights. Democrats pummeled voters with two decades worth of Richardson’s controversial statements about gays, illegal immigration and abortion.
Richardson tried to downplay those issues, saying he respected the will of voters and that state policy on abortion and gay marriage has been settled.
Kitzhaber is a former emergency room doctor and longtime state lawmaker who served two terms as governor that ended in 2003. He then returned four years ago for another term.
Before leaving office in 2003, Kitzhaber famously quipped that Oregon was becoming “ungovernable.”
He held the record for the largest number of vetoes, earning the nickname “Dr. No.”
Kitzhaber’s third term started on a smoother path before Cover Oregon fell apart and the questions about Hayes’ work emerged. He has issued only a handful of vetoes, helped by a Legislature that was either tied or firmly in Democratic control.
But some voters didn’t see Cover Oregon as a fiasco, said Angeline Wolski, a Portland science teacher who enrolled in health insurance via the state’s troubled insurance exchange.
“Even when the Cover Oregon technology failed, Kitzhaber was still making a lot of effort to get people registered,” Wolski said after dropping off her ballot.
Kitzhaber has touted Oregon’s steady economic recovery and his work overhauling the systems of delivering public health care and education. He claimed credit for a bipartisan spirit in Salem that allowed lawmakers to close a massive budget deficit in 2011 and, two years later, to shrink the unfunded liability in the state’s pension system.
