If his intentions weren’t clear when he created a campaign committee and quit his job as an internationally known newspaper columnist, they are now: Nick Kristof is running for Oregon governor.
After months of speculation, and increasingly meaningful steps toward a run, Kristof made it official on Wednesday.
Kristof, who has no political experience, framed his decades of experience at the New York Times as a boon to Oregon’s current troubles. Unveiling a new campaign website and an announcement video, Kristof, a Yamhill native, made it clear he plans to carry the political outsider mantle as he vies for governor.
“Nothing will change until we stop moving politicians up the career ladder year after year, even though they refuse to step up to the problems Oregon faces,” he said in his campaign video.
Kristof joins a Democratic primary field already crowded with established political names, including House Speaker Tina Kotek and state Treasurer Tobias Read. There’s also already an independent candidate running, Democratic Senator Betsy Johnson, who recently announced that she’ll seek to gather enough signatures to make the November general election ballot as an unaffiliated candidate.
Kristof was a foreign correspondent and a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. In his campaign advertisement, he said he “spent a lifetime shining a light in the darkest corners of the globe.” In the video, Kristof said it broke his heart when he returned “from crisis abroad to find crisis at home.”
It’s clear Kristof plans to make economic insecurity a theme of his run. Along with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, also once a New York Times journalist, he authored a book called “Tightrope” exploring how so many people Kristof knew as a child in Oregon grew up into homeless or died young.
“Unaffordable housing, weak mental health support, inadequate education and a politics that has treated addiction not as a disease but as a crime,” Kristof said in the video. “If you want to see what happens when our politics so badly fails the people it’s supposed to serve, just take a walk through downtown Portland.”
Kristof grew up on a farm in Yamhill, Oregon, about 30 miles southwest of Portland. He’s spent most of his adult life in other countries and on the East Coast. But he recently moved back to the family farm.
One of the likely biggest sticking points in his campaign, however, will be just how much of an outsider Kristof really is. Oregon has a three-year residency requirement for its governors, and Kristof voted as a New York resident last year.
When Willamette Week raised questions about whether Kristof meets the residency requirements, he responded with a 15-page legal opinion making the case.
“Though he left Oregon for college and has maintained a residence outside Oregon to accommodate employment in New York, he has also kept a residence in Oregon, has maintained extensive contacts with the state (including regular physical presence), and has considered Oregon to be his home at all times,” the document states.
This is a developing story. Watch for updates.
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