Gov. Tina Kotek is leading Tuesday in partial returns as she seeks to fend off a challenge from Republican Christine Drazan.
Early returns showed Kotek leading Drazan, 54.4% to 43%, with an estimated 35% of ballots counted.
Brett Smith, the Pacific Green Party candidate, had 2.5% of the vote as 8:00 p.m.
If Kotek’s lead holds, Democrats would notch their latest victory in a winning streak that dates back four decades. The party has taken the Oregon governor’s office in every election since 1986.
This year’s governor’s race is a partial rematch of 2022, when Kotek and Drazan squared off alongside former state Sen. Betsy Johnson’s well-funded nonaffiliated campaign.
The race followed what has become a familiar narrative in Oregon, with limited polling suggesting the two candidates were virtually neck and neck.
In the run up to Election Day, political forecasters repeatedly downgraded Kotek’s perceived advantage. A race that was rated as “solid Democratic” following the May primary was eventually handicapped as only “lean Democratic” by outfits like the Cook Political Report and Inside Elections.
Throughout the race, Drazan leaned into Kotek’s low approval ratings to make a case the governor had overseen a flagging economy and not delivered on promises to address the state’s housing shortage, improve educational outcomes and beef up the state’s behavioral health offerings.
Kotek insisted she has begun to make progress on all of those, but spent most of her time linking Drazan to the unpopular policies of President Donald Trump. Democrats warned that putting a Republican in Mahonia Hall would give Trump a sympathetic Oregon partner on immigration enforcement, slashing healthcare benefits and more.
Drazan continually tried to pivot from that Democratic messaging by promising, if elected, she would enforce the state’s sanctuary state laws and protect Oregonians’ ability to vote-by-mail.
Formerly the state’s longest-serving House speaker, Kotek won office four years ago with a reputation for ruthless efficiency in passing Democratic priorities. The onetime nonprofit advocate often says she will always prioritize people in the most need. She has worked to expand the social safety net and create new regional networks to assist people out of homelessness.
But Kotek acknowledges that success on her top priorities has not come swiftly in her four years as governor.
“If anything, I’ve learned in this first term the wheels of change are probably a little slower than I am happy with,” she recently told OPB. “We need to work harder to continue to make that progress for folks.”
Drazan made a point of telling voters on the campaign trail that she was born in Oregon, in Klamath Falls. She’s the youngest of three children and grew up in a family that she said had to sometimes worry about money. She graduated from George Fox University, a conservative Christian school in Newberg.
Following college, Drazan briefly worked in public relations before heading to Salem where she worked as a staffer for Republican leaders in an era when Republicans were in the majority in the statehouse. There, the mom of three saw the potential of influence the Republican party could have in this state. In 2019, Drazan became the House Republican Leader. She ran for governor in 2022 and was appointed to the state Senate in 2025.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
