Today’s Republican candidates mostly don’t seek union endorsement. And yet a solid fraction of union members are registered Republicans, including about 26% of those who receive the Labor Press through their unions. Who should they pick in Oregon’s closely contested Republican primary for governor?
Fourteen Republican candidates for governor will appear on the May 19 primary ballot, but an April poll showed three of them far ahead of the rest: Christine Drazan, Ed Diehl, and Chris Dudley. The Labor Press contacted all three campaigns requesting an interview. Only Dudley agreed. Diehl’s campaign said he was too busy. Drazan’s campaign did not respond.
Drazan, by far the front-runner in the poll, is a state legislator from Canby and former House minority leader. Before that she was a lobbyist for the restaurant industry. Drazan ran for governor in 2022 and got 44% of the vote, losing to Democrat Tina Kotek, who got 47%.
Drazan doesn’t have the worst labor voting record among Republican legislators — she voted for the union-backed bill that established Oregon’s paid family and medical leave program. But she voted against bills cracking down on wage theft in construction, allowing strikers to collect unemployment insurance, and expanding the prevailing wage in construction. She also voted against letting public employee union reps participate in new employee orientations, and against limiting rent increases to inflation plus 7%. The Democratic majority passed all of those into law.
Like Drazan, Diehl also has a voting record to scrutinize. Diehl is the Stanford-educated owner of an industrial automation company. He lives in Scio and has represented the rural area east of Salem in the state house since 2023. Campaigning for governor, he calls himself Ed “No tax” Diehl, a reminder to voters that he led the campaign to refer a 6-cent gas tax to the ballot. But in his campaign materials he makes it clear he’d like to eliminate other taxes too, including the estate tax and the 0.57% corporate activities tax that raises $1 billion a year for K-12 schools. If elected governor, he pledges to veto tax increases on the rich or anyone else.
Like Drazan, Diehl voted against bills to let strikers get unemployment, expand the prevailing wage, and crack down on wage theft in construction. He also voted against a bill that increased OSHA penalties (which were the lowest in the nation).
Dudley calls himself an “outsider” because he’s never held public office. A Yale-educated wealth manager and former NBA player, he lives in Sisters, Oregon. He ran for governor in 2010 and got 48% of the vote, losing to Democrat John Kitzhaber. Dudley’s professional basketball career spanned 16 years and five teams, including two stints with the Portland Trail Blazers. He also served as executive treasurer of the NBA Players Association and was on the union’s bargaining committee.
Dudley is the only Republican candidate for governor this year to get a union endorsement. The executive board of Operating Engineers Local 701 voted May 8 to recommend Dudley within the Republican primary (In the Democratic primary Local 701 is backing Tina Kotek.) Local 701 business manager James Anderson said Dudley made a good impression on apprentices during a visit to the Local 701 training center. His former union involvement and his business experience were also factors.
His campaign has raised $2.4 million, including $1 million from Nike billionaire Phil Knight, $25,000 from NBA player Kevin Love, and $25,000 from union-busting distributor Bigfoot Beverages.
Speaking by Zoom with the Labor Press, Dudley reaffirmed his campaign pledge to cut unnecessary regulations, but said he’d rather not name any examples. He said he wants to lower taxes on working families, and predicted that would lead to increased tax revenue because it would spur so much economic activity. He wasn’t sure if he would have signed the paid family medical leave into law and would have struggled with the proposal for unemployment benefits for strikers. He said project labor agreements make sense on big projects in some areas, but maybe not in rural Oregon.
