Secretary of State

Tobias Read

Democrat

The secretary of state holds Oregon’s second-highest office, and its occupant is a heartbeat away from becoming the state’s chief executive: The secretary of state automatically replaces the governor, should the governor resign or die.

Kate Brown jumped into the governor’s chair in February 2015, when Gov. John Kitzhaber abruptly quit. Brown’s elevation marked the beginning of a period of turbulence from which the office has yet to recover: Including Brown, there have been six different Oregon secretaries of state since 2015. The person most recently elected to the job—Democrat Shemia Fagan, who won in 2020—resigned in disgrace last year after WW reported she was moonlighting for La Mota, the troubled cannabis company. Gov. Tina Kotek appointed former Portland City Auditor LaVonne Griffin-Valade to serve out Fagan’s term. Griffin-Valade is not running, which means the state will elect its seventh chief elections officer in less than a decade.

Alarming? Yes. But it also presented an opportunity for Republicans to offer voters a different course. As usual, they squandered the chance. The GOP nominated a MAGA-marinated election denier, state Sen. Dennis Linthicum (R-Klamath Falls), to oversee elections. Linthicum, a rancher and small business owner, is one of the senators prevented by state law from seeking reelection because he had more than 10 unexcused absences in 2023. It’s puzzling why the GOP, which saw one of its own, the late Dennis Richardson, win this office as recently as 2016, would field a candidate so obviously unable to win and unfit to do the job.

That’s to take nothing away from the Democratic nominee, State Treasurer Tobias Read. Read, 49, served five terms in the Oregon House representing Beaverton before winning his current job in 2016. At the treasury, Read has been a steady hand. He has continued to push for financial literacy and saving for retirement, most notably through a new program that encourages employers to establish retirement programs. Under his leadership, the treasury took over administration of unclaimed property from the Department of State Lands and sped up the return of that property to Oregonians.

Read hasn’t decarbonized $100 billion in pension funds as fast as climate activists would like. On that front, we applaud his caution, which is appropriate when safeguarding pensioners’ money. Investment returns, long a strength for Oregon, have continued to be robust, although critics have noted Read allowed the portfolio to overcommit to private equity.

Read is exactly the kind of deliberative policy wonk the state needs to return stability to the Secretary of State’s Office. Oregonians should feel comfortable with Read serving as next in line to the governor. Unlike Gov. Tina Kotek and Kitzhaber, Read hasn’t involved his wife in state business. Nor, like Fagan, is he a moonlighter. A former Nike manager with a penchant for numbers, Read is smart, honest and cautious—good qualities for somebody who will run elections and oversee audits.

Nathalie Paravicini, a naturopath representing the Pacific Green and Progressive parties, is in the race to bring attention to the importance of campaign finance reforms passed earlier this year but not yet implemented. She is an eloquent advocate for continued vigilance of money in politics but cannot compete with Read’s experience.

What Read was known for in high school: He was the most likely to bore somebody to sleep while talking about policy.

State Treasurer

Elizabeth Steiner

Democrat

Sen. Elizabeth Steiner (D-Northwest Portland) should be gliding toward victory in the race to be Oregon’s next state treasurer. And deservedly so. Steiner, 61, has been an effective public servant since becoming a state senator in 2011. A New Yorker by birth and a doctor by training, she has no tolerance for time-wasting bullshit. And she knows how to handle public money, having served as co-chair of the Senate Ways and Means Committee since 2018.

Conventional wisdom says a Democrat running for statewide office in Oregon after winning the primary is very likely to win the general election because the Beaver State is reliably blue.

Victory seems even more assured when the Republican opponent doesn’t have a campaign website, has raised less than $20,000, and doesn’t bother to show up at endorsement interviews with the state’s leading newspapers.

That’s Sen. Brian Boquist (R-Dallas), who can’t run for the state Senate again because he walked out last year, violating a new Oregon law against going AWOL.

Still, Steiner is worried. Boquist is running an anemic campaign, but he has built-in advantages that could help him win if enough progressives vote for Mary King, a retired Portland State University professor who is running as part of the Working Families Party.

Boquist is a grandstander whose self-serving antics (during a prior walkout, he once told the governor to “send bachelors” to drag him back to Salem) have at last cost him his public office. Now he’s waging a campaign with conspiratorial undertones. In his statement in the Voters’ Pamphlet, Boquist says he wants to “stop the globalist sellout driving up your grocery, utility and fuel bills.” He wants to “invest in Oregon, not New York. Oregon First.”

In an email, Boquist says he wants to explore “self-bonding for in-state legislatively approved sales” so we “pay interest to ourselves.” Steiner says she worries about that because Oregon sells $1.5 billion of bonds on the global market to pay for infrastructure projects every year. With just 4 million residents, there isn’t enough appetite for that kind of funding in state.

Steiner fears that King’s spoiler candidacy could open a window for Boquist. “There is still a persistent implicit bias that men are better at managing money than women, and that Republicans are better at it than Democrats,” Steiner says. “I think that boosts the number of people who would vote for Senator Boquist.”

King says she’s running to push major-party candidates toward more aggressive climate action by getting the state to divest from fossil fuel companies more quickly. That’s all.

We applaud those aims—and urge you to vote for Steiner.

What Steiner was known for in high school: “I was pretty socially awkward. I was happy to live through it.” She went to boarding school.

Attorney General

Dan Rayfield

Democrat

Hallelujah! The Republican Party finally found a legitimate candidate for this office, which Democrats have held continuously since 1993.

The GOP reached a nadir in 2020, when it nominated Michael J. Cross, whose legal experience consisted of being charged with crimes. He still got 41.3% of the vote against incumbent Ellen Rosenblum, who has decided not to seek a fourth term. (We did not take an editorial position on her three races in 2012, 2016 and 2020 because Rosenblum is married to Richard Meeker, the co-owner of WW’s parent company.)

This year, Republicans nominated Will Lathrop, 46, a genial former prosecutor in Yamhill and Marion counties, who later spent eight years working in Africa for International Justice Mission, a Christian nonprofit that says it rescues people from human traffickers. The BBC raised some questions about the legitimacy of that work, but we’ll give Lathrop this: He’s earnest and smart and has run a good campaign, raising more than $1.5 million for a relatively low visibility position.

Lathrop has a couple of problems: First, abortion has come roaring back onto the national scene as a suddenly unsettled issue. In these troubled times, we’d prefer the state’s top lawyer to be pro-choice. While legislators passed one of the nation’s strongest and most expansive laws safeguarding abortion and gender-affirming care in 2023, the bill generated fierce opposition. If the state is forced to defend that law in the courts, Oregonians deserve to have an elected official in control who supports it.

Second, Lathrop seems to misunderstand the duties of the job he’s seeking. His campaign is almost entirely about crime-busting. We’re all for dialing back fentanyl and gun violence, but that’s the job of county prosecutors and the feds, not the AG. Want proof? Fewer than 5% of the Department of Justice’s 1,500 employees work in the criminal justice section. The bulk of the AG’s job is advising state agencies, representing the state in court, and performing mundane but important tasks, such as collecting child support. While Lathrop’s got his eye on Mexican drug cartels, the real work is far less sexy.

His Democratic opponent, state Rep. Dan Rayfield, 45, knows that. Rayfield, a trial lawyer from Corvallis, rocketed through the Legislature over the past decade, serving both as co-chair of the budget writing Joint Ways and Means Committee and, until he stepped down to run for this office, speaker of the House. Although he looks like a Boy Scout, a troubled youth resulted in a couple of arrests and he struggled to get through college. He’s since found the straight and narrow and promises, if elected, to energize the agency. He’s argued consumer protection and civil rights cases as a lawyer, and ably charted how he’d think about big tests, like the impending purchase of Legacy Health by Oregon Health & Science University. Rayfield is the best choice.

What Rayfield was known for in high school: “I was an absolute goofball,” he says. “I threw good parties.”