Former House Speaker Tina Kotek and former longtime Oregon legislator Betsy Johnson have pulled ahead of former House Republican Leader Christine Drazan in the three-way race for governor, according to a new poll released Wednesday that was paid for by Johnson’s campaign.
About a third of registered Oregon voters polled picked Kotek, a Democrat, as their choice for governor, while 30% chose Johnson, a former Democrat who is running unaffiliated, in the poll conducted by Idaho-based GS Strategy Group. Drazan drew 23% support. The poll showed 15% of voters remain undecided, down from 41% in March.
The poll of 600 Oregon voters was conducted via telephone from June 23 to 29. It has a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points, putting Kotek and Johnson in a statistical tie for first. It also puts Drazan in a statistical tie with Johnson for second place.
Its results come far ahead of November’s election, with campaign season generally considered to begin in earnest around Labor Day.
A separate poll conducted at the end of May by Nelson Research, an Oregon-based public opinion research firm, showed vastly different results with Drazan and Kotek leading with 30% and 28% respectively and Johnson trailing with 19%.
A still earlier poll conducted by GS Strategy Group in May, but not publicly released by the firm until Wednesday showed Kotek with 34% support, Drazan with 24% and Johnson with 22%. The Johnson campaign released the poll results Wednesday to highlight how Johnson has surged in popularity while her opponents have held steady.
The latest poll found that 33% of voters surveyed had a favorable opinion of Johnson compared to 26% for Kotek and 16% for Drazan. However, 35% of respondents said they had never heard of Drazan, potentially giving her an opportunity to grow her favorability among voters in the coming months.
Johnson had by far the largest favorable-over-unfavorable ratings, with 18 percentage points more poll respondents saying they viewed her favorably than unfavorably. Kotek, by contrast, had a net 2 percentage point favorability gap while Drazan, who is largely unknown to most voters, had a net 3 percentage point unfavorability margin.
Robert Jones, vice president at GS Strategy Group, said that his firm only polled registered Oregon voters who had cast ballots in at least one of the last four general elections or were newly registered to vote as of 2020. He said pollsters interviewed a representative sample of voters based on geography, age, gender and race to ensure that respondents closely matched the demographics of Oregon’s likely voter pool. Among poll takers, 31% were age 65 or older and 16% said they were voters of color.
Oregon’s governor’s race will pit three longtime lawmakers against each other in an exceedingly rare race between three viable candidates. That means the winner will need only a plurality in the November general election to become governor.