Oregon

Democrats picked up four seats in Oregon’s House, breaking a 30–30 deadlock (and making Tina Kotek the first openly lesbian speaker in any legislature in the U.S.). A Democratic governor and Democratic Legislature now confront $16 billion in unfunded liabilities in a Public Employee Retirement System that has lost 27 percent of its value since the recession began in 2008. Democrats couldn’t have taken back the House, or defended a 16–14 Senate majority, without the support of public-employee unions.

In 1994, An Oregon state senator drafted legislation extending Medicaid beyond the welfare recipients who had previously qualified for it.

When Oregon governor John Kitzhaber needs to get away from the stresses of work, he heads to the Rogue River and rafts the great whitewater rapids that churn through its canyons. In calmer waters, he fly-fishes. “It’s my church,” the 65-year-old politician explains. “You’re in the moment. Ospreys, eagles, bears. It’s the most spiritual place you can imagine.”

The Bus Project went two for two in issues it supported in 2012. 1) The Bus supported one legislator in the May primary: Bob Jenson, a moderate Republican state representative who faced a conservative challenger. Canvassers traveled to Pendleton, far more conservative than Portland, to knock on one-third of the doors of likely Republican voters in support of Jenson,

Editor's Note: Historically, the arc of voting rights has been bent in the direction of universal suffrage: from African-American citizens enfranchised by the post–Civil War amendments, to women in 1920, to 18-year-olds who were barred from choosing the elected officials who sent them to war in the sixties, to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which created the mechanisms to deliver on the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Taking the Offensive "We've done two decades of ballot fights, but it's always been on someone else's timeline. This time, it will be on our own terms." —Jeana Frazzini

"WE'RE INVITING VOTERS, who eight years ago changed the state's constitution to exclude gay couples, to rethink their position," Jeana Frazzini told me in an interview in her downtown Portland office. Frazzini directs Basic Rights Oregon. The concept of "inviting" is central to the process the gay and lesbian advocacy group has undertaken. Before they can change the Oregon constitution, they have to change the political landscape.