By DIRK VANDERHART and LAUREN DAKE/Oregon Public Broadcasting
Two days after the presidential election, Washington Gov.-elect Bob Ferguson and the state’s incoming attorney general held a nearly hourlong press conference to assuage Democratic worries about a second Trump administration. There has been “a lot of work for many, many months” to prepare for the possibility, Ferguson said.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom also moved fast, announcing he would call lawmakers into a special session aimed at protecting “California values and fundamental rights” before Trump takes office.
From the middle of the country, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois issued a strong warning: “You come for my people. You come through me.” On Wednesday, Pritzker and Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, announced they were forming a new initiative to resist Trump.
But in Salem, the response has been muted.
Gov. Tina Kotek and other top Democrats aren’t holding any press conferences. Asked last week how she was preparing for a second Trump administration, Kotek opted to issue a statement saying she would continue to fight for Oregon values.
“While I seek to work with the incoming administration, I will not stand idly by as abortion access environmental standards, civil liberties, or other priorities come under attack from national partisan politics,” it read.
Senate President Rob Wagner, D-Lake Oswego, said it was too early to predict how legislators will react to a second Trump administration. House Speaker Julie Fahey, D-Eugene, offered a bit more insight, saying in a statement she was worried about federal cuts to health care and how Trump’s tariffs could impact the state’s trade-dependent economy.
Meanwhile, newly elected Attorney General Dan Rayfield — who would be a key line of defense if Oregon becomes concerned about federal overreach — is taking a wait-and-see approach.
“Trump has said a lot of things over the years, and so you have to be patient,” Rayfield told OPB last week. “Let’s see what he actually does.”
The restraint might seem surprising in a blue state where voters this year once again gave Democrats strong majorities and every statewide elected office. But it’s been welcome to many Republicans, who have been warily watching the majority party since Trump won, and who argue a toned-down approach makes sense at a time Kotek has sought to make inroads with rural Oregonians.
“I think if you are interested in working in a bipartisan way to bring people together, it’s the wrong direction to react in a partisan way,” said state Sen. Tim Knopp, R-Bend, a former Senate minority leader who has less than two months left in office. “It’s actually productive that we haven’t seen the same thing out of the Oregon Legislature or the governor of Oregon.”
Bills, lawsuits in first term
Trump’s 2016 victory caught Democrats off guard throughout the country.
And in Oregon, it forced party leaders to grapple with many of the same questions they currently face now that Trump is heading back to the White House.
“At the time, the question was what’s going to happen to funding that comes to the state?” said Jennifer Williamson, a former Democratic lawmaker who was House majority leader when Trump first took office in 2017. “What will happen on the environmental front? What will happen on the regulatory front and what will happen with immigrant communities in our state?”
Williamson, now a lobbyist, remembers Oregon Democrats quickly convening meetings with leaders in California and Washington to hash out a game plan for protecting the environment, pushing back on immigration raids, and — potentially — safeguarding abortion.
“We still had [Roe v. Wade] in place and the court had not changed yet,” she said, referring to three pro-life justices Trump would ultimately appoint to the U.S. Supreme Court. “So there was some talk of that, but that really came later.”
By July 2017, seven months into Trump’s presidency, the Legislature had approved a bill that limited the kind of information state and local agencies could share with federal immigration officials.
Lawmakers also passed the Reproductive Health Equity Act, a law that codifies the right to an abortion within state statute. It’s a step that is often mentioned when Democrats talk up Oregon’s abortion protections.
And Democrats passed a bill in 2019 aimed at sidestepping Trump-administration rules that reduced protections on air and water.
“My assumption is legislative leadership will do a similar analysis on what might be needed now,” Kotek, who was House speaker when Trump took office, said in a statement.
At the executive level, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown moved swiftly to form a coalition with both Washington and California governors. The three states worked together to defend reproductive health care and protect patients and doctors who visited the three states for that care.
Kotek declined to say if her office is in contact with Ferguson or Newsom’s staff.
Democratic AGs around the country teamed up to sue Trump repeatedly on issues like immigration, schools and the federal response to racial justice protests — and even paid for a splashy cartoon depicting themselves as superheroes.
In late 2020, the Democratic Attorney General Association touted a success rate of more than 80%. Washington’s Ferguson alone sued the Trump administration 97 times.
A different challenge
Ferguson, the incoming Washington governor, is emblematic of what Democrats’ preparation for a second Trump presidency looks like in some states.
He said last week his staff has been going “line by line” over Project 2025, a plan spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation that outlines steps the new president should take while in office. Among its prescriptions are proposals for dismantling federal agencies, restricting access to abortion, ramping up deportations and rolling back climate change policy.
“We’re not just waking up yesterday thinking, ‘Oh my gosh there’s a new Trump administration coming in,’” Ferguson said.
But Ferguson said he expects it will be harder to fight the Trump administration this time around.
The President-elect will likely be less sloppy and more disciplined in his approach, Ferguson said in his press conference. And he noted Trump has made it clear he plans to upend Democratic values when it comes to environmental protections and reproductive health care rights.
Others worry about changes to the legal landscape since Trump was first in office – particularly since Supreme Court appointees from his first term have authored opinions that expand presidential powers.
“I think that our institutions are weaker than they were in 2016, particularly our courts and our federal court system,” said Williamson, the former House Democratic leader.
But Rayfield, the incoming Oregon attorney general, struck an optimistic tone not shared by some other Democrats. He said Democratic attorneys general have strong relationships and a playbook for challenging federal overreach under Trump.
“We are not going to be caught off guard again,” he said. “We saw what happened the first time.”
While top Democrats aren’t holding press conferences and positioning themselves as vanguards of a new resistance effort, they are thinking about what another Trump term will mean.
Fahey, like Kotek, pointed to bills on abortion, immigration and the environment that Oregon Democrats pushed through in response to Trump’s first term, suggesting similar reactions could be on the table over the next four years.
“We must be prepared for the possibility of cuts to federal Medicaid funding or other health care rollbacks,” she said. “We also must be ready to respond to tariffs that could damage Oregon’s trade-dependent economy, federal restrictions on medication abortions, mass deportations, and rollbacks of clean energy policies or workers’ rights.”
Kotek’s office said Thursday that the state had secured a new supply of the abortion medication mifepristone that will not expire until 2028, continuing an initiative that began last year. A spokesperson said Kotek is monitoring the national landscape “to understand the potential scale of impacts to reproductive health care in Oregon.”
One former top Democrat says her party needs to be active in responding to threats. Former state Sen. Ginny Burdick, who was Senate majority leader when Trump took office in 2017, told OPB she worries the new administration could withhold federal aid or order violent crackdowns on protesters here.
“Blue states like Oregon and California and Washington — we have an enemy in the White House basically,” Burdick said. “We have to be clear-eyed about that, and we have to look at actions that we can take.”
One strategy she suggested is ensuring state laws can hold federal agents accountable if they carry out violent acts against Oregonians demonstrating against federal actions.
Not everyone sees a repeat of the Democrats’ 2017 strategy as the right move. Since Trump’s victory last week, Republicans have worried majority Democrats would react by pushing policies the GOP can’t tolerate and potentially causing gridlock in next year’s legislative session.
“I’m just concerned at the signal that somehow we’re going to be a wall against something,” said Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, adding that Kotek’s response to date had been “so vague and so generic, I don’t know what to be concerned about.”
Knopp, the former House Republican leader, agreed.
“The more leaders work to bring people together, the better off we’ll be as a state and as a country,” he said. “They should move toward purple. Not dark red and not dark blue.”
And Williamson, a Democrat who had a sizable role in her party’s response to Trump’s first term, is now preaching caution.
“The lesson that we can take from election night is that there are a whole bunch of people who are struggling, who Democrats have not been talking to and have not been addressing their concerns,” she said. “I think we need to figure out what we’re getting wrong.”
- This story originally appeared Nov. 15, 2024 on Oregon Public Broadcasting.
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