EDITORIAL: Javadi for state House GOP primary

May 5—For the third straight election cycle, there is an open seat in state House District 32.

The North Coast district, which includes Clatsop County, was redrawn after the 2020 census to cover Clatskanie to the east and more of Tillamook County to the south. The new legislative map could make the district even more competitive politically.

State Rep. Suzanne Weber, a Tillamook Republican, is choosing to give up the House seat for a bid in state Senate District 16. Betsy Johnson, a former Scappoose Democrat, stepped down from the Senate to campaign for governor as an independent. In November, Weber will face Melissa Busch, a home health nurse in Warren, who is unopposed in the Democratic primary.

All the turnover is a little unsettling.

Johnson was able to gain influence, build power and leverage her role on the Joint Ways and Means Committee to deliver results. While we do not expect someone to replicate her skills overnight, we believe the North Coast needs pragmatic, reliable and consistent advocates in Salem to help look out for our interests.

Our region, which gets one state representative and one state senator, does not have the luxury of sending someone to the Capitol who will function as a foot soldier in partisan political clashes.

Weber's victory in 2020 was the first time a Republican had won in House District 32 in nearly two decades. We thought that setback would be an incentive for Democrats to reload, since the party still has the edge across the region, but there is no competition in the May primary.

Logan Laity, a community organizer and small-business owner in Tillamook, is unopposed. The young Democrat, who serves on the Tillamook Urban Renewal Agency, is stressing investments in education, health care and housing in his progressive campaign.

Over the past few years, we have resisted looking at candidates for the state Legislature through the prism of our poisonous national politics. Our questions have been about local, regional and statewide policy. Our threshold has been the potential for candidates to be effective regardless of political party.

But the Republican Party has made that approach impossible to defend. Many Republican leaders, from our own backyard to Salem to Washington, D.C., have fueled the fiction that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from President Donald Trump. Even as we learn more about the degree to which Trump and his allies sought to overturn the election, Republicans in state capitals across the country are trying to make it easier to do so in 2024.

This is not a red-state phenomenon. In Oregon, nearly half of Republicans interviewed in an Oregon Values and Beliefs Center survey in February believed there was major fraudulent voting in 2020 that changed the results of the election.

Before the November election, Republican and Democratic contenders should expect to get asked whether they would ever use their power as a state legislator to overturn the will of the voters.

In the Republican primary for House District 32 in May, Cyrus Javadi, a dentist in Tillamook, faces Glenn Gaither, a retired corrections officer in Seaside.

We endorse Javadi in the primary.

Javadi, who used to live and work as a dentist in Astoria, is frustrated by what he sees as partisan politics getting in the way of policy changes. He said his top priorities are improving the region's workforce, housing and economic rebound from the coronavirus pandemic.

"We know the interests. We know the people. Let's make sure those interests are represented well in Salem," he told The Astorian's editorial board of his decision to run.

He acknowledged his lack of political experience and understands it would take time to learn how to be effective in Salem, where Republicans will likely remain in the minority in the House. He said he would reach out to regional interests and stakeholders to hear their priorities. He cited Johnson's approach as a model.

"Even if I can't be effective as a minority (Republican), even if I were marginalized, I can still go to bat for the constituents," he said. "And if we do get more balance, well then let's come to the table with both sides and let's leave kind of this far left and the far right agenda out of it and let's get down to common-sense solutions that are more middle of the road."

Javadi describes himself as a moderate Republican.

"I don't think Donald Trump represents the Republican or the conservative movement at all," he said. "I think he's become their poster child, I think for a majority of it, and I feel like they're trying to rebrand the Republican Party. But, I think, that's not the direction I hope the Republican Party goes."

Gaither, a U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Army veteran, ran unsuccessfully as an independent for the Washington House of Representatives in 2012. He has pointed to increases in crime and homelessness and blames relaxed criminal penalties and softer attitudes toward drug abuse as factors. He has been critical of mask and vaccine mandates and other government restrictions to contain the pandemic. He has also condemned what he believes is incorrect teaching on race and sexuality in schools.

"I wasn't too happy with the way the state was looking. It didn't look the same as when I left it," said Gaither, who went to Knappa High School. "Sixties and '70s, all the way up to '80, growing up in the state, Democrats and Republicans wanted the same thing for families. They wanted them to have a good-paying job. They wanted them to have an education that gave them the tools so they could either go to higher education or find a good job and at least be able to read, write, have those basic skills to work their way through life.

"And what I see now is that a lot of that's dropped to the wayside."

Gaither has criticized the "RINO (Republican In Name Only) virus." "Listen to what your candidate is saying and NOT saying," he wrote on his campaign Facebook page. "If they aren't condemning CRT (critical race theory), LGBTQ indoctrination, mask mandate abuse and telling you that there needs to be mass civil disobedience against tyranny ... odds are they are not conservative or too cowardly to say what needs to be said."

In a post on his personal Facebook page on Jan. 6, the one-year anniversary of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Gaither claimed there was "no attempted overthrow of our democracy" and downplayed the violence that day as "a couple nuts criminally trespassed."

Our sense is Gaither is more engaged in the culture wars than in local and regional issues on the North Coast.