Danielle Bethell is unlikely to be Oregon’s next governor.

But she isn’t letting that stop her from trying.

“My whole life, I’ve been the long shot. Literally, there’s never been an opportunity handed to me,” she said. “Not once, this is not new.”

In the first forum where the four top contenders interacted, she surprised some of the audience with her ability to take a deep dive into some policies.

“I’m actually doing the governing of a large jurisdiction, similar to what the governor would do if she were to do the job the way I think she should do the job,” Bethell said in a recent interview with OPB.

Bethell has been in the race the longest of any of the top contenders, but she arguably has the lowest name recognition.

One recent poll showed she only had about 2% of support. She largely grew up in Oregon and bounced around as a child, spending time living with other families who took her in as a teenager while her mother struggled with mental health issues.

It took her about eight years to get her bachelor’s degree from Oregon State University, but she did it. And she managed it while also working full-time and raising three children.

She served on the Salem-Keizer school board and owns a plumbing business with her husband.

She was the president of the Association of Oregon counties and the executive director of the Keizer Chamber of Commerce.

In 2020, Bethell was elected to the Marion County Board of Commissioners. As a commissioner, she said, she felt strongly that the system is supposed to help people like herself and her mother, who navigated complex behavioral health systems.

“Something I’m really proud of is that we have created more community outreach teams since I’ve been a county commissioner,” Bethell said, adding the teams help people navigate the county’s homeless services and work with the county sheriff’s office to steer people with low-level crimes away from jail and toward treatment.

Bethell came under scrutiny recently after the state ethics commission opened two investigations into whether she used her position in a way that benefited her children.

One issue surrounded a traffic violation her daughter received, and the commissioner told the officer that, due to her position as a commissioner, her daughter’s ticket should be moved to a different county.

The other complaint deals with a contract that Marion County Commissioners approved for a construction company that employs Bethell’s son.

The two investigations are ongoing.

“I don’t believe I did anything to benefit my children,” Bethell said. “I did everything I could do to be transparent about my situation.”

OPB asked four leading GOP candidates for governor the same five questions. Here are Bethell’s answers, which have been edited for brevity and clarity.

OPB: What’s the biggest policy difference between you and your opponents?

Bethell: When it comes to homelessness, (my opponents) all say we have to audit the system and find out where the problem is.

I know where the problem is. I’ve heard (some of the candidates) say we are going to put people in jail if they don’t want to go into treatment. That isn’t a solution.

First of all, there aren’t enough jail beds, and homelessness isn’t a crime. I have street teams in my county; there are five of them, and they are made up of different systems. I have qualified mental health associates, basically therapists, that go out with law enforcement and paramedics, and a diversion team.

People who are going out and responding to individuals in crisis in the streets. People then diagnose if the issue is mental health, or is it substance abuse, or is it both, and the teams have different directions they can go with the service.

They can walk them into a detox, or walk them to a shelter, or connect them to a mental health service provider. They are building that relationship in the response.

OPB: As the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement in Oregon, the effort has swept up undocumented people with no violent criminal history. Do you support enforcement against people without legal status who have been productive community members?

Bethell: That’s a hard question. I would say in general, no, I don’t. So I voted for Donald Trump and the promises that he made to Americans, but I didn’t vote for the way he’s handling things.

I don’t believe that the lack of participation in partnership between local law enforcement, federal law enforcement and the states, and the federal administration is healthy for our communities.

I also know that since this new administration has been in office, I’ve had more conversations in the last year with individuals across the state, in the agriculture community, who are frustrated with the immigration process in America.

And I’ve learned a lot about that process just by doing research and talking to people. And one of the things that frustrates me the most as an American and somebody who believes that immigrants are healthy for our community and our economy is that we haven’t had a structured immigration process since the Reagan administration.

It’s like a moving target and difficult for not just immigrants who are trying to come to America but also for Americans who rely on immigrants to follow that process. \I do believe that people should be here legally. And I also believe that the process is overly complicated.

OPB: Oregon has one of the lowest-performing education systems and requires among the least amount of time in the classroom in the nation. Are Oregon’s struggles a money issue, a staffing issue, or an accountability issue?

Bethell: I would say it’s the last two. It’s staffing and accountability. Obviously, Oregon spends a lot of money on education. In fact, we’re probably one of the highest in the country.

On the staffing issue, I believe that it is unfortunate that we have forced so many responsibilities on teachers in the classroom outside of academics. We expect teachers today to be parents, administrators, mental health therapists, doctors, all the things that they did not sign up to be.

And we don’t have any expectation from the governor, specifically, for the systems designed in Oregon to work together in collaboration to serve the whole person, the child, and or the community or classroom. We expect the teacher to figure that out.

And then we put them under this, this massive weight of unmeasured expectations that they cannot achieve. When I was on the Salem-Keizer school board, as an example, we went every single year we bargained with our unions, classified and non-classified.

And I always spent time with the teachers and the custodians and the classroom aids coming into that space to see how they were feeling about the decisions that were made in the previous year, and if they were making gains or not.

And I’ve never one time heard somebody that works in a school say, ‘I hate this. I don’t want to do this,’ but I have always heard them say we don’t have enough help. There are too many expectations.

Instead of the Oregon Department of Education being an agency that is heavy-handed and threatening, I believe they should be a partner to school districts, and they should set the table of expectation for everybody to meet every grade, have graduation requirements, the whole shebang.

And then, as schools struggle because of things that happen in their community or crises that evolve, those schools should trust ODE enough to be able to reach up and say, “Hey, we’re experiencing this challenge. Could you come in and be our partner?” Without fear of them taking over and making it act like the district isn’t trying or isn’t capable.

And I’m frustrated by that as a parent. I was frustrated as a school board member at the time, and well, I’m just frustrated as a whole around education.

OPB: Democrats’ legislative majorities are unlikely to go away in November. As governor, that means you would need to work with a party whose priorities you’ve been harshly critical of. How will you work with Democrats to actually make progress, as opposed to simply blocking their ideas?

Bethell: I do a good job now, in my opinion, of working with Democrats in the Legislature.

An example of that is the work that I did around House Bill 4002 as the president of the Association of Oregon Counties on recriminalizing drugs in Oregon.

That work was done under my leadership and policy design that came from my county. And I obviously had to work with a super majority to get that done. But my philosophy truly is that if you’re going to be a participant in change, you need to know who’s at your table and who’s invited and not there and why, or who’s there and why.

I believe in knowing the origin of their intent. And people run for office for a variety of different reasons. And it is my responsibility as a player in that field to know what those reasons are and then to work with them to find common ground and understanding as to who we are.

I truly believe every single person in the Legislature wants the same thing I want, regardless of the system. We want a healthy environment. We want a thriving economy. We want really solid kids with great comprehension and success under their belt, so they can grow up into great human beings.

But the way we go about getting there is different. And if you take the time as a person to get to know the person in front of you, then you can find a path forward to work together. And I’ve already proven that.

OPB: President Trump continues to try to undermine vote-by-mail. Oregon has no other means of conducting an election, and mail elections here were initially pushed by Republicans. Do you agree with the president’s recent executive order on mail voting or the Save America Act that he has pushed? Why or why not?

Bethell: So I believe that you should have a form of U.S. citizenship identification to be able to vote. And I believe that somehow in Oregon, we can and should figure out how to get people registered to vote with documentation. But vote by mail based on polling is very popular.

It’s like over 80% statewide; people really like it. I believe that there are flaws in vote-by-mail that create distrust and security issues. I do not believe ballot harvesting should be legal at all. And I do not actually agree that there’s only one method for elections in Oregon.

It turns out there are county clerk’s offices in every single county in this state. And if Oregon wanted to pivot and create a real plan to do in- person voting, we could do that because we have the office and the leadership. We just don’t have the funding or the appropriate layout plan today.

I think we should do both. I believe that there are a lot of reasons why vote-by-mail is successful. And originally, early on, I thought it was a really good idea. I believe that people should have access to voting, especially if they live in a frontier community or have a disability, vote by mail makes it easier for them. I also think that there are security issues that we have that we need to address.

And I don’t personally feel like the governor, the secretary of state and the Legislature are taking elections as seriously as they should. I believe elections are seriously underfunded from the Legislature through the Secretary of State’s office, and there’s a significant burden on counties as an unfunded mandate.

And we need to have a really healthy conversation with the decision makers in this state to say, why wouldn’t we want everybody here in Oregon to feel good about our election system, and how do we work together to make that happen?

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/30/danielle-bethell-knows-shes-long-shot-canidate-for-oregon-governor/