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David Poulson, the Republican nominee in Senate District 19 (Lake Oswego, West Linn, Tualatin) is an interesting guy.
An engineer who manages structural engineering for a Tesla factory, he's running on a MOGA promise—he wants to "make Oregon green again" and hopes to do so by knocking off incumbent Sen. Rob Wagner (D-Lake Oswego).
Today, Poulson's campaign released a video of a song he wrote titled, Oregon, Blaze On!
In the pantheon of campaign-related music videos (an admittedly small sample size), it's pretty good.
(Sample lyric: "Now our rivers are dammed and the homeless we shun/Our sky's full of smoke and the salmon don't run/Let's upgrade our state and make politics fun.")
Poulson's got an uphill battle against Wagner. Democrats hold a 17 percentage point registration advantage over Republicans in the district.
Wagner has raised $186,000 since he began seeking the seat last year, while Poulson has raised just $16,000.
A conservative political action committee called Capitol Watch, run by former state Rep. Jeff Kropf (R-Sublimity), recently sent mailers to Wagner's district.
The mailers (below) suggest voters add Wagner to the list of longtime elected officials who voters tossed out of office—such as U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), who lost his seat earlier this year after 19 years in Congress, and U.S. Rep. Mike Capuano (D-Mass.), who also lost this year after an identical tenure.
Capitol Watch is targeting others, including Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney (D-Salem). Courtney is the state's longest tenured lawmaker, who first won election to the House in 1980, so he might have something in common with Crowley and Capuano.
Wagner? Not so much. He's a rookie, who was appointed in January to replace former state Sen. Richard Devlin (D-Tualatin), who resigned.
"It's absurd," Wagner says. "I've been in office for eight-and-half months."
