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The Republican effort to place a vote on whether to recall Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, on Oregon ballots has fallen short.
Oregon GOP Chairman Bill Currier made that announcement today in an interview with KXL talk-show host Lars Larson.
"We did come up short," Currier told Larson. "Not by a lot. But we did come up short."
Currier said the official GOP party effort came up about 10 percent short. Currier also told Larson that a separate recall effort led by Michael Cross, a Turner resident, gathered about 100,000 signatures but the two campaigns could not legally combine their signatures.
Today's announcement confirms what GOP insiders have been saying for weeks: that critics lacked the money, the organization and perhaps most importantly, a burning issue that would motivate voters to call for the ouster of Brown, who won a decisive victory over state Rep. Knute Buehler (R-Bend) in 2018 after decisively beating a different GOP challenger, Dr. Bud Pierce in 2016 to serve out the remainder of former Gov. John Kitzhaber's term.
Rather than any specific scandal or issue, Republicans launched a recall effort this year out of what seemed to be a general dislike of Brown. They had just 90 days to gather 280,500 signatures and today, they acknowledged they would not meet the Oct. 14 deadline.
Currier said he's nontheless encouraged by the number of Oregonians who signed either the GOP petition or Cross' petition and said the GOP hopes to launch another recall effort next year. "This fight is definitely not over," he told Larson.
The most recent voter registration figures show that Democrats outnumber Republicans in Oregon by 269,000 registered voters, nearly 10 percentage point registration advantage.