On a tangent, I just saw on the teevee that the Republican governor candidate in OR has taken a noticeable lead (possibly thanks to the third party candidate there). I also saw a couple of youtubz clips where the late night hosts were making fun of the OR counties that want to defect to Idaho. Once they bring in the late night nitwits to shill for them, it usually means they're in trouble. I don't want to jinx it, but I sure hope OR gets an R governor. The shrieking out of Portland would be 2016 epic.
Christine Drazen seems to be doing a pretty good job of tacking to the center without outright compromising her earlier stances from the primaries (though I think she was one of the more centrist R candidates to begin with, so she didn't really have to tack all that far), and I think it's helping reassure independents. Her latest television commercial has a bunch of multicultural people talking about how they would normally vote D but are going for Drazen because we need a change. It's very Obama-ish in execution.
I'm not sure how much the independent candidate, Betsy Johnson, is actually spoiling the race for the D's. Simply given the how poorly D's are doing this election cycle it's possible she's pulling more from the D's than the R's, but she has a lot of crossover appeal, so it's hard to say. Personally, I'd have voted for Johnson if it looked like she was doing better than Drazen so long as it kept Tina Kotek out of office. Johnson seems pretty good on guns, at least (one of the attack ads on her run by Kotek accuses her of owning a machine gun and being A-rated by the NRA, and highlights that she voted against the Red Flag law).
