Republican Alek Skarlatos, a U.S. Army National Guard veteran running in Oregon’s Sixth Congressional District, told Breitbart News Saturday this past weekend that Democrats are worried Republicans are gaining ground in the Beaver State after the “culmination of 40-45 years of bad Democrat policies” in the state.
Speaking to Breitbart News’s Washington Bureau chief Matthew Boyle on the radio this past weekend about Oregon being a vulnerable state for Democrats, Skarlatos said it’s not just “Joe Biden and his terrible policies.”
“This is really the culmination of 40-45 years of bad Democrat policies in Oregon. … What I think has happened is we’ve been Democrat for so, so long. Everyone always wrote off Oregon as a liberal state. I mean, it does lean liberal, but not as much as most people think,” Skarlatos explained. “The national party, the Republican Party, kind of wrote it off. We didn’t really have a very good organized state party.”
However, he said that under the Democrats’ feet, the Beaver State started to move more Republican without anyone knowing because “good candidates” never ran.
“Because there were no “good candidates,” Skarlatos noted, “we had no metric of measuring how Republican and Democrat Oregon was or wasn’t, and then finally, 2022 comes along… You got Joe Biden as president with all of his terrible policies. You have 40-45 years of terrible policies in Oregon.”
Bringing up 2020 Oregon Ballot Measure 110 “basically legalized all hard drugs,” Skarlatos said. “So you have all these bad policies, and then all of a sudden, it’s a redistricting year, they redraw the map. And then on the congressional map, the district I’m running in, [Rep.] Peter De Fazio retired, so it’s an open seat. It’s just barely leaning Democrat; Kurt Schrader loses the primary in the Fifth Congressional District, which barely leans Democrat, that’s now an open seat. And the Sixth Congressional District is brand new, and that’s an open seat. So we have three open seats that just barely lean Democrat. And then of course, we have Christine Drazen running for governor.”
“So we have great candidates running all at the same time and a good year for Republicans. And the National Party is spending a little bit of money in Oregon as well,” Skarlatos said, about the current candidates, the political climate after multiple Democrats retired, and the national party wanting to put money into the state by saying. “And so it’s really showing people how Republican Oregon can be if we recruit good candidates and get a little bit of help and make a concerted effort to actually win. And I think that’s really surprising a lot of people because, I know, the red wave is kind of surging across the country. But Oregon is outperforming the red wave for probably the first time in its history.”
In fact, Skarlatos said that the Republicans doing so well across the country are scaring the Democrats, and making the party spend money to “shore up the races that they think they can actually win” versus the races they have to write off in the swing states.
“They’re not spending time in Nevada or Georgia. They’re spending time in Oregon and Colorado,” which are traditionally safe Democrats seats, like California and New York. “And in this kind of a year… they’re light blue enough to where Republican could actually win them.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.
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