GOP voters in 2nd Senate District will decide if they want a Robinson or another conservative

Noah Robinson, son of Sen. Art Robinson, and Rep. Christine Goodwin are running for the Republican nomination for the Senate District 2 seat. (Campaign photos)

A state House lawmaker and the son of a senator are facing off for the Republican nomination in the Oregon Senate’s 2nd District seat. 

Rep. Christine Goodwin, R-Canyonville, is running against Noah Robinson, son of Sen. Art Robinson, R-Cave Junction. Both of them hope to succeed the elder Robinson, a first term senator who cannot run for reelection because he had too many unexcused absences in the Senate during the GOP-led walkout in 2023. 

The race pits two conservatives against each other who both support gun rights, parental choice in schools, low taxes, resource industries such as timber and law enforcement. They both also oppose abortions.

But they differ in their  approach to legislating: Goodwin believes in compromising, Robinson does not.

The 2nd District includes Josephine and parts of Douglas and Jackson counties and has a strong majority among Republicans, who represent 36% of all registered voters, including unaffiliated voters, according to Secretary of State voter registration figures in April. That’s almost twice the number of Democratic voters, who account for nearly 19% of all registered voters. The remaining 45% are unaffiliated or with third parties.

In November, the winner will face Tracy Thompson, who is running unopposed in the Democratic primary.

Here’s a look at the candidates:

Christine Goodwin

In an interview, Goodwin said her opponent would be a carbon copy of his father. 

“I filed because the threat of another Robinson was frightening to me,” Goodwin said. 

She called the senator a “do-nothing” lawmaker, who, she said, has had no wins or successes. 

“His idea of solving problems is just about ‘no.’  That’s the solution,”
Goodwin said.

Name: Christine Goodwin 

Party: Republican

Age: 70

Residence: Canyonville 

Current occupation: State legislator, business owner and chief financial officer at husband’s optometry practice

Education: Bachelor’s degree in education, Portland State University, 1978

Prior elected experience: Representative of Oregon House District 2 in southern Oregon since 2021, former member and chair of South Umpqua School Board

Family status: Married, two grown children

Fundraising: $126,517 raised as of April 23.

Cash on hand: $98,152 as of April 23.

Goodwin said that as a minority member of the state House, she has worked with Democrats to seek out wins for constituents in her district, which includes Merlin, Cow Creek and Central Point. 

As an example, she pointed to her role on the bipartisan legislative committee that met over months and listened to a wide array of testimony, including from law enforcement, health care providers and advocates. It hashed out the details of House Bill 4002, which recriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs and funds programs to help people enter addiction treatment and avoid jail. 

The bill, now signed into law, came about after intense negotiations that led to the creation of a new misdemeanor penalty supported by Goodwin and other conservative Republicans. 

“I don’t just throw the baby out with the bathwater because I didn’t get 100% of what I wanted,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin said she supports tax relief and would work in the Senate to raise the threshold for corporate activity taxes. The current one is $1 million, which means businesses have to pay the tax when they sell more than $1 million worth of goods in Oregon. Lawmakers passed the tax in 2019 to raise more money for education.

Goodwin said the corporate activity tax is damaging to small businesses and hurts them regardless of their profit margins, squeezing mom-and-pop businesses relentlessly.

“It’s really damaging to small businesses,” Goodwin said. “Businesses can be losing money and still owe it because it’s a gross receipts tax. What we’re doing is allowing the bigger Amazons of the world to thrive at the expense of our small local communities that just can’t compete.”

In the last session, Goodwin introduced a bill that died which would have raised the threshold from $1 million to $5 million.

She also has supported state income tax exemptions on lawsuit settlements that wildfire survivors receive. This session, she was a sponsor of Senate Bill 1520, which includes those exemptions. It passed and was signed into law by Gov. Tina Kotek.

If she wins the primary, she’s likely to face a court fight. A group of Josephine County voters sued in March, alleging that though she claims to live in Senate District 2 and House District 2, which she currently represents, she lives outside the boundaries. They dropped their attempt to remove her from her House seat and bar her from running for the Senate this month, but said they’d file again if she beats Robinson.

Goodwin has called the lawsuit a “political stunt” and said she looks forward to voters getting a chance to elect her.

Noah Robinson

In an interview, Robinson touted his determination to stand up for conservative values and not compromise with Democrats, who have a majority in the Senate majority.

That means that if a bill has something good in it but other things he doesn’t like, he’ll vote against it, Robinson said.

Robinson, who’s assisted his father as an unpaid legislative staffer throughout his term, said his policies would mirror that of his dad. 

“I don’t think you’ll see much difference in the voting,” he said. “We both pretty much agree on what he’s doing.”

Name: Noah Robinson 

Party: Republican 

Age: 46

Residence: Cave Junction

Education: Doctoral degree in chemistry, California Institute of Technology, 2003; Bachelor’s degree in chemistry, Southern Oregon University, 1999

Current occupation: Chemist, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, family nonprofit, since 1999.

Prior elected experience: None but volunteer legislative aide to his father, state Sen. Art Robinson, 2021-present

Family status: Single, no children

Fundraising: $80,273 raised as of April 23.

Cash on hand: $29,420 as of April 23.

One of the issues Robinson said he cares about is education. He said he favors local control, such as allowing school districts to determine their curriculum requirements rather than having that dictated by the state. In Oregon, the State Board of Education approves grade-level standards that are enforced by the state’s Department of Education, but local boards play a role in curriculum selection when they ‘re asked to approve the purchase of new books and materials.

“I think that we can count on the residents of every district to elect good boards and educate their children,” Robinson said. 

Robinson also favors a complete dismantling of the Oregon Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Education. The prospect of either happening is dim. Yet Robinson’s stance demonstrates his opposition to centralized government and support for local control.

“Personally, I think we should completely get rid of the Department of Education both at the federal and state level,” he said. “I don’t think it works. It just doesn’t work: The more centralized the control, the worse things are.”

Before he attended college, Robinson’s experience with education was non-traditional. As one of six children, Robinson was homeschooled by his parents in an era when homeschooling was much more rare. His mother died when he was 10, and his father took over their education.

His father, he said, instructed him to do his math every morning, followed by reading and writing.

“It turned out that answer was basically self-teaching,” Robinson said. “It turned out to work extraordinarily well.”

As a teenager, Robinson drew upon that experience to design a home-school self-teaching curriculum, one that has been distributed to about 100,000 students, he said.

Robinson’s home-schooling experience influences his perspective on public education. For example, he would like to see public school principals empowered to hire whomever they want to teach reading to students, regardless of whether they are licensed as teachers. The elder Robinson tried to pass this concept in Senate Bill 1534, which died in the last session.

“We don’t care whether they’re licensed by the state, the principal can decide whether they’re effective or not,” Robinson said. “We know that if implemented, that would work very well because there’s homeschool mothers everywhere that could be hired and they do it successfully.”

Like Goodwin, Robinson is also a law-and-order candidate. And his father voted against House Bill 4002, which passed with bipartisan support to address the fentanyl addiction crisis. The bill, now signed into law, will create a new misdemeanor that carries up to six months in jail in drug possession cases, but only when probation is revoked.

Republicans wanted to make the penalty a class A misdemeanor, which can carry up to a year in jail, while Democrats sought a class C misdemeanor, which carries up to 30 days in jail. 

In a bipartisan compromise, lawmakers agreed to create the new misdemeanor, and Art Robinson voted against it.

Noah Robinson said that was the right thing to do. He said the Republicans should have insisted on a class A misdemeanor.

“This is just one example of where I don’t think the deal-making helps the Republicans,” Robinson said. 

Robinson said the $211 million allocated in the bill for drug addiction treatment and related services will help address the crisis, but he said the bill didn’t go far enough. “We should have been able to get something much better by just standing on principle and saying ‘No, this is what we do,’” Robinson said.

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