Miranda Weigler
Candidate for:
Governor
What drives me to seek an elected position
I’ve spent the last several years watching Oregon’s political establishment fail to meet the moment, on housing, on the economy, on the basic question of whether government can actually work for people who don’t have lobbyists and discretionary budgets. My final straw was the Prosperity Council: a closed-door panel of industry insiders being asked how to grow Oregon’s economy, while people I work with at Safeway can’t afford rent and entrepreneurs I know in cannabis lost everything navigating regulatory chaos with no support.
I’m a former Fortune 1000 advisor who left corporate work to help build Oregon’s legal cannabis industry. Now I do part-time bookkeeping and work at Safeway to support my five-year-old twins. I filed for governor because someone should be asking these questions out loud: which economy are we growing, for whom, and how will we measure success?
I believe Oregon deserves a real primary conversation, not another a rubber stamp on the status quo. I’m running without PAC money, without institutional backing and without a voters pamphlet entry because I couldn’t justify the fee. That’s relevant too. When the cost of being heard is prohibitive, we’ve already answered the question of whose voices shape our politics, and who we are building for.
The first three priorities or issues I want to tackle
1. Universal healthcare in 2027. HCAO will deliver a complete single-payer design for consideration in September. Multnomah County carries an outsized burden of unmet behavioral health, substance use and housing instability needs that compound without integrated care. I will push for fast-track implementation aligned with the next open enrollment period and back a ballot initiative if the legislature won’t act.
2. Structural housing reform. Oregon is short 140,000 homes. Multnomah County pays the downstream costs of displacement in emergency rooms, shelters and schools. I support a social depreciation tax on large institutional landlords, rebuilding SRO housing stock through nonprofit operator models and expanding community land trusts, including exploring PERS investment as patient capital.
3. A regenerative economy to build local wealth. Oregon focuses too much on regulation and not enough on supporting innovation. I want to build workforce pipelines through community colleges into healthcare, trades, legal services and education—including OreCorps, a civic labor compact for 17-24 year olds that provides wages, credentials and loan forgiveness for service in critical shortage fields. Government should build the conditions for people to thrive—not just manage decline.
The experiences and insights I will bring to the office
Early in my career I got to be a builder: global institutions, complex multi-stakeholder partnerships, regulatory frameworks from scratch. I then left that world to help build Oregon’s “legal” cannabis industry, where I learned firsthand what it costs to build something legitimate inside broken systems: bureau by bureau education, malicious compliance from regulators, watching colleagues lose everything while the state added rules instead of support. I now work at Safeway and do bookkeeping part-time. That is not a liability, it is the most clarifying education I’ve had. I understand what Oregon’s economy feels like from inside lived experience, not from a prosperity council meeting. I’ve advocated directly to Multnomah County about the human costs of siloed social services. I’ve directly negotiated care for unhoused community members. I have deep background in operations, communication and systems design.
I am also a mother of five-year-old twins navigating childcare, school systems and the cost of living in real time. The policies I’m proposing: care as infrastructure, OreCorps, universal healthcare, a balanced school calendar, are not abstractions. They are the things that would have made my life and the lives of people I work with meaningfully different in ways that ripple.
What being a Democrat in Multnomah County means to me
Being a Democrat in Multnomah County means something specific to me. I grew up believing all Democrats were like Multnomah County Democrats; smart, fair, progressive and living their values. The work this county does as Oregon’s largest urban county, carrying the heaviest loads and the most entrenched histories, while still leading on preschool for all, housing and care? That’s not performance. That’s conviction. That’s genuinely hard.
I also understand the difficulty of friction with Salem. The gap between what Multnomah County is trying to build and what state government often delivers is real, and it matters.
What I want to offer is alignment, someone who genuinely holds these values and can also speak to rural counties, broker connections instead of deepening divisions and carry Portland’s progressive commitments into conversations where they don’t always travel easily.
I filed as a long shot—no PAC money, no voters pamphlet, two young kids, two part-time jobs—because Oregon Democrats deserve to have this conversation and not resign ourselves to a dysfunctional status quo. Multnomah County Democrats will keep doing this work long after this election, but I think you deserve a governor worthy of what you’re building.