So endeth the strange saga of Nicholas Kristof’s ambitions to run one of the more dysfunctional states in the Union. The longtime New York Times columnist had tried to argue that his residential property in Oregon qualified him as a resident for at least the three years required by state law. Today, however, the state supreme court ruled his voting record in New York City undermined his residency claim:

The Oregon Supreme Court ruled Thursday that former New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is not eligible to run for governor because he does not meet the state’s three-year residency requirement.

Kristof had appealed to justices after Oregon’s secretary of state declared Kristoff did not meet the qualifications to run for Oregon’s highest office, citing in particular that Kristoff voted in New York in the 2020 election.

Questions about Kristof’s residency had dogged him even before he announced his candidacy in October, the same month that The New York Times announced he had resigned. According to Oregon law, candidates for governor must have been a residents of this state for at least three years before elections. …

Kristof, 62, told election officials in a sworn statement that he moved as a 12-year-old with his parents to a farm in Yamhill, Oregon, in 1971, and has considered it to be his home ever since.

If that’s the case, then why was Kristof voting in New York? It would have been easy for Kristof to keep abreast of Oregon politics and vote in Yamhill. Yet he chose to cast ballots in a state on the other side of the continent instead, even while choosing to file income-tax returns in Oregon for 2019 and 2020. One has to wonder, though, whether those filings had to do with income earned in the state rather than an establishment of full residency.

A lack of ballot casting isn’t the only problem in Yamhill for Kristof, as Politico pointed out last month:

Potter won election as mayor in 2018, right around the time Kristof says he started spending more time on his family’s farm. She knows him from photographs but has never seen him — virtual or otherwise — at community meetings or town events. If he cares about Yamhill and Oregon, she wonders, where has he been? How does he know what concerns people here and across the state? After all, Oregon is made up of hundreds of Yamhills.

Kristof says he has maintained close ties to Yamhill and his friends here. When asked about the mayor’s comments, Kristof said he didn’t recognize Potter’s name or even know that she was mayor of Yamhill.

Oopsie! Kristof co-wrote a book about Yamhill, published in 2020, titled Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope. How did he and his co-author, wife SherylWuDunn, manage to miss the name of the mayor at the time the book was being written? Yamhill residents, including Potter, remain unhappy with Kristof’s depiction of their community:

Kristof says his heartbreak over “deaths of despair” that claimed his Yamhill friends led him to leave his beloved Times and, having never run for public office before, reach for Oregon’s governorship.

“There is some consensus that we are not all that we can be, and that political leadership has not provided sufficient vision or leadership or execution,” Kristof said in an interview. “Do we try to get different results by electing the same kind of folks and hope that things are somehow going to be different? Or do we bring in fresh blood, someone with new ideas and a different kind of life experience?”

But people in Yamhill remain frosted over the harsh light that Tightrope and its accompanying CNN documentary aimed at town Yamhill. “We’re not the poor town that his book depicted,” Potter says.

It seems unlikely that the state supreme court took any of that into account. Instead, their unanimous per curiam opinion stuck to the objective facts of Kristof’s true residency. Technically speaking this may not be a final resolution of the case, as it denies a request for a writ of mandamus rather than a settlement on the merits. The opinion shines enough light on the latter to make the futility of further action obvious:

However, as the secretary noted, the record contains countervailing evidence concerning relator’s intent. He remained registered to vote in New York and retained a New York driver’s license until late 2020, actions that are at odds with an intent to change his domicile to Oregon a year or more earlier. Relator continued to physically reside primarily in New York during 2018 and 2019, and his affidavit is nonspecific about precisely how much time he spent in Oregon in those years and in 2020. In addition, relator’s stated reason for spending more time than usual in Oregon was to work on a book about Yamhill County, a temporary project, while relator retained his employment at the New York Times. See Elwert, 196 Or at 268 (“Evidence that the main place of a man’s business is at the place from which he came may be indicative of an intention to maintain his domicil in that locality.” (Emphasis in original.)). Moreover, as the secretary’s decision letter noted, relator’s affidavit did not contain any detail about whether his farm management responsibilities required him to spend more time in Oregon or whether he handled them primarily from New York. See id. at 269 (“The original domicil is favored and where the facts are conflicting, the presumption is strongly in favor of an original or former domicil as against an acquired one.”). Given the objective evidence in the record of relator’s continued presence in and related connections to New York in 2019 and 2020, and the limited detail on key components of his ongoing connections to Oregon, the secretary was not compelled to find that, as of November 2019, relator had reestablished his residence in Oregon and intended that Oregon, not New York, be the state in which he would reside indefinitely or, ultimately, to conclude that relator had changed his domicile to Oregon.

As for a mandamus writ declaring the residency clause in the state constitution in violation of the Equal Protection, that’s a non-starter given the facts involved in Kristof’s claims:

As we have emphasized above, a writ of mandamus is appropriate only to compel a public official to perform a clear duty. Although mandamus can be used to decide a novel legal question, as we have done in this case, we have explained that it will only rarely unsettle a public official’s findings of fact. The question of narrow tailoring for strict scrutiny purposes, however, will frequently rest on factual as well as legal determinations. See Turner Broadcasting Systems, Inc. v. FCC, 512 US 622, 665, 114 S Ct 2445, 129 L Ed 2d 497 (1994) (plurality opinion) (concluding that, “[o]n the state of the record developed thus far, and in the absence of findings of fact from the District Court, we are unable to conclude that the Government has satisfied” a narrow tailoring requirement). Here, relator’s claim that the durational residency requirement contained in Article V, section 2, is not narrowly tailored to its goals implicates questions with factual components, including how well the durational residency requirement actually serves its intended purposes, the administrability of relator’s proposed alternative, and whether that alternative would serve those purposes equally well. Relator emphasizes that, “[u]nder strict scrutiny, the government has the burden of proving that [challenged restrictions] ‘are narrowly tailored measures that further compelling governmental interests.’” Johnson v. California, 543 US 499, 505, 125 S Ct 1141, 160 L Ed 2d 949 (2005) (quoting Adarand Constructors, Inc., 515 US at 227). But it is precisely that feature of strict scrutiny that makes this claim inappropriate for this court’s original mandamus jurisdiction, where the secretary has not had the opportunity to develop a record capable of sustaining that burden. See Fredrickson v. Starbucks Corp., 363 Or 810, 814, 429 P3d 727 (2018) (denying a mandamus petition because “the parties’ disagreements are better resolved through proceedings where those arguments can be fully developed, rather than through the limited jurisdiction afforded in a mandamus proceeding”).

We therefore decline to consider relator’s Equal Protection Clause challenge in mandamus, and so we deny relator’s mandamus petition insofar as it seeks to compel the acceptance of his declaration of candidacy on the basis of a conclusion that Article V, section 2, is unconstitutional. State v. Blok, 352 Or 394, 400, 287 P3d 1059 (2012) (“This court’s exercise of its mandamus power is discretionary.”). That does not mean that the courthouse doors are closed to consideration of this claim, just that it is not suited to the extraordinary legal remedy of mandamus.

In other words … have fun storming the castle.

At this point, Kristof would be better advised to stay on the farm, wait another four years, and then file a legitimate petition for a gubernatorial election. After another four years on the farm around the annoyed people of Yamhill, though, Kristof might reach the better conclusion that he should stick with his position at the New York Times.

Note: Yes, I’m aware that Oregon’s capital is Salem, not Eugene. However, Politico already used the pun I was hoping to snag — Ore-Gone. Darn you, Zach Montellaro!

Also, here’s video of an interview Kristof did to launch his gubernatorial bid. If he sticks around long enough to legitimately qualify as a candidate, Kristof wouldn’t be a bad fit for progressive Oregon. As I have stated before, though, Kristof can do more as a columnist and writer, and would likely find himself outside his skill set as a public-sector executive. That’s a tough position to choose for a late-life career path.