PORTLAND, Ore. — The downtown Saturday farmer's market is one of this city's bedrock institutions – a blocks-long parade of vendors and buskers in the shade of soaring elms.
And on a recent Saturday, gladhanding through it all, came a six-foot-tall talking pencil. "My name is Pencil," the pencil told an attendee, pressing a flyer into her hand. "I'm running for governor because we need to raise awareness about education."
"You're running as a pencil or a person?" the surprised woman asked.
"As a pencil."
Picture a smiling office supply store mascot: Pointy lead tip just above its bespectacled face. Big yellow barrel of a body. Pink eraser down around the knees.
That's Pencil, Oregon's most unlikely gubernatorial candidate this year.
Dead last
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek is seeking another term in November. A clutch of Republicans is tussling over who gets to take her on. And Pencil is running against them all, asking voters to skip voting for any Republican or Democrat and instead write "Pencil" on their ballots.
It's an absurd request – with a very sharp point.
Oregon fourth-graders rank dead last in reading, according to one prominent analysis of national testing. It's Pencil's mission to alert as many voters as they can to that alarming stat.
"This is an indictment of the people who are running our state," said J. Schuberth, the person behind – and inside – the pencil. "[Democrats] have had a supermajority, or close to it, for a long time. That's who is determining education policy."
Schuberth is a former college professor and longtime literacy advocate who has grown increasingly alarmed as Oregon falls behind other states. After years of watching what they believe are misguided attempts to alter course, Schuberth built the pencil costume earlier this year and began campaigning.
Pencil's prospects
To state the obvious, Pencil will not be Oregon's next governor. The state's constitution contains no provision that allows an anthropomorphized object to hold the role of chief executive.
But Schuberth believes the write-in effort will signal to Kotek and other leaders just how much Oregonians want them to fix the problem.
"That pretty much sends a wake-up call," Schuberth said. "People are willing to write in an inanimate object. We might have a problem."
The campaign comes with a caveat: It probably won't be clear how many votes Pencil receives. Under state law, election officials only tabulate write-in votes to individual candidates if the total number of write-ins exceeds votes for the leading candidate.
"If there's a ton of write-ins, there's going to be some questions about what was written in," said Schuberth, who is looking into tallying votes for Pencil themselves by requesting images of ballots cast.
At a farmer's market in the heart of Portland, it's not hard to find Democrats. And as Pencil spreads the news about the state's depressing child literacy stats recently, more than a few said they'd consider skipping a vote for Kotek, who faces no serious opponent in the May 19 primary.
"Ultimately, I want Tina Kotek to win," said Portland resident Randy Hueber, who nonetheless said he'd consider writing in Pencil's name "to get the point across."
Another Portlander, Suzanne Lassen, was more incensed than most by the state's moribund student performance. "It's really a crime," Lassen said. "Our education system's horrendous and it's only gone down."
Would she write in a pencil? "Yeah, because I think our current administration's not very effective."
Anna Mackay, sitting on a nearby lawn with her small children, told Pencil that the state of Oregon's schools left her with a difficult choice.
"While our family doesn't have bottomless means, we're making the decision to put our children in private school because of some of these outcomes," said Mackay, adding she would "certainly consider" a write-in vote.
Even another politician appeared won over.
"I don't know much about Pencil, but I would [consider a write-in vote]," said Joe Hagedorn, a candidate for county judge who was also campaigning at the farmer's market. "What they've talked about with education is very similar to what I'm interested in."
A longstanding reality
Pencil isn't the only one making education a central issue in this year's governor's race. Every Republican vying to square off against Kotek in November is sharpening their attacks against Democratic policies that have led to lagging test scores.
And Kotek herself acknowledges the schools are not okay. The governor has made educational achievement – and specifically reading – a key focus in her first term. She's pushed major investments in upgrading the programs used to teach kids to read, and authored a new law that will give state officials more ability to intervene in underperforming districts.
"I agree with Pencil," Kotek said in a recent interview. "We have a problem when it comes to literacy and reading and writing in our state. That's why it's been a priority for me since my first year as governor."
But Kotek's policies are relatively new and have yet to move the needle. Schuberth said the governor's approach is toothless and won't work. More needs to be done if Oregon hopes to emulate the success of states like Mississippi, where focused literacy efforts have resulted in dramatic improvements, they said.
To spread that message, Schuberth has an impressive array of campaign swag – custom postcards and flyers and fridge magnets pairing Pencil's friendly face with a serious message: "Oregon's education system is failing our kids, but together we can FIX it!"
Politics isn't cheap, and Schuberth has already spent nearly $30,000 of their own money to spread their message.
They'll likely need much more before all is said and done. Once Oregon's primary is over, Pencil said they will make a run at the November general election.
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