BEND — Republican voters Thursday, April 21, got another taste of the choices they face on their primary ballot in May.

In the first televised debate of the race, four candidates vying to be Oregon’s next governor and the first Republican to hold the job since 1987 squared off at Bend’s Open Space Event Studios.

The debate, sponsored by The Bulletin and Central Oregon Daily news, included four of the race’s 19 candidates, selected by organizers based on the campaign fundraising success and polling results.

As the candidates took rapid-fire questions on hot-button issues, they made their cases to voters about how they could be the ones to win in the November general election and shift the state’s priorities if elected.

Christine Drazan, who represented her Canby district in the state House until this year, drew on her experience as House Minority Leader to show voters she had the experience to change the state’s direction, pointing to a 2020 walkout of Republican legislators as evidence of her ability to stand up for conservatives who’ve felt unheard in state government.

“We have for too long seen single-party control hurt Oregonians,” Drazan said. “We have an opportunity in this election to elect real change in our state. We have an opportunity to rebalance our political life and to get government out of Oregonian’s lives.”

An oncologist from Salem, Bud Pierce pointed to his 2016 success in the Republican gubernatorial primary as a sign that voters were already behind him and ready to give the party a shot at the governorship. He positioned himself as a political outsider who’s work with cancer patients prepares him for the job.

“It’s very important for a governor to have been trained to stay on track, to make sure that Oregon becomes lower cost so you have a better life, that Oregon is safe with much better safety and that we get the suffering homeless off our streets,” Pierce said.

Stan Pulliam, an insurance executive and mayor of Sandy, sought to draw the most distinction between himself and the other candidates on the stage, rallying against crime in Portland and across the state, COVID-19 restrictions imposed by Gov. Kate Brown and social topics in school curriculum.

“As Republicans, we also know what a winner looks like and what winning looks like. It looks a lot like fighters. It looks a lot like fighting. We’ve proven that we’ve been here since the beginning,” Pulliam said. “Let’s take the fight all the way to the governor’s office.”

A former state representative and Republican Party chair from Lake Oswego, Bob Tiernan touted his experience leading large corporations like Grocery Outlet to show he can solve complex problems. He said he’d use the state’s initiative process to pass legislation in a Legislature controlled by Democrats.

“The problems we’re facing in Oregon are serious,” Tiernan said. “That takes leadership. That takes people who know how to get things done. That’s what I’ve done my entire life in the Navy. That’s what I did my entire life in business, and that’s what I did in the Legislature: Solve problems.”

To a question about the state’s housing crisis, each of the candidates said state regulations hamstring developers’ ability to build housing affordably across the state and called for reduced restrictions.

“Contractors don’t want to build them, because they can’t do it profitably,” Tiernan said. “It takes too long — there are just too many rules and regulations and additional costs, and they lose money.”

Pierce said the state should seek to reduce those costs.

“Clearly what we have to do to build affordably — not build unaffordably and subsidize — but to build affordably is lower the price of land by modifying the land use law that’s 50 years old and stymieing us,” Pierce said.

On COVID-19 precautions, none of the candidates said Brown deserved credit for the public health orders she imposed throughout the pandemic to close or limit business capacity or require masking in public spaces.

Drazan called Brown’s actions an overreach and said the governor used the pandemic as an excuse to impose housing and public health policies.

“Rather than respecting Oregonians and leading with facts, she led with fear,” Drazan said. “Her management of COVID was political. It was preferential. It was bureaucratic, and it was sloppy.”

Pulliam used the question as an opportunity to distance himself from the other candidates and refer to his vocal opposition to COVD-19 mandates early on in the pandemic.

“I think a lot of your viewers are probably hearing for the first time where a lot of these folks were,” Pulliam said. “You guys know where Mayor Stan was. I was totally in the fight.”

Asked about election security, Drazan, Piece and Tiernan acknowledged that the election of President Joe Biden was legitimate.

Pulliam appealed to a different base.

Parroting disproven claims, he called Biden’s election “completely fraudulent,” disparately alluding to as evidence both mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania and a controversy surrounding the laptop belonging to Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

“Biden, Biden, Biden — all of them said Biden won,” Pulliam said during his response to the next question posed by debate moderators, pointing to each of his competitors on the stage as he did so.

The full, hour-long debate will air at 7 p.m. Tuesday on Central Oregon Daily and will be posted on The Bulletin’s website. Oregon’s primary election is on May 17, and voters have until April 26 to register to vote or change their party affiliation.