His mind goes sleepwalking while he’s putting the world to right

In general, I think that residency requirements to run for office should be interpreted leniently rather than strictly. That said, Oregon’s three year residency requirement to run for the state’s highest office is far from draconian, and the rules are known in advance. That also said, LOL:

Oregon’s Democratic primary race for governor narrowed significantly Thursday, with the state Supreme Court ruling that former New York Times columnist Nick Kristof can’t run because he does not meet the state’s three-year residency requirement.

The court’s unanimous ruling leaves former House Speaker Tina Kotek and state Treasurer Tobias Read as frontrunners for May’s Democratic primary, which will also feature a long list of lesser-known candidates.

The high court upheld a January decision by Secretary of State Shemia Fagan that Kristof did not meet Oregon’s requirement that he have lived in the state since November 2019

[…]

Fagan leaned heavily on Kristof’s voting records, the justices wrote, but she did so broadly, noting that he “registered to vote in a different state and cast ballots in that other state’s elections over a period of two decades,” their opinion states.

[…]

Kristof grew up in Oregon, has owned property in rural Yamhill County for decades and said he always considered the state home. But he also owns a house in New York, filed New York as well as Oregon income taxes and voted in New York as recently as November 2020.

The Oregon Constitution states that no one “who shall not have been three years next preceding his election, a resident of this state” can run for governor. In briefs submitted to the court, lawyers for Kristof and Fagan presented their interpretations of whether the framers of the state’s Constitution, and voters who adopted it, intended for “resident” to include only people who primarily lived in the state for three years or extend that to cover someone who had clear ties to the state but was present here intermittently. The court concluded that the Oregon Constitution’s use of “resident” is properly interpreted as meaning “a person can have only a single residence at a time.”

The fact that Kristof thought that a court of law should put more weight on the fact that he considered Oregon his spiritual home while he was living, voting, and working in New York City than the fact that he clearly had been actually living in Oregon for less than a year before filing to run for office is the most Nick Kristoff thing ever. The fact that he couldn’t even be bothered to vote in Oregon in 2020 presumably knowing that he intended to run for office represents exactly the kind of elitist arrogance arrogant elitists amusingly confuse with “populism.”

Meanwhile, these are the Glengarry leads:

Kristof has raised at least $2.7 million to fund his now-defunct campaign for governor, money he can now donate to other candidates and campaigns, return to donors or save for another future run for office.

I’m going to bet that “return to donors” is not going to be the outcome here.