Failure and Corruption: Simple Facts Don’t Matter

Here’s part of the summary-report I am preparing, describing the Republican intra-party “election” that occurred last Saturday in Salem. John Lee and I ran for the ORP National Committeeman seat against twenty-year incumbent Solomon Yue. My short talk (which 90% of delegates didn’t hear because of an “audio glitch”)  revolved around explaining five separate charts/graphs/lists: measurements that illustrate the broad range of failure of ORP leadership since Solomon Yue became the National Committeeman and therefore de facto leader of the ORP Executive Committee twenty years ago. Chart #4 will especially blow your mind.

Chart #1: Fundraising: the ORP raised over $5,000,000 in 2000 just as Solomon Yue took power. In shocking contrast, the ORP raised less than $200,000 in 2020. Look at the steep and steady downward trend over Yue’s twenty-year tenure:

Chart #2: Relative Republican/Democrat power in our Salem legislature. Nearly at par with Democrats in 2000 when Solomon Yue joined party leadership, by 2018 both chambers had become Democrat supermajorities. See the constant trend downward:

Chart #3: In 2018, 25% of House seats had no Republican nominee (shown in red). Two years later in 2020, that “vacancy” rate was down to 10%. See maps below.*  With our large database of conservative Oregonians, and super-active use of social media, Diana and I pretty much single-handedly made that 15% improvement happen…from outside the ORP. Solomon Yue and the ORP showed no interest, with Chris Barreto, the National Committeewoman, declaring the ORP would “put no effort at finding candidates in districts that had a 15% or higher Democrat majority.” (Documented).

Chart #4: Through his role as ORP National Committeeman, Solomon Yue receives free guest passes to important Republican events in Washington, DC. He then sells those passes for profit through his private company, Republicans Overseas, of which he is CEO. Sales range up to $10,000 per individual membership. None of this income is returned to the ORP to assist Republican candidates. Some people would call this unethical if not illegal. We’re investigating all this now, including possibly making FOIA act requests of Yue’s various intermingled corporations in which financials and other documentation are not available via the regular public domain.

Chart #5: Facebook is the gold standard for measuring an organization’s “reach.” Page statistics answer the question, how many constituents does the organization engage? Below are the four most active political Facebook pages in Oregon, listed in order by number of total “subscriptions” (Page Likes).

  1. Note our Make Oregon Great Again Page listed at the top. It has 93K subscribers. Drop down to the ORP Page. It has 17K subscribers.
  2. Again, note the Make Oregon Great Again Page, at the top, and see “Engagement.” Two weeks ago we actively engaged over 89K Oregon Republicans while the ORP engaged 5K. (Facebook engagement is the sum total number of Likes, Shares and Comments over a given period of time. For more detailed information about these stats, including information regarding the Kate Brown and Knute Buehler Pages, see the homepage message on our website at www.makeoregongreatagain.com)