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Dan Pulju
Dan Pulju (Pacific Green Party) ran for election to the U.S. Senate to represent Oregon. He lost in the general election on November 8, 2022.
Pulju completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Dan Pulju was born in Fairfax, Virginia. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon in 1991. Pulju has experience working as a poll interviewer.[1]
Elections
2022
See also: United States Senate election in Oregon, 2022
General election
General election for U.S. Senate Oregon
Incumbent Ron Wyden defeated Jo Rae Perkins, Chris Henry, and Dan Pulju in the general election for U.S. Senate Oregon on November 8, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Ron Wyden (D / Independent Party) | 55.8 | 1,076,424 |
 | Jo Rae Perkins (R / Constitution Party)  | 40.9 | 788,991 | |
 | Chris Henry (Progressive Party) | 1.9 | 36,883 | |
 | Dan Pulju (Pacific Green Party) | 1.2 | 23,454 | |
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.1 | 2,197 | ||
| Total votes: 1,927,949 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
- Michael Stettler (Constitution Party)
- Bret Westwood (Independent)
- Thomas Verde (Independent)
- John Newton (L)
Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for U.S. Senate Oregon
Incumbent Ron Wyden defeated William Barlow and Brent Thompson in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate Oregon on May 17, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Ron Wyden | 88.8 | 439,665 |
 | William Barlow | 7.1 | 35,025 | |
| Brent Thompson | 3.5 | 17,197 | ||
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.7 | 3,279 | ||
| Total votes: 495,166 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Republican primary election
Republican primary for U.S. Senate Oregon
The following candidates ran in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate Oregon on May 17, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Jo Rae Perkins | 33.0 | 115,701 |
 | Darin Harbick | 30.7 | 107,506 | |
 | Samuel Palmer | 12.2 | 42,703 | |
 | Jason Beebe | 11.3 | 39,456 | |
 | Christopher Christensen | 8.1 | 28,433 | |
| Robert Fleming | 1.9 | 6,821 | ||
 | Ibrahim Taher | 1.9 | 6,659 | |
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.9 | 3,024 | ||
| Total votes: 350,303 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Campaign themes
2022
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Dan Pulju completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Pulju's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
| Collapse all
- End the Forever Wars
- Save our Economy
- Take Back Our Rights
For more than two years, they have put us through a new hell, wrecking our economy with reckless interventions, restrictions and global sanctions. For decades they have eliminated our civil liberties while waging a series of endless wars. They control and manipulate us with censorship and propaganda. They spread constant fear to keep us spellbound and traumatized.
I can quickly assess personalities without judging them, and patiently work with them toward common goals.
The past 30 years of wars have wiped out our reputation as defenders of anything. Now our sanctions regimes are making us a financial pariah too. The petrodollar is heading for collapse. Argentina and Iran are joining the BRICS pact, which represents half the world population.
It would help to abolish seniority. A senator who's been in 20 years doesn't represent better people than one who's been in 5 years. A hierarchy of the people's representatives is, for all practical purposes, a hierarchy of the people - fundamentally anti-democratic.
The worst feature of the Senate is that it almost unanimously represents the interests of the very wealthy.
More generally, our government is so corrupt that we need outsiders to shake things up. Experience in a failed system is no virtue.
It's the status quo, though, and calls to eliminate it tend to be motivated by rash proposals, e.g. adding justices to the Supreme Court. If the Democrats do that, the Republicans will take their first chance to reverse it in the other direction.
2. Is there any hint of nepotism? If so, I vote no.
3. For employees of State Dept or Intel agencies, any involvement in US hegemonic activity is a disqualifier.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
Campaign website
Pulju's campaign website stated the following:
| “ |
Medical Freedom
– Nuremberg Code The “vaccines” developed for SarsCoV2 are experimental – the long term effects on humans are unknown, and it’s not possible to know them until the long term happens. That’s not now. But our corporate-controlled government thought now was soon enough to use restrictive mandates – a form of “constraint or coercion” – to force the sale of countless doses of these still-experimental drugs. That’s a crime under this code and similar American laws, aggravated by the fact that the drug is an untested gene therapy and intended to treat an illness with lethality on the same order of magnitude as influenza to the general population. Most of the public is not at risk of severe illness or death and needs no medical intervention. Our corporate-controlled government is not interested in human rights. The people have to rise up and take back the system. I’ve been out there from the start when we took to the streets: The divide between the major parties on this issue is accidental, but the Democrats ended up being the side favoring mandates, even though it was Trump who rushed the gene therapies through the approval process. The mandates and lockdowns were imposed by the executive, using a declared emergency that ended up lasting nearly two years. This was accompanied by aggressive censorship of those, including medical professionals and researchers, who published views at odds with state policy. These are key features of authoritarian government, and hard to roll back once the precedent is set. This lasted until the recent, predictable Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade. Now the Democrats again champion bodily autonomy, and the Republicans defend the right of a state to violate it. They are neither here nor there, flip-flopping on medical rights depending on where they are politically. I’m pro-choice both ways. Medical choice is a natural right, and the state shouldn’t be interfering on the basis of either morals or fears. At the very least, the body politic should reach a consensus before imposing limits, but it is not even seeking one. Instead special interests seek the political power to get their way by force. My candidacy keeps bodily autonomy and unfettered medical choice – reproductive and otherwise – on the ballot in one spot. Leave the major parties behind!
The United States is a republic meant to operate on democratic principles. During my lifetime I have watched the supposed “leader of the free world” descend into undisguised oligarchy. Our electoral process is thoroughly corrupt. Candidates are bought by the wealthy and serve them. Corporate-funded media lie and cheat for establishment candidates. Most races are won long before votes are even cast. You may or may not believe the 2020 election involved widespread balloting fraud. But there is no doubt that it involved widespread censorship of any question of legitimacy – which, in itself, served to undermine its legitimacy. A democratic process cannot be valid without the presence of free and open debate. Many Democrats have a short memory when it comes to their own primaries in 2016. When Wikileaks revealed dirty secrets like Clinton being given debate questions in advance, this was somehow an attack on our democracy rather than an indictment of it. The two-party system represents barely half of the electorate, but marginalizes non-affiliated and third-party voters with a process that nearly always presents them a choice of two evils. Besides the corruption of big money, this stems from our primitive first-past-the-post counting system, long discarded by most of the world’s democracies which have moved on to proportional systems. Here’s what we need to do: 1. Implement a proportional electoral system in Oregon. Our state constitution already allows this. 2. Overhaul campaign finance laws to allow donations only from individuals. Cap the donation amount in Oregon. 3. Expand the FEC’s equal-access laws. Media easily exploit loopholes allowing them to lavishly promote their favorite candidates. The Pacific Green Party has a long history of supporting voting system reform. I gathered signatures in Benton County to help qualify the successful ballot measure to implent classic Instant Runoff voting in their county commission elections. During our 2020 presidential nominating contest, with 7 delegates to be apportioned among 8 candidates, I designed a party-list count using IRV in place of the classic threshold method. Many Greens supported the STAR voting effort which nearly succeeded in Eugene. If you’re serious about electoral reform, help us make it happen.
Our last two presidential elections were saddled with doubts about their legitimacy. The specifics are a subject for a later piece, because the main problem right now is doubt not being allowed. In 2016, when the DNC and Podesta leaks showed how the political and media establishment was tipping the scales for Clinton, the answer was the Russians were trying to erode our confidence in our corrupt electoral process. And so on to the labeling of “state sponsored” media, ratcheting up cold war tensions, use of fear to deflect from the obvious. In 2020, vehement doubts were raised again, though not entirely by the same people. This time, the Dem-leaning social media platforms which exert de facto control over public debate were ready with “independent fact checkers,” warnings, and account deletions. Having helped raise doubts about Trump’s win, they now helped quash doubts about his loss. Twitter updated its policy to include moderating “Disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself, e.g. unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results.” A “disputed claim” can be viewed as an “unanswered question.” In 2016, the shoe was on the other foot. Democrats were adamant, but unable to prove, that Trump must have cheated with Russian help. Rather than censor this “disputed claim,” social and legacy media marched in lock step with Democrats to waste a few years of everyone’s time on the Mueller investigation. That Russiagate was destructive and excessive doesn’t mean it should have been censored, though. It was, after all, pushed by establishment power, not a grassroots movement. The right to dispute an election result is fundamental to democratic process, and the election bears the burden of proof. “Faith in the process” is earned, not given! Twitter completely flipped this burden of proof to the claimant, who faced moderation by posting any kind of “unverified information.” I realize I’m understating this. Rampant censorship is enough to make any election look suspect. Do those who supported it realize this? Probably not, because they’re still doing it. The cliche response that private companies can censor however they want is a red herring; the damage to the electoral process is still done. But even so, I don’t believe they can, or should be able to. “Section 230” created safe harbor for web forums – which is good – but lumped them all into the safe “non-publisher” pile, which is questionable. Is a forum which so aggressively curates the content of its contributors not effectively a publisher? Like letters to a newspaper or a collection of short stories, the content is clearly overseen by the equivalent of an editorial policy that determines whether or not it is distributed. The company crafts its own message, by selection and rejection, out of the words of millions of individuals. This message is often political and reaches millions or billions. This wasn’t possible when Section 230 was written in the 1990s, as the forum tech was simply too primitive to pull it off. These were the days of dial-up internet, AOL, php boards, and going to the library to log on. It was uncontrolled, a “true diversity” of political discourse, according to Congress. Now the law is obsolete, and we find our politics, even our entire lives, dominated by these few social media giants and their thinly-veiled agenda of control. This has to change. There’s a big difference between interaction and manipulation, between discourse and corporate propaganda. As your Senator I’ll propose reforms in the first 100 days to revise these obsolete terms and clearly delineate what separates a real forum from a publisher. I’ll also propose reforms to further strengthen protections for political speech, the lifeblood of our republic.
The creation of Israel after World War 2 was the culmination of decades of British colonial policy in support of Zionism. The tragedy of the Holocaust during that war was used by the US to manipulate the UN into declaring a new state founded on inequality, which quickly resulted in a new genocide as Palestinians were murdered or driven from their land. These people and their descendants have the right to return to their land and reclaim their property. US support of Israel is a deliberate provocation to destabilize, divide and colonize the middle east. Currently, Israel is deeply complicit with Washington in stoking sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shiite, between Riyadh and Tehran. Israel is a major aggressor in the devastating Syrian war and has influenced the Emirates during the Yemen war. The “two state solution” imagined more than two decades ago has failed, relegating Palestinians to a heavily oppressed existence on what little remains of their land, still shrinking due to settler colonialism. Gaza is a de facto prison bombed heavily by modern air power in response to small rocket attacks, a violation of proportionality in the law of war. Washington, with its U.N. security council veto, protects this apartheid state from accountability for its abysmal human rights record. US citizens, both political and ordinary, are falsely smeared as “anti-Semitic” for opposing Zionism. US politicians, including Ron Wyden, even tried to make it illegal. They failed. The Pacific Green Party supports the BDS movement, while Democrats like Wyden are trying to ban it. While sanctions can harm ordinary people, Israel is prosperous. This sort of economic pressure succeeded in South Africa, and it might succeed now. Unfortunately, because Israel also plays a critical role in Washington’s war machine, it will still receive direct support from our government. This has nothing to do with our own security, but the profits of our military industrial complex and petrochemical and other industries. The Oslo accords did not result in a viable Palestinian state, and Tel Aviv has shown no intent better than the gradual annexation of remaining Palestinian lands. This reached a major milestone with the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Biden has shown no interest in rolling this back, nor the provocative recognition of Syria’s Golan as Israeli territory. Washington does not willingly relinquish hegemony. As an undeclared nuclear state, Israel needs little protection from its opponents, but rather is a constant aggressor. Withdrawal of US federal support will compel it to make peace with its neighbors and repair its human rights abuses. It is up to American voters to make this happen. Remove Ron Wyden from office, and send me to take his place.
Our usual voting system, called single-winner plurality, sucks! It freezes out all but two candidates, as whoever doesn’t like the front runner starts lining up behind the runner-up, even if they don’t like the runner-up either. In this lesser-evil dynamic, evil always wins! Somewhere around half of eligible voters are trapped in this nonsense, disliking both major parties. We’re the sensible half – the major parties are corrupted by big money and machine politics. We know they represent elite interests, not the people. The Green Party promotes Instant Runoff Voting – the single-winner alternative to plurality voting – to help eliminate this lesser-evil effect. This process eliminates the last-place candidate and transfers their votes to the next choice on each ballot that ranked them first. This repeats round by round until a candidate reaches a majority. It’s easy to understand, and implementing it is an important first step to give voters a real choice. There’s even better options. Most of the world’s legislatures use multi-winner elections chosen either proportionally or by STV, the multi-winner form of RCV. We can do this in Oregon under our constitution! Other options include approval and scored voting, including STAR voting, which was nearly adopted in Eugene. IRV is used in Benton County – I helped qualify it for the ballot in 2016 – and may soon be implemented in Portland too. We are building up the momentum to get this statewide, and we need it. FairVote is a good source for the basics. Check out OpaVote to run some practice elections and find out how it all works. And vote for me in the real election![2] |
” |
| —Dan Pulju's campaign website (2022)[3] | ||
See also
2022 Elections
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on June 30, 2022
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
- ↑ Dan Pulju For U.S. Senate, “Home,” accessed October 8, 2022
