John Kitzhaber
35th and 37th governor of Oregon
John Albert Kitzhaber (born March 5, 1947) is an American former politician and physician who served as the 35th and 37th governor of Oregon from 1995 to 2003 and again from 2011 to 2015. In February 2015, shortly after beginning his fourth term, Kitzhaber resigned from office and was replaced by Secretary of State Kate Brown. A member of the Democratic Party, Kitzhaber was the longest-serving governor in the state's history.
A physician in Roseburg, Kitzhaber was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1978. After one term, he won an Oregon Senate seat in 1980, serving three terms, until 1993. He was Senate President from 1985 to 1993. In 1994, he was elected governor of Oregon, defeating his Republican opponent Denny Smith. He was reelected by a wide margin in 1998, making him the first Democrat to be reelected as Governor since 1906, and left office in January 2003. In 2010, Kitzhaber ran for governor again and narrowly defeated his Republican opponent Chris Dudley. He was reelected in 2014, to become Oregon's longest serving governor.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q740345. VIAF identifies the subject as 68678849. The Library of Congress control number is no2006020932. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947, 1995, 2003 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Kitzhaber” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.