Some GOP constituents call him a RINO. Other Oregonians are starting to trust him.

Published 9:25 am Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Tillamook Republican says doing what is right matters more than loyalty, regardless of political cost

PACIFIC CITY—Backstabber. Leftist. RINO — short for “Republican in name only.” These are just a few of the labels given to Rep. Cyrus Javadi on his Facebook posts.

The Tillamook Republican is in his second term in the Oregon House of Representatives, representing a politically split region along the north coast. While Columbia and Tillamook counties lean Republican, Clatsop County leans Democratic.

The dentist and member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has taken stances on LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and welfare that set him apart from many in his party. He voted in favor of legislation honoring drag performers. He condemned federal immigration enforcement on social media for “tearing families apart in front of their kids,” and he criticized Congressional Republicans’ “big beautiful bill” and its impacts to Oregonians on Medicaid and food assistance. Yet, he supports gun rights and has sponsored legislation to limit abortion access — stances that some of his Democratic constituents consider dealbreakers.

Still, some of his constituents argue he isn’t conservative enough, and one is leading an effort to remove him from office. But Javadi said he isn’t interested in following along with the status quo of his party. He instead believes governing has become too party-driven, and he hopes to change that in the way he represents his politically diverse district.

“We have come to expect that whoever the representative or senator is, they’re going to reflect the party and its agenda as their top priority and then whatever benefits the district comes last,” he told the Oregon Capital Chronicle. “I feel like that is backwards.”

Breaking with the party to represent the district

Javadi represents a stretch of rural coastal towns from Astoria to Neskowin — communities that rely on tourism and fishing and that deeply care about the environment. Javadi, who spoke to the Capital Chronicle at a Pacific City cafe overlooking the Nestucca River, said tourism especially strains public services and housing available to locals.

“They want schools that aren’t crumbling,” Javadi said about his constituents. “They want to know their jobs are safe. They don’t want to find out next month or next year that the industry that they made their generations of living off of — like fishing or farming — is suddenly not viable anymore because of some new rule or regulation.”

In his Substack posts, similar to a weekly blog, Javadi regularly explains his lived experiences to his constituents and how they shape the way he views policy — such as growing up with a single mother who relied on food assistance or sharing that during dental school he relied on Medicaid for himself and his children, similar to the 1.5 million Oregonians on the Oregon Health Plan.

Now in office, Javadi said he sees his younger self and his mother in many of the constituents he represents.

“Public assistance isn’t charity,” he wrote in one of his Substack posts. “It’s investment. It’s insurance. It’s the price we pay to live in a country that doesn’t leave people to starve just because they had a bad year. Or a bad decade.”

Romy Carver, a Tillamook resident and one of Javadi’s constituents, has never voted for him. During Javadi’s first campaign in 2022, she even campaigned for his Democratic opponent in the general election.

While she doesn’t agree with Javadi on everything, she said she appreciates his collaborative approach.

“He’s taken some stances that I feel have been brave,” Carver said. “He’s trying to protect vital services from being attacked against some pretty intense pressure from people in his own party.”

During the interview with the Capital Chronicle, Javadi criticized his party’s proposed transportation package in the 2025 legislative session that wouldn’t have raised taxes but instead redirected millions of dollars from electric vehicle, bus, bike, pedestrian and climate programs to pay for road projects.

“Instead of my own party coming to the table with a long-term solution… all we came up with was a short-term fix that would look good in the next election,” he told the Capital Chronicle.

The Democrats’ proposal, House Bill 2025, was at least “headed in the right direction,” he said. But in the end, he said their proposed tax and fee increases were too much.

“(My party) didn’t want to raise taxes, so no new revenue,” he said. “We proposed zero ways other than using the emergency money to fill that shortfall, but we said nothing about what we were going to do long-term to make sure we had sustainable funding for our roads.”

Like Carver, Ketzel Levine is a constituent but from Nehelem. The registered Democrat actively campaigned against Javadi in the 2024 election and said she’s been suspicious of him “all along” after he sponsored an unsuccessful bill that year to restrict abortion access after a 15-week gestational period with exceptions to rape, incest or an urgent health need.

She described her email interactions to Javadi as “adversarial with a sense of humor.” But in recent months, through his legislative votes and weekly Substack posts, she said she’s beginning to sense that Javadi is more than just a “knee-jerk, anti-abortion conservative.”

Still, Levine told the Capital Chronicle that the only way she’d vote for Javadi would be if he changed his stance on abortion.

A Republican voice for LGBTQ+ issues

In June, Javadi was the only House Republican who voted in favor of Senate Bill 1098, a bill to protect access to school library books about race, gender or sexual orientation. Nearly all of the books challenged in public and school libraries in 2024 were by or about people of color or LGBTQ+ people, including biographies of Kamala Harris and Barack Obama, Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning classic “Beloved” about former slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War and the coming-of-age graphic novel series “Heartstopper,” according to an annual report from the State Library of Oregon.

During the vote, Javadi shared that his son is gay. Youth like his son and other vulnerable populations, he said, deserve to see their identities represented in the stories available to them at school.

Javadi’s vote angered some constituents, such as Katrina Nelson, a Clatskanie resident who filed a petition with the Oregon Secretary of State to recall him, calling him out of touch with his constituents and conservative values. Nelson has until Sept. 24 to collect signatures from at least 5,417 voters who want to recall Javadi.

Oregon House Minority Leader Christine Drazan did not respond to a call, text or email from the Oregon Capital Chronicle about whether the Republican lawmakers will stand by Javadi as a constituent attempts to recall him.

“I felt like doing the right thing, regardless of the political cost,” Javadi said about his vote.

In 2023, Javadi also supported an unsuccessful bill that would have extended Oregon’s prohibition on conversion therapy for minors to include adults.

“My own party was doubling down on how conversion therapy should be allowed for kids and that you could pray the gay away or that you were just confused,” he said. “Having a gay child — he’s not confused. It’s who he is.”

When criticized for not being Republican or conservative enough — a comment that made him chuckle when brought up — he said he doesn’t take it personally.

“I feel like I am Republican,” Javadi told the Capital Chronicle. “I feel like the real RINOs are the Donald Trumps, or the people who have taken the Republican name and some of those Republican ideals and twisted them and perverted them to a point where it doesn’t really reflect who we are and what we believe.”

Ousted Republican says Javadi ‘needs to be there’

Former state Rep. Charlie Conrad, previously registered as a Republican from Dexter, faced a similar situation in 2023 after he voted in favor of a bill to widen access to abortion and gender-affirming care. However, his votes cost him his seat in the 2024 primary.

Now a registered independent and advocate for open primaries, Conrad criticized the Oregon Republican Party saying it expects obedience from its members.

“The party demands loyalty,” Conrad told the Capital Chronicle. “Be loyal or go away. This just reinforces the fact that the Republican Party has, in my opinion, some significant issues because they are small tent. They don’t understand pluralism.”

But Javadi does, Conrad said.

“He is one of the best representatives there because he is representing his district,” he said. “He takes the time to consider the issues and the words on the page and all the things that matter. And frankly, he is a really intelligent person. He’s just a person that I have a lot of respect for, professionally, but also personally. He needs to be there. I want to see him there.”

Rep. Mark Owens, R-Crane, has gotten to know Javadi well over the last few years. In a phone interview, Owens said Javadi is thoughtful for prioritizing policy over politics.

“Is there room for diversity of opinion in the Republican Party?” Owens said. “100%. Do some of our Republicans feel that way? No, they don’t. But that’s no different in the Democratic Party, either.”

Owens said what he admires most about Javadi is his Substack posts, which he said are thoughtful and heartfelt.

“There’s more than just Republicans that put Cyrus into office, and he honestly wants to represent what he feels is what the majority of his community does,” Owens said.