Incumbent governor Charles Martin lost in the Democratic primary to Hess, an attorney and former state senator from La Grande.

Hess was a strong supporter of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal while Martin was a frequent critic of the program.

[1] When Martin announced his intention to run for the Democratic nomination for another term, labor unions and the Roosevelt administration sought an alternative, eventually throwing their weight behind Henry L. Hess, a little-known attorney and former state senator from Union County.

A third candidate, O. Henry Oleen, a state representative from St. Helens, earned about 7% of the vote.

[2][4] With most of the attention on the Democratic primary, on the Republican side, newspaper publisher Charles A. Sprague emerged from a crowded seven-way Republican field with a comfortable plurality of 48% of the vote, 30 percentage points better than his nearest competitor, former state senator Sam Brown.