SALEM — With less than two weeks to go until the May 15 primary, the gloves have come off in the Republican race for governor.

Rep. Knute Buehler, R-Bend, the front-runner, broke his long-held position of criticizing only Gov. Kate Brown, the Democrat incumbent, while ignoring his GOP primary opponents.

Buehler launched a radio and press attack on GOP candidate Sam Carpenter, a Bend businessman.

“We’ve all had enough of Sam’s false, mean-spirited attacks,” Buehler said in a statement Thursday. “It’s time to tell the truth about him — 21 times, he failed to pay his personal and business taxes.”

Besides the statement, Buehler released a radio ad criticizing Carpenter.

“If Sam Carpenter can’t pay his own taxes,” says the radio ad, “why should we trust him with our tax dollars?”

Carpenter campaign manager David Gulliver said the ad is “slanderous” and that Carpenter has demanded a retraction.

“Sam has paid ALL his taxes,” Gulliver said.

The Buehler campaign said it would make no further comment beyond the statement.

In an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Carpenter said the liens were mostly from the 1990s when his telephone answering service business was suffering. The personal and business liens totaled more than $130,000, according to OPB.

“I’ve never not paid anyone back,” Carpenter told OPB. “I never declared bankruptcy.”

Buehler, a Republican moderate, is hoping to win, in part, by splitting the conservative vote between Carpenter and retired naval aviator Greg Wooldridge, of Portland. Carpenter has concentrated on wooing the pro-Trump vote with “Make Oregon Great Again” as his campaign slogan. Wooldridge is endorsed by Oregon Right to Life and won the straw vote at the Dorchester Conference, the annual meeting of Republican activists in Salem.

Carpenter told OPB that he thinks the ad shows Carpenter’s attacks on Buehler as a “RINO” — “Republican In Name Only” are gaining traction and Buehler is worried of losing the primary.

Gulliver said the late radio ad and statements were signs of a “desperate” campaign by Buehler.

“They must have polling or other information showing them falling behind and in danger of losing,” Gulliver said. “Why else would they resort to smear tactics?”

Carpenter has been the focus of a series of allegations.

One that he was registered to vote in Kentucky was shown to be false by the Portland Tribune. He’s the target of a state ethics commission complaint about how he listed his educational credentials in the Voters’ Pamphlet during his unsuccessful 2016 run for the U.S. Senate. Carpenter says its just a matter of garbled wording and he expects to be exonerated of any wrongdoing.

In an unsigned Facebook post, the Oregon tea party said “the Carpenter campaign is obsessed with attacking anyone who doesn’t support their candidate with whatever despicable tactics they can drag up.”

The group was talking about social media postings by Gulliver that called on Carpenter supporters to cast those backing GOP candidate Bruce Cuff as racists in a bid to blunt Cuff’s decision to pull out of the race and back Wooldridge.

In a video posted on Facebook, Cuff talked about his switch as he pulled Cuff for Governor yard signs out of the lawn at what he described as his mother’s house, and replaced them with Wooldridge yard signs.

In messages sent to some Republican activists, Gulliver urges Carpenter supporters to portray Cuff backers as “David Duke” extremists. Duke is the former Ku Klux Klan leader who has run for public office in Louisiana as a Republican, only to be disowned by the party.

Gulliver claimed Wooldridge’s combative spokesman Jonathan Lockwood is responsible for an online attack against “Lyin’ Sam Carpenter.” The title is a play on a the “lyin’” term often used by President Donald Trump to denigrate his opponents. Carpenter has pinned his campaign hopes on being the candidate most in step with Trump. He has also urged Wooldridge to withdraw from the campaign so as not to split the conservative vote.

Lockwood, who along with others obtained copies of the messages, noted that Gulliver says the attack on Carpenter was the creation of one of Lockwood’s “butt boys.” Lockwood, who is openly gay, took as a pejorative allusion to his sexual orientation.

“Gulliver should be fired,” Lockwood said. “They have repeatedly used dog-whistle anti-gay slurs and attacks against me. This isn’t heated rhetoric; it’s thermometer breaking. It’s not envelope-pushing or edgy; it flat-out crosses a line.”

Gulliver declined to respond to the allegation.

“As for Johnathan Lockwood, I will not lower myself to his level of sleaze,” Gulliver said.

When Carpenter supporters posted online that they wished they could “throat punch” a woman who questioned whether Carpenter remaining in the race was the best for the party, the Oregon tea party issued its reproach to the Carpenter campaign.

Gulliver dismissed the Oregon tea party rebuke as the “last gasp of an irrelevant group of pseudo-elite never-Trumpers to remain in the spotlight.”

— Reporter: 541-525-5280, gwarner@bendbulletin.com