“We continue to exercise patience as we await additional clarity on the final outcome of this race,” Drazan’s campaign said in a statement issued early Thursday afternoon. The Oregonian/OregonLive called the governor’s race for Kotek on Wednesday morning. In the results counted at 12:45 p.m. On Thursday, Drazan trailed Kotek by 54,800 votes, 47% to 43.5%. That margin of 3.5 percentage points is too wide to overcome. And Kotek’s lead could grow in the next day or days, The Oregonian/OregonLive projects. Multnomah County, where voters favor Kotek over Drazan by 70 percent to 30 percent, says it has received 40,000 ballots it has not yet counted. These are expected to add about 16,000 votes to Kotek’s margin of victory. There are also thousands of uncounted ballots in counties that favor Drazan, including Clackamas, Marion and Yamhill, and those results will reduce Kotek’s lead. But they won’t be enough to overcome the significant numbers favoring Kotek, an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive shows. That’s partly because those counties don’t favor Drazan nearly as much as Multnomah leans toward Kotek. At a news conference Thursday morning in Portland, Kotek said she spoke with both Drazan and Betsy Johnson, an unaffiliated candidate who ran a well-funded campaign but finished a distant third in the race. Johnson conceded Tuesday night. “I commend them for their public service and hard-nosed campaigning,” Kotek said. “I’ve heard from Oregonians across our beautiful state that they want things to be better,” Kotek said. “They want problems solved and they want to be included in the solutions to our toughest challenges.” “I promise to be governor for all of Oregon,” Kotek said. In the most recent Oregon governor’s race to be as close or closer than that, Republican Chris Dudley conceded to Democrat John Kitzaber at 7:15 p.m. the day after the election. He lost to Kitzhaber by just 22,200 votes. As of 2 p.m. Thursday, more than 80 percent of the ballots in Oregon had been counted, an Oregonian/OregonLive analysis shows. Political editor Betsy Hammond contributed to this report. — Hilary Bord. [email protected]; @hborrud To sign up to receive our weekly newsroom newsletter recapping our top election coverage, just click here. Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today at OregonLive.com/subscribe