Meet David Burch, a candidate running for Governor in the May 17th primary.

David is a resident of Salem, OR, and is a first-time candidate for running in the republican primary.

The Mail Tribune is proud to present "The Candidates for Governor: In Their Own Words."

Our producers have conducted interviews with the over 30 candidates registered to run in the primary on May 17. All were invited, and either came to our newsroom or joined us in a Zoom interview.

As a public service, the Mail Tribune is making the over 30 hours of candidate interviews available to everyone in the state. After Primary Day on May 17th, we will return the videos to the exclusive use of our digital subscribers.

This ambitious project is unlike any you'll find anywhere in Oregon, from any news organization, print, broadcast or digital. With over 30 candidates, we took full advantage of the freedom our digital online e-newspaper offers that print newspapers (space), and television newscasts (time), cannot provide. With no time or space restrictions, we are able to bring you the full unedited answers each candidate provided us when we asked the same series of questions, all in the same order. Candidates were never told to "wrap up," or warned that they'd run out of time.

The result is an unprecedented video library of the candidates answering the same questions to their satisfaction. Each answer is as complete as they chose to answer. There's no interruption from us or analysis afterward.

We hope this collection of videos is something you find useful as you consider the candidates and make your voting decisions.

Here are some more details of how we did these interviews. We had roughly a three-week window so that the questions would remain valid and not be unduly influenced by headlines in the news. All the interviews were done in late March and early April, but not published until all were completed. That ensured no candidate could see what other candidates might have said and used that to their benefit.

We then posted every interview at the same time, on Friday, April 8th, so there were no favorites, and well in advance of the May 17th primary. We will be using our social media pages to get the word out about these interviews. Over the course of a week beginning Sunday, April 10th we will randomly choose 5 or 6 candidates each day to promote on our social media pages and highlight that we have all the interviews in one place online. By the way, in the interests of fairness, we chose the which names to promote each day out of a hat, but again, all the candidates are available to view now on the mailtribune.com.

We hope you find this useful, and we welcome your comments and criticisms.

Thank you for supporting the Mail Tribune.