Gordon Harold Smith (born May 25, 1952) is an American politician, businessman, and religious leader who served as a United States senator from the state of Oregon. A Republican, he served two terms in the Senate from 1997 to 2009. From 2009 to 2022, he served as president of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). He served as an area seventy for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) from 2012 to 2022, and since March 2025 has served as the church's director of hosting at Temple Square. As of 2026, he is the last Republican to represent Oregon in the U.S. Senate.
Smith was born in Pendleton, Oregon, to Jessica (Udall) and Milan Dale Smith on May 25, 1952. Smith's family moved to Bethesda, Maryland during his childhood, when his father became an Assistant United States Secretary of Agriculture. He was involved with the Boy Scouts of America and earned the rank of Eagle Scout. After graduating from high school, he served for two years as an LDS Church missionary in New Zealand.
Smith then went to college at Brigham Young University, received a Juris Doctor degree from Southwestern University School of Law, and became an attorney in New Mexico and Arizona. He moved back to Oregon in the 1980s to become director of the family-owned Smith Frozen Foods company in Weston, Oregon.
In the 1980s, Smith and his wife, Sharon, adopted three children, two sons (Morgan and Garrett) and a daughter (Brittany). On September 8, 2003, Garrett, then a 21-year-old college student majoring in culinary arts, died by suicide. Smith wrote a book entitled Remembering Garrett, One Family’s Battle with a Child’s Depression. In 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act, authorizing $82 million for suicide-prevention and awareness programs at colleges.
Smith is also a member of the Udall political family. His mother was a cousin of the late Representatives Mo Udall (D-AZ) and Stewart Udall (D-AZ), and Smith is a second cousin of Senators Mark Udall (D-CO) and Tom Udall (D-NM). He is a double second cousin of both of them, as their great-grandparents were a pair of brothers and a pair of sisters who married. All three of them were candidates for Senate in the 2008 elections. Smith was the only Republican and incumbent senator of the group, and the only one of the three to lose his electoral bid. Smith's brother, Milan Dale Smith Jr., is a federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006.
Smith is a member of the board of directors of the International Republican Institute. In 2010, another second cousin, fellow Republican Mike Lee of Utah, was elected to the Senate.
On March 31, 2012, Smith was called as an area seventy in the LDS Church. He served until August 2022.
Smith entered politics with his election to the Oregon State Senate in 1992, and became president of that body in 1995. Later in 1995, he ran in a special election for a Senate seat vacated by the resignation of Bob Packwood, but was narrowly defeated in the January 1996 special election by then-Congressman Ron Wyden. Smith carried all but eight counties, but could not overcome an 89,000-vote deficit in Multnomah County, home to Portland–far exceeding the overall margin of 18,200 votes.
U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield, a fellow Republican, announced his retirement later in 1996. Smith became the first person to run for the Senate twice in one year. This time he won, easily defeating Lon Mabon (whose organization, the Oregon Citizens Alliance, had previously endorsed Smith over Wyden) in the Republican primary and Democrat Tom Bruggere in the general election by a close margin. Before his election, Oregon had not elected a senator from the eastern part of the state since 1938.
Smith was re-elected in 2002, defeating Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury by 210,389 votes.
Smith's approval rating was 52%, with 38% disapproving.
In 1996, Smith was endorsed by the conservative political activist group the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) in his race against Wyden. After losing that initial race for Packwood's seat, Smith then renounced the OCA endorsement and won in his subsequent race for the seat being vacated by Senator Hatfield.
In October 1999, Smith was one of four Republicans to vote in favor of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The treaty was designed to ban underground nuclear testing and was the first major international security pact to be defeated in the Senate since the Treaty of Versailles.
Smith is pro-life. In 2003, he voted for the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, legislation that prohibits the intact dilation and extraction procedure.
In 2006, he voted to pass another controversial bill, this time crossing party lines to vote for the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. The measure, which would have expanded federal funding of stem cell research to cell lines extracted from embryos discarded during fertility treatment, became the first bill to be vetoed by President George W. Bush. Smith was one of 19 Senate Republicans who voted for the measure.
In January 2006, Smith began circulating a draft of the Digital Content Protection Act of 2006. The legislation would grant the Federal Communications Commission the authority to authorize a technology known as the "broadcast flag". This technology would enable the producers of television programming to ensure the programs cannot be recorded by viewers in their homes, for instance using a digital video recorder or onto recordable DVDs.
Smith is often described as politically moderate, but has strong conservative credentials as well. In a 2007 web video, Smith refers to "the values that make us Republicans, that make us conservatives".
Smith is a member of the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership, and a February 2006 National Journal congressional rating placed Smith in the exact ideological center of the Senate.