Posts published in “Oregon”

In contrast to the national scene, Democrats in Oregon have moved into a powerful position. Oregon’s government has returned to something you might call super-control, beyond even what’s often called a trifecta: control of the two legislative chambers and the governor’s office.

They dominate all three and even have a supermajority by holding 60% of the seats in the Legislature. That means they can adopt new taxes or raise taxes without Republican support. The Democrats in the Legislature and Gov. Tina Kotek, a former House speaker, are also likely to be aligned on most of the major issues, which could give them broad ability to do as they wish.

Their supermajority this year also comes at a time when the Republican ability to stage long-term walkouts to block legislation has been curtailed: A still-new constitutional provision penalizes legislators who have 10 or more unexcused absences by banning them from serving a subsequent term.

With few brakes on Democrats in Oregon and with frustrations over the national political scene, they may have an urge to try to fulfill long-standing wish lists.

But as the legislators and governor put together their game plan for the next session, they should maintain some discipline and not push their advantage too far because it could backfire.

To prevent that, the governor and legislators should ask themselves three questions as they prepare to decide how ambitious to be in the upcoming legislative session and beyond.

First, are you leaving enough space to deal with whatever is coming down the road from the new Trump administration?

Messages from the president-elect have been mixed and have changed with time. No one, probably including Trump himself, can say exactly what the next year of his administration will bring. But its policies and actions are highly likely to clash with the ideals and plans of the bluer parts of the country. Many people in states like Oregon have begun to prepare, but the effectiveness of their response will depend in part on what resources, time and effort are brought to bear.

A legislature and a state administration that’s tangled up with extensive internal ambitions may not be well equipped to cope with any national threats.

Second, are you sure you can properly manage what you’re seeking to do?

Oregon’s state government has been better over the years with its aspirations than with execution. The state in recent years has made major policy decisions — often highly defensible — which sounded good in theory but fell short in execution.

Oregonians could point to the Measure 110 drug initiative, public defender structuring and other efforts as examples. The dissatisfaction registered in many polls about Oregon’s government often seems to have more to do with how policies were managed than whether the core idea was sound.

And a third question, with specifically political implications: To the extent you press new ambitious efforts in this session, are you sure you have the real and effective backing of the people who cast the ballots?

Even though Oregon is classed as a blue state, the partisan margins here are tighter than they seem. Kotek, who prevailed in a thin win two years ago, might be among the first to acknowledge that.

Unlike some deeper blue states, legislative supermajorities have been fleeting and fragile. In the legislative term before the election just two decades ago, Democrats did not control either chamber of the Legislature. They have grown their leads only slightly and often have been on the edge of losing control in the Senate.

In the Senate, Democrats held a supermajority after the 2004 election, then lost it after one term. They regained it in 2008, lost it again after one term and regained it in 2018. But then they lost it after two terms. In the House, Democrats have had the supermajority only in the terms after the 2008 and 2018 election cycle — and they lost control of the House in 2010 when the chamber was split.

Democrats would be wise not to give Republicans material — especially on taxes — that they could use to claw back seats in the House or Senate, the latter of which could be slightly more favorable to Republicans in 2026.

The biennial agenda Kotek has proposed calls for serious spending, but it does place some guardrails on it. And it has focus: housing and homelessness, education and behavioral health.

It does not include all things for everyone, and is a starting point as legislators file their legislative proposals for the next session. They, too, will have their focus and desires. Both Republicans and Democrats have their own priorities and while they’re likely to meet on some issues, they’re certain to diverge on others.

It’ll be up to Democrats to shape their agenda so that it retains voter support while working through details that result in policy successes. That’s never simple, but in this term, as holders of all the executive and legislative power they need, it’s on them to do it.

Originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Oregon’s U.S. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer as labor secretary is among the more unusual and intriguing cabinet picks he’s made, and her appointment could have an impact on partisan politics — notably in Oregon.

The Republican, who lost Oregon’s 5th Congressional District seat last month to Democratic state Rep. Janelle Bynum, has become an unlikely pivotal national figure. With only a single term in the U.S. House and a small-town mayoralty on her resume, Chavez-DeRemer is set to run the Department of Labor, which is tasked with fostering and developing the welfare of workers, job seekers and retirees, according to its mission statement. If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, she’ll also be in charge of improving working conditions, promoting employment and protecting workers’ rights, which could become a flashpoint in the next couple of years.

Unlike some of the other cabinet nominees, such as the flamed-out Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Chavez-DeRemer does not enter this arena with any heavy baggage or evident scandals. Her election loss was narrow, running against a strong opponent and in a Democratic-leaning district that’s difficult for a Republican.

Chavez-DeRemer endorsed Trump well before the general election, but she developed a reputation as a relatively moderate Republican while representing her district. That, with the fact that she is a Latina, may have combined to give her some advantage in the contest for a seat on the cabinet.

There is another factor, too, unusual among Republican secretaries of labor: She has a personal connection to labor unions and support from a number of them. She has family connections to unions — her father was a member of the Teamsters — and she attracted some union support during the last campaign.

She also was a rare Republican supporter of the PRO Act, which was intended to make union organizing easier and was backed by the Biden administration but did not clear Congress. She also supported another unsuccessful measure aimed at protecting public sector workers from losing Social Security benefits if they receive pensions as well. Both measures mainly failed because most other Republicans in Congress opposed them.

All this seems to make her much closer to organized labor than most Republican administration labor secretaries. Labor unions have considered most past Republican administrations as hostile to their efforts, and many have had corporate rather than labor backgrounds.

Several news reports said that the Teamsters pushed for her appointment. Shortly after the Chavez-DeRemer announcement, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler commented that she “has built a pro-labor record in Congress.”

Shuler added, however: “But Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States — not Rep. Chavez-DeRemer — and it remains to be seen what she will be permitted to do as secretary of labor in an administration with a dramatically anti-worker agenda.”

All of this happens against the background of political cross-currents.

On one side, there’s the significant number of votes Trump received this year from workers in or allied with labor unions. Chavez-DeRemer’s placement could be intended as a way for a business-oriented Republican administration to build bridges to them.

To the extent that happens, it could affect Oregon politics. Democratic party success in Oregon is tightly tied to labor organizations, especially public sector unions. To the extent the Trump administration is seen as friendly rather than hostile, a significant curve ball could be thrown into politics back home. A disruption in the labor-Democratic relationship could make for big changes locally.

But squaring that with the generally business-oriented tenor of the administration won’t be easy, as the second part of Shuler’s comment makes clear. Business interests and leaders who have supported Trump were expecting a more business-oriented nominee, and some already have made plain their displeasure with the nominee.

Shortly before Trump delivered the nomination, the anti-regulatory Competitive Enterprise Institute blasted her as unqualified for the job and said, “What we do know is not encouraging. In any event, cabinet secretary shouldn’t be a place for on-the-job training. Trump should keep on looking.”

The apparent likelihood is that Chavez-DeRemer, if she holds to her labor-allied path in Congress, would be swimming against the Trump administration’s overall tide. And that could prove a serious challenge for even the most skilled and experienced of Washington operators, let alone a relative rookie.

So that begs the question: Will Chavez-DeRemer move the curve on conventional Republican politics and labor unions, or will she be ground up in conflict surrounding the incoming Trump administration?

Smart money probably is on the latter. But it’s a story yet to be written.

This article first appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

 

During the just-concluded campaign for attorney general, Republican Will Lathrop dodged a question about whether he supported his party’s presidential candidate by saying he was “laser focused” on public safety issues in Oregon and not on national politics. National issues, he suggested, were not a major part of the job for an Oregon attorney general.

He was wrong.

What’s become obvious in the days since the election of Donald Trump as president is that the line between Oregon’s and national issues could be erased, and that courtrooms — and specifically those likely to be frequented by Oregon’s attorney general — will be a primary battleground over the broader subjects of safety and security.

Oregon’s next Democratic attorney general, Dan Rayfield, reflected as much immediately after his race was called. In some of his first remarks post-election, he said, “In light of this week’s election, our work to defend Oregon’s values and the rule of law against national attacks will be front and center like never before. As the last line of defense for the rights and freedoms of Oregonians, we will be prepared to stand firm against the unconstitutional and unlawful threats President-elect Trump promised on the campaign trail.”

Oregon statewide officials overall have been less strident than those in some other blue states with their responses to the incoming federal administration, but their comments have included warnings that offensive federal policies wouldn’t go unchallenged. Gov. Tina Kotek, for example, said, “While I seek to work with the incoming administration, I will not stand idly by as abortion access, environmental standards, civil liberties or other priorities come under attack from national partisan politics.”

Rayfield seems likely to ask the Oregon Legislature in coming weeks for more money to do battle with the Trump administration. And he’s likely to get it.

That would mirror most of the blue state attorneys general. Washington state, for example, situated much like Oregon, also has just elected a new AG with the incumbent, Bob Ferguson, a veteran of many battles with the prior Trump administration, moving up to governor.

A number of California-Oregon-Washington legal initiatives may be on the way.

Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said, “If Trump attacks your rights, I’ll be there.”

Washington’s incoming AG, Nick Brown, remarked that, “We will be prepared for whatever comes and do everything in our power to defend the rights of Washingtonians, the people of this great state, and to make sure that when there is an illegal action, that we look very closely to see if we can bring a case.”

Where might the battles be located?

You can start with some of the topics Trump emphasized in his campaign. Oregon’s protections for immigrants and transgender people are two likely targets. Education policy may shift dramatically, since there’s discussion of eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, though its reach is not as broad as some critics appear to think. The Affordable Care Act is again, as during the first Trump term, very much at risk.

Trump’s discussion of election fraud has faded since his win, but Oregon’s vote-by-mail process may become a target anyway.

But the meaningful list of battlefields is much longer.

In 2017 the Trump administration proposed to decrease the size of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which had been expanded by President Barack Obama. The effort failed. But the effort did not happen because Trump made a personal push for it; the proposal came from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. In all presidencies, many administration proposals come from officials other than the president, and the list of those initiatives could be extensive.

Taken together, many changes in environmental rules and management could happen.

On the campaign trail, Trump indicated that California’s water woes could be solved by draining water from the Columbia River: “So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down. And they have essentially a very large faucet. And you turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it. It’s massive.”

This may have been nonsensical, but if Trump did decide to follow up, the legal battles over water could be heated.

Different approaches to policy, even when not outright or obvious reversals, could matter. Native American tribes have expressed concern about this, noting unwelcome changes in policy during the first Trump administration.

Policy clashes are likely, too, in areas like housing, where the state has begun efforts to ease housing shortages and pricing — but the next Trump administration is likely to push very different approaches.

The battle begins on Jan. 20. It will not end quickly.

This column first appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

Although Oregon mostly held to its usual political patterns this election, that doesn’t mean nothing changed.

The pre-eminent example of that is Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, where the parties flipped control and the vote changed a little.

A close look at the election results showed some other shifts, down to the county level, happened elsewhere, too.

But a good place to focus is on the 5th District race. The district crosses the Cascades south of Portland and includes all or part of six counties: Clackamas, Deschutes, Jefferson, Linn, Marion and Multnomah. Only a thin slice of Multnomah is included along with a tiny number of people in Jefferson County, which is mostly in the 2nd District. That leaves the weight of the vote in the 5th concentrated in Clackamas and Deschutes counties.

Taken as a whole the district leans slightly Democratic, but not by a lot.

Two years ago, in the first election of this newly configured district, Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer defeated Democrat Jamie McLeod-Skinner by 50.9% to 48.8%.

This year, running against Democrat Janelle Bynum, she appears to have lost by a similar margin, 45% to 47% as of Wednesday evening.

What accounted for the difference?

One obvious distinction is that while in 2022 the Democrat and Republican were alone on the ballot, this year three other candidates — Andrea Thorn Townsend (Pacific Green), Sonja Feintech (Libertarian) and Brett Smith (Independent Party) — were on the ballot as well. Smith’s total alone was larger than the gap between Bynum and Chavez-DeRemer, but the three minor party candidates probably affected the overall result only slightly.

That is because DeRemer pulled significantly fewer votes in 2024 —167,600 — than she did in 2022 — 178,813. Meantime, Bynum’s vote outpaced McLeod-Skinner’s prior run 178,054 to 171,514, suggesting the Independent Party candidate in this case drew more from the right than from the left.

But that wasn’t the only distinction between the vote totals in the two elections.

Both, it turns out, and in contrast to much of the country this month, edged slightly more Democratic in the 2024 election.

Among Oregon’s 36 counties, few registered a change in preference between the two major parties from the 2020 election to 2024.

The three largest shifts based on the vote for president were toward Republicans, but they were in relatively small counties which long have voted strongly for the Republican for president: Jefferson with a 6.5% margin shift, Umatila at 5.8% and Morrow at 5.1%.

The eight counties which shifted toward the Democratic nominee for president included Wheeler and Lincoln counties, which each saw a shift just over 4%. They’re both small, especially Wheeler, Oregon’s small county, and a change in a small number of residents can have an outsized impact.

In the larger counties, the biggest shift toward Democrats was in Deschutes, with 2.1%. That may reflect newcomers into the fast-growing county, the same as new arrivals may have accounted for shifts in some other counties around the country, including in Idaho, for one example. That shift also may have been reflected in the county’s choice of Democrat Anthony Broadman to take the seat currently occupied by Sen.Tim Knopp, a Republican, who can’t serve again due to his participation in the 2023 walkout by GOP senators.

The other dominant county in the district, Clackamas, was not among the Democratic shifters at the presidential level: It edged from 2020 toward Donald Trump by 1.2% but still preferred Democrats for top jobs. Clackamas, historically a purple county, voted for Democrat Kamala Harris for president, and locally ousted Republican Tootie Smith from the chair of the county commission.

And the next largest county in the 5th District, Multnomah, which is already extremely Democratic, actually moved even more leftward in the 2024 election compared with 2022.

Taken together, the shifts were enough to apparently have cost Chavez-DeRemer her seat in Congress. The overall Oregon atmosphere may have been part of the reason why incumbent Democrats in Oregon’s other two close-run districts, Val Hoyle in the 4th and Andrea Salinas in the 6th, improved their leads from two years ago.

Bynum has beaten Chavez-DeRemer twice in legislative races, and there also was another factor at stake in the 5th:  She fared well in the debates and in a district that leans slightly Democratic, the October campaign visit from Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson may have been ill-advised.

Onn election day, Chavez-DeRemer seems to have faced a hill too steep to reach the top though she tried, positioning herself as a moderate who frequently crosses the aisle.

Bynum’s apparent win means the 5th District, even with redistricting, will likely go back to the Democratic control it has had since 1996.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle. Image/Julia Shumway.

 

Rarely do cities or other governments go through such a big organizational change, while at the same bringing in mostly new leadership, as Portland is doing now.

There’s a chance the next mayor will be a relatively little-known candidate who has never been elected to office, city or otherwise, just as the city’s governing structure is being upended.

But there may be a message beyond Portland for the whole state coming out of this city election, in the form of ranked choice voting. Portland is using this system right now, at a time when Oregon voters are being asked to decide whether to adopt it on a statewide scale.

On the far side of this election, Portland’s mayor and council – whoever is elected – will be a lot different than what the city has had. The job of mayor will be far smaller than it traditionally has been, and it will have a much smaller management role while still serving as the speaker for the city. The council will have its traditional semi-management role stripped away, and at the same time, many more council members will share the legislative work.

The city’s new mayor-council lineup may be among the least experienced in recent city history, though there’s plenty of Portland precedent for electing mayors without prior work background in City Hall.

There’s real uncertainty about who may win. The ballot is crowded, with 19 contenders vying for the role, which makes prediction all the more difficult.

This campaign does have some structure. Three of the candidates are incumbent council members: Rene Gonzales, Carmen Rubio and Mingus Mapps, and the limited polling has shown them rising toward the top, though name familiarity may have contributed to that early on.

Portland does have a more or less front-runner in terms of conventional wisdom: current council member Rene Gonzalez, who has been described as a Biden Democrat (and self-described as a “centrist”) who is also law enforcement-oriented and not a favorite of the cultural left. He has a strong collection of endorsements, though, including that of The Oregonian/OregonLive, and he may win. Polling by DHM Research for The Oregonian gives him 23% of the first place choices, twice the percentage of any other contender, though that’s still a small slice of the vote.

The other candidate often mentioned as a top prospect is fellow council member Carmen Rubio, who has been active on city policies from energy to housing, endorsed as the top choice by the Portland Mercury and backed by a number of liberal-leaning organizations. But she also has problems and bad headlines, stemming in part from a series of personal issues, many related to driving and parking tickets.

Most of the other candidates, including council member Mapps, seem to be trailing in endorsements and polling metrics. But there is another factor, a wild card, in this election.

It is the changed election method, ranked choice voting, in which voters can rate their preferred six candidates – or fewer if they wish – in order of preference. If no candidate gets more than half the vote initially, the lowest-ranking candidates are one by one struck from contention as other candidates get their votes. That means the person who normally might be the top choice might lose to a candidate who may not be the first choice of the most voters but has the broadest appeal expressed by second- or third-place choices.

Remarkably, that might happen in the case of a lesser-known candidate who has never served in elective office, business owner Keith Wilson. He has the endorsement of Willamette Week,which said issues with Gonzalez and Rubio “have left many voters throwing up their hands and asking, isn’t there another choice? There is. It’s Keith Wilson.”

That may sound like a lightweight reason to support a candidate, but it’s more than just speculation. An Oct. 18 poll that showed that a third of Portland voters were undecided still indicated Wilson had enough support beyond first-place voting to defeat Gonzalez by an estimated 53% to 47%. Wilson, the CEO of a trucking company who has also done work on homelessness, appears to have picked up significant late-campaign support.

This election, which will reshape the structure of Portland city government, will make a big difference on how it addresses most of its key civic issues.

And how it chooses its new mayor may give Orgonians elsewhere food for thought when it comes to ranked choice voting.