Tell Me Who To Vote For (Portland Edition 2026)

I'll confess, I haven't been following local politics as much as I should. Like many, I'm frustrated with the gridlock and dysfunction on the city council, which seems to be a majority view (though of course, fracturing badly on the "who is to blame" question). But I don't have big opinions on many of the local issues of the day. And since everyone is a Democrat (at least at the municipal level), I don't even have that heuristic.

So I'll do my best, but I'm still quite persuadable. Have at me in the comments.

Governor: Tina Kotek

I guess I can understand being underwhelmed by Tina Kotek, though I think the issues in Oregon's government go well beyond her. What I don't understand is the appeal of Christine Drazan. I guess some people never get tired of thinking "things aren't great now -- maybe if we elect someone worse, they'll get better!" They won't. They'll get worse. That's how it works.

Congress: Janelle Bynum

She's doing fine. I live in a swing district now, so I couldn't do the purity-politics thing right now even if I wanted to, which I don't.

County Executive: Julia Brim-Edwards

Probably the race I'm most unsure about. Last time around, I voted for Sharon Meieran, who lost to Jessica Vega Pederson. Given how much everyone thinks JVP has been a trainwreck, I'm feeling pretty good about that call. But despite that, I'm less keen on Meieran now than I am the first time around. What once was a useful penchant for hard-truth-telling now seems like a near-Joker-like desire to burn everything to ground in a cleansing fire. There's no way that doesn't turn out to be a disaster.

So that leaves Brim-Edwards, who has locked up most of the institutional Democratic endorsements, and Shannon Singleton, who is occupying the left lane and is seen as the closest thing to JVP's successor. The latter gave me a lot of pause, and that pause coupled with the aforementioned endorsement parade for Brim-Edwards almost made this a walkover. But I was surprised to see Singleton earn the endorsement nod from the Willamette Week, and they make a good case for her both as a leader and as someone who really shouldn't be seen as JVP 2.0. That reverted what was an easy pick back into a hard one.

Ultimately, what's driving me right now is I've heard the "yes, she's aligned with X faction, but she's actually thoughtful and independent!" spiel before, and it keeps on breaking apart once people occupy higher office. Maybe Singleton will be different -- after all, she has shown more of an independent streak in her current role on the county commission. But I'm not sure it's a risk worth taking.

City Council (District 4): Olivia Clark, Eric Zimmerman, Eli Arnold

The city council race is weird. Everyone seems to hate how the council is performing, and yet our shiny new electoral system seems tailor-made to ensure all the incumbents will win again. So I don't know why I'm stressing about this.

The last time around -- which is to say, the first time we got to vote under the new city government system -- there were approximately six trillion candidates vying for three seats. Nonetheless, all three of the eventual winners -- Clark, Zimmerman, and Mitch Green -- were in my top six. Since then, the council has been effectively deadlocked between a mainline liberal faction (including Clark and Zimmerman), and a DSA-aligned left faction (including Green) known as the Peacocks (short for "progressive caucus"). The two factions are not friends, and both blame the other for the animosity.

As far as animosity goes, I'm sure there's blame to go around. But despite ranking Green last time, I'm loathe to do so again. A lot of attention has centered around some poor choices Green has made outside the council chambers -- setting a fire in his yard in defiance of a "burn ban", missing some taxes, and some pretty vitriolic anti-police social media posts from before he was elected. I'm more concerned about some of his grandstanding in the room. As an academic freedom guy, I'm particularly incensed about his threat to withhold funds from Portland State unless they bent their school conduct disciplinary process to his political will -- a move taken directly out of the Trumpist playbook. That's just unforgivable to me.

Of course, none of this will matter. The system is designed to promote "pluralism", and I have no doubt there is at least a substantial minority of D4 voters who like Green's style of politics and want more of it. In concept I guess he could be replaced by a different DSA-aligned politician. In practice, none of them seem especially viable. As for Clark, Zimmerman, and Arnold; I ranked them all last time and I've been satisfied with how the former two have performed on the council (Clark more than Zimmerman). The pro and con of Arnold is that he's viewed as essentially a Zimmerman clone, which isn't a sterling recommendation as far I'm concerned, but it beats the alternative (except, it won't actually beat the alternative).

Ballot Measure 26-267 (Community Budgeting): No

Seems like a classic Portland case of "this issue is far too important to care about doing it well." First, it's far from clear to me that budget decisions should be devolved to direct democracy (a position I've held since back when I lived in California). Moreover, in practice, it's almost assured that this fund will not be especially democratic at all be taken over by an opaque mix of lobbyists and hardcore activists with bizarre and embarrassing hobbyhorses. When even the Portland Mercury can't bring itself to give it a nod, you know there's a problem.

Portland: America's Last Bastion of Normalcy

In my congressional district, local media is now projecting that Janelle Bynum has ousted incumbent Republican Representative Lori Chavez-Deremer. As terrible as election day was on the whole, I am grateful that I'll be represented by a Democrat in Congress once again, and I'm glad my neighbors made the right choice in sending Bynum to Congress.

Meanwhile, across the river in Washington state, Democratic incumbent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has won her rematch against Republican challenger Joe Kent. This was a result that thrills and honestly confuses me. Perez's 2022 victory over Kent was one of the night's bigger upsets, largely chalked up to Kent being basically a White supremacist. But clearly the lesson of 2024 is that that's no longer any object, and if you told me ahead of time that election night would see a broad-based "red shift" compared to 2020 I would have been dead certain that Perez was absolute toast. So why exactly did this nut crack? I don't have an answer to that,* and I acknowledge that Perez has annoyed Democratic leadership before. But she seems to have some ideas of how to present progressive priorities in a way that speaks outside of our current base (e.g., her championing of "right to repair" laws, or pairing student loan debt relief with "dollar-for-dollar ... investments in career [and] technical education"), and she is a voice worth paying attention to going forward.

Needless to say, both Bynum and Perez bucked a pretty terrible national trend. As most of the country embraced the chaos and the void, the single, solitary exception was the Pacific Northwest. Here, we rejected crude reflex and base instinct. And it's not just the local congressional races. In the Portland mayor's race, we didn't pick the woman who thinks the law doesn't apply to her just because she's "progressive", and we didn't pick the man who wants to execute the homeless because he promised "law and order". Our new mayor is going to be Keith Wilson, whose major appeal in the field, from my vantage point, is that he seemed like a normal, good guy making reasonable efforts to resolve the problems in front of our city. That shouldn't always be enough, but in the field we had it was better than all the alternatives.  In my city council district, I felt like we had a plethora of good candidates to choose from, and the three winners all were among my top six picks. Here too, I'm very happy with the choices offered and choices made, and none of them seem (yet, anyway) like kooks, cranks, or gadflies. I'm optimistic that they will be diligent and attentive public servants when they enter office, and again, that's not something I take for granted anymore.

It is, of course, quite off-brand for Portland to be America's avatar of normalcy. Locally, we're more used to embracing our "weird" identity, nationally, our reputation is something like that of a post-apocalyptic drag show. "Normal" is not historically our forte.

But for my part, I am so, so happy that this is the city my wife and I have chosen to build our life in and raise our child in. Portland is a great city. It is full of great people, great beauty, great resources, great activities, and great values. I'm under no illusions that anywhere, blue states included, will be "safe" in the coming years. But there are very few places I'd rather be than here, and if you're looking for a new place to call home, I'd encourage you to look our way.

* One thing I will say, and someone inundated with ads for the Perez/Kent race, is that Kent went 100% all-in on anti-trans fearmongering. The result was Perez likely expanding her margin of victory in an otherwise red wave year. Take from that what you will.

Bow(man)ing Out

As you've no doubt seen, George Latimer has ousted incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic primary for New York's 16th congressional district. The margin -- approximately 58-41 -- is similar to Bowman's own primary victory over longtime district Rep. Eliot Engel in 2020 (that was a 55-41 victory).

Of course, we all know the cardinal rule about ousting incumbents in primaries: My challenge is an authentic expression of popular rebellion, your challenge is an astroturfed manipulation by special interests and rabble-rousers.

The reality is that one shouldn't read too much into this result. I think it tells us a lot less about the state of "Israel politics" in the Democratic Party than anybody would like to admit. Yes, AIPAC dumped a truckload of money into this race. But Bowman made plenty of missteps that made him vulnerable; first and foremost being seemingly completely uninterested in connecting with his district once lines were redrawn after the census. Part of what haunted Engel was the sense he had grown distant from his district, but Bowman quickly fell victim to the same sentiment (particularly in contrast to Latimer, who had extremely deep connections and a reputation as an outstanding retail politician). When your closing rally cry is a promise to show "AIPAC the power of the motherfucking South Bronx", and none of your district actually includes the South Bronx, that's not awesome.

All of which raises the question of how much difference AIPAC's money actually made. A colleague of mine described their intervention as "feasting on a corpse", and while I think that's exaggerated, there's little question that AIPAC knows how to pick its spots and is happy to claim credit for backing a winning horse. AIPAC's backing might have given him some extra oomph, but Latimer was already an unusually high-profile challenger given his long run in Westchester politics. Right now, both sides have an incentive to talk up AIPAC's influence -- Camp AIPAC to gain the aura of deterrence, Team Bowman to provide a face-saving excuse -- but for my part I'm doubtful that AIPAC's dollars made much of a difference (or at the very least, the diminishing returns after the first infusion accelerated rapidly). As obnoxious as the glut of money sloshing around American politics might be, it just isn't the case that a truckload of money can simply buy a congressional seat (ask David Trone, or Carrick Flynn). Bowman may have been outspent, but he had plenty of resources (tangible or not) in his corner; he was hardly hung out to dry. And meanwhile, as much as AIPAC wants to crow that "pro-Israel = good politics", it remains the case that most of its advertising in Democratic primaries studiously avoids talking about Israel, suggesting it isn't as confident in its message as its bluster suggests. 

In fact, I'm mostly tired of how the Israel thing completely overwhelms and distorts how we talk about all the relevant players here. Bowman's 2020 victory over Engel was framed as an ousting of a "moderate", but that label almost exclusively played on Engel's pro-Israel voting record -- in reality, he was a reliable progressive vote through his entire multi-decade tenure in office. And Bowman, too, is disserved when people act like the only thing he did in office was yell about Israel. He was a passionate voice for the interests of working class Americans and that passion was an inspiration to many. I have no desire to dance on his grave, any more than Engel's. And, for what it's worth, I suspect Latimer too will be a generally reliable liberal voice in Congress (indeed, my understanding is that New York progressives generally had warm feelings towards Latimer up until the ugliness of this race). The real moral of this story is that while in highly-activated online circles Israel (pro- or anti-) might matter uber alles, that's not what's happening on the ground.

These posts aren't what anyone enjoys reading -- people want to crow at a Squad member being laid low or they want to fulminate over AIPAC bulldozing American democracy. But the reality is that most of the political dynamics in play here are considerably more prosaic. If Cori Bush loses her primary in a few weeks, the same will be true -- she's also facing a strong challenger and she also has had some bad headlines dragging her. And likewise, there's a reason why AIPAC has largely left folks like AOC or Rashida Tlaib or Summer Lee alone -- they haven't shown the same vulnerabilities. There's no unified narrative, save perhaps that there is a lot more political diversity amongst even committed, partisan Democrats right now than there is amongst Republicans.*

* Yet even these stories can be overstated. The linked article uses, as one of its examples of "moderates" prevailing in Democratic primaries, my own congressional district where Janelle Bynum beat 2022 nominee Jamie McLeod-Skinner. Yet I highly doubt that this result has much of anything to do with Bynum's "moderation". McLeod-Skinner was badly damaged by stories that she was abusive towards staff, but more importantly she ousted an incumbent Democrat in 2022 and then lost the seat to a Republican, which I think for many Democrats was an unforgivable failure. There are times when it's worthwhile to dislodge a rooted Democratic incumbent, but if you do it in a swing district you damn well better close the show, and McLeod-Skinner didn't. McLeod-Skinner's track record, coupled with Bynum's own history having defeated the Republican incumbent in a local race before, were I suspect far more decisive than notions that Bynum cut a distinctively "moderate" profile (I think she, like Latimer, will be a decidedly "normal" Democratic representative in Congress).