The incumbents in Oregon’s 5th and 6th Congressional districts have an advantage of being already in office but will face challenges next year. (Getty Images)
Oregon Libertarians are bracing for the prospect of Republicans meddling in their Saturday nominating convention or trying to block Libertarian candidates from appearing on the ballot in November.
Matt Rowe, chair of the Libertarian Party of Oregon, told the Capital Chronicle he has heard “implicit threats” over the past few weeks that backers of Republican congressional candidates were planning to temporarily change their party registration to participate in the Libertarian nominating convention on Saturday. If that fails, they’ll take advantage of a long-running dispute over the legitimacy of the party’s bylaws in an attempt to block Libertarian nominees from appearing on the ballot in hotly contested races.
The Libertarian Party has just 19,800 voters statewide – less than 1% of the state’s more than 3 million registered voters. Its candidates stand virtually no chance of winning elections, but they have long frustrated Republicans by siphoning hundreds or thousands of votes that might otherwise have been cast for GOP candidates in tight races.
In 2020, longshot Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Jo Rae Perkins even sued to block her Libertarian opponent from appearing on the ballot, arguing that he was improperly nominated under invalid party bylaws. She lost that lawsuit, but a former Libertarian Party leader who has long argued the party is operating under illegal bylaws warned Rowe last month that Republicans found a kernel of hope in that 2020 court case. This time around, Richard Burke told Rowe in texts reviewed by the Capital Chronicle, the Oregon Republican Party or the National Republican Congressional Committee plan to file a complaint with the secretary of state and follow up with an administrative appeal.
Perkins, now the Oregon Republican Party’s secretary, said she hadn’t heard of any such plans and deferred comments to the Oregon Republican Party’s communications director, LaJuana Decker. Decker did not respond to an email Friday.
And Rowe, preparing for Saturday’s convention in the tiny eastern Oregon city of Moro, is worried about other interference. Earlier this week, he received a phone call from a Republican friend who told him that Kevin Hoar, a fixture in Oregon GOP politics and campaign manager for 4th Congressional District candidate Monique DeSpain, was helping organize efforts to bus Republican activists to the Libertarian convention. Those Republicans, having temporarily changed their party registration to Libertarian, would try to hijack the convention to nominate straw men or no candidates at all, Rowe said.
“If Republicans in Oregon put 1/10 of the effort they do into trying to manipulate elections and trying to play spy versus spy like they’re in an episode of ‘West Wing’ or something like that – if they could just grow up, learn how to do a serious campaign on serious issues and actually address the issues that matter to the people of Oregon, they could probably win an election,” Rowe said. “But instead, they’ve got to do stupid, dishonest, underhanded games like this when they already have every advantage in the book compared to us. That’s what I find to be utterly shameful.”
Hoar, for his part, denied any involvement in efforts to either seize control of the Libertarian nominating process – but said he heard “some people” talk about doing just that.
“I’ve heard some people talk about it, but I don’t have anybody doing it,” Hoar said. “I haven’t been involved with organizing anything for the Libertarian convention, but there are perhaps grassroots people that pay attention to this stuff.”
He said the same about the prospect of challenging Libertarian candidates’ viability.
“I don’t know of anything that’s being done about that, but I have heard about it,” Hoar said. “There are some very vocal people that I think filed lawsuits in the past about that. It remains to be seen. I guess it really depends on what happens at their convention.”
A spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee also denied any involvement in registering Republican voters as Libertarians, and didn’t immediately respond to a question about whether the group would try to invalidate the Libertarian slate.
Rowe suspects that Burke – the former party leader, one-time Libertarian nominee for governor and member of the Oregon Government Ethics Commission who warned him that Republicans were sniffing around – was working with the GOP. Burke denied that and said he’s merely concerned that the Libertarian Party is vulnerable to legal attacks.
“I’m not feeding the Republicans anything,” he said. “I’m not trying to hurt the Libertarian Party.”
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