Oregon election results follow usual pattern

A supporter listens to speeches at the Oregon Democratic Party’s election night event at the Portland Hilton on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (Rian Dundon/Oregon Capital Chronicle)

Oregon had few surprises in the  general election results that changed the political landscape very little.

Tracking closely with similar kinds of results in Washington state, the light blue Beaver state stuck with its usual voting patterns, careful to rarely edge over into landslides. In most cases, Portland remained deep blue and most of the eastern counties stayed deep red. 

Taken as a whole, Oregon remained generally blue, even as much of the country was awash in red-tinged results. 

The state Legislature will not be significantly changed by this election, even if a number of new faces will be taking their places in it.

But some degree of change, you could point to the decisive election of Democrat Anthony Broadman to a Senate seat representing Deschutes County. That, together with a clear win in the same region by Democrat Emerson Levy, can be fairly marked as an extension of Democratic strength there. But that’s really an extension of an ongoing trend. 

Partisan status aside, Portland could almost have served in this election as a poster child for “change,” given its impending change of the form of government and many new people on the ballot. But City Hall is unlikely to feel a lot different when the results are finalized. 

The race for mayor of Portland vaulted little-known businessman Keith Wilson into a smashing win over three council members, a result few people would have anticipated months ago. Yet even that was not completely a shock. 

The two contenders widely thought during most of the campaign to be front runners for mayor, Rene Gonzalez and Carmen Rubio, both were city council members with extensive support from many of the people and groups known as key influencers in Portland. 

But neither of them seemed to develop any strong excitement, and voters seemed in the mood for a change at City Hall, maybe to go along with their new form of municipal government. In an endorsement editorial, Willamette Week suggested Rubio and Gonzalez “have left many voters throwing up their hands and asking, isn’t there another choice? There is. It’s Keith Wilson.”

A lot of Portland voters seem to have had the same idea. 

But Wilson, who campaigned expressing strong interest in several high-profile issues such as homelessness, doesn’t immediately seem to be suggesting radical change at City Hall. And under the revised form of city government, he would have less clout to exercise it than his predecessors did.

The premier congressional race and one of the hottest in the nation, in the Clackamas-Deschutes-based 5th House District, turned out as close as advertised. The results as of Tuesday night mirrored almost exactly the district’s thin Democratic lean, probably giving Democrat Janelle Bynum the edge over Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer. 

That margin is close enough that late-counted votes still could reverse it. But the results in two other moderately Democratic districts with serious contests, the 4th District in southwest Oregon and the 6th in the southern Willamette Valley, also ran true to form, showing results not a lot different from the way the parties performed two years ago.  

Results in the state’s three highly partisan congressional districts, the Democratic 1st and 3rd Congressional districts and the Republican 2nd, went according to the usual patterns. 

With the possible exception of the 5th District, the U.S. House members from Oregon seem to be settling into place, and may be hard to dislodge in the next few elections. 

For the most part, Oregonians went along with the stands of major organizations and political leaders when they decided on ballot issues. They approved the impeachment process (Measure 115) and rejected the widely-criticized corporate income tax proposal (Measure 118). 

But they strongly rejected the legislative proposal – which generated bipartisan criticism – for ranked choice voting (Measure 117), and by a wide margin. Only three counties (Multnomah, Benton and Hood River) appear to have supported it.

At the same time, Democrats in Oregon were not running away with overwhelming support.

The three statewide offices up for election this year were, unusually, were all open seats with no incumbent running for reelection. That might have opened the door to major changes, but the three Democratic nominees for those offices – Tobias Read for secretary of state, Elizabeth Steiner for treasurer and Dan Rayfield for attorney general – all were winning, and did not present themselves as clear change agents. 

Though they ran against candidates with more modest campaigns, they did not win by huge margins. On Tuesday night, Steiner was ahead of Republican Brian Boqist by about 49% to 44%, an unspectacular margin considering the relative scope of the campaigns, and organized support, the two had. 

This election didn’t really move the state of Oregon into a new direction. On a state level, its results have the feel of a holding action. 

In that, it may have stood out strikingly from the red wave in the nation at large.