House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries watches as Democratic Congressional candidate Janelle Bynum speaks at a press conference supporting on Oct. 2, 2024. (Julia Shumway/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
CLACKAMAS— In 2023, top congressional Democrat Hakeem Jeffries urged Oregon state Rep. Janelle Bynum to run for one of the country’s closest U.S. House races. On Wednesday, he stood side-by-side with Bynum at her campaign headquarters, telling reporters that a Democratic victory in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District is a way to stop an “extreme” Republican agenda.
Bynum, D-Clackamas, is running against first-term U.S. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican from Happy Valley who Bynum twice beat in state legislative elections. Democrats hope she prevails a third time, and they brought Jeffries to town to help make Bynum’s case that Chavez-DeRemer — who boasts of having the second-most bipartisan voting record in Congress in 2023 — is an “extreme MAGA Republican” running against a “smart, substantive, serious, small-business-owning, sports-loving mother of four.”
Jeffries is traveling the country to campaign with Democratic challengers, including a visit to Arizona on Tuesday and a visit to New Mexico on Thursday. But he highlighted the importance of several close Oregon races — along with Bynum challenging Chavez-DeRemer in Oregon’s 5th, Democrats are working to defend freshman Democratic Reps. Val Hoyle in the 4th District and Andrea Salinas in the 6th District.
“It was particularly important for me to have the opportunity to spend some time with Janelle Bynum, because she is the quintessential example of what a member of the House of Representatives and a public servant should be,” Jeffries said. “She’s got the intelligence, the heart, the soul, the integrity and the commitment to represent people in order to make a difference in their lives.”
Most of his brief remarks focused on Project 2025, the presidential transition plan crafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a second Donald Trump term. While Trump has sought to distance himself from the plan, which includes restrictions on abortion, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, dozens of former Trump administration staffers worked on it.
“Extreme MAGA Republicans, including Lori Chavez-DeRemer, put Trump’s Project 2025 over the people of this great state,” Jeffries said. “That’s a very dangerous thing to do, because Project 2025 is about extreme MAGA Republicans exercising total control over the lives of the American people.”
Democratic congressional candidate Janelle Bynum and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries hug at a press conference on Oct. 2, 2024. (Julia Shumway/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
Chavez-DeRemer’s campaign and the National Republican Congressional Committee panned Jeffries’ visit in statements. NRCC spokesman Ben Petersen called it “lie-filled” and said Jeffries was the real extremist, while Nick Trainer, a senior adviser to Chavez-DeRemer, said Chavez-DeRemer hasn’t read Project 2025 and won’t be reading it.
“This is a desperate attempt by Janelle Bynum and Hakeem Jeffries to mask their liberal extremism,” Trainer said. “From championing Measure 110 (Oregon’s drug decriminalization measure) to siding with Defund the Police groups, Janelle Bynum’s dangerous record in the legislature speaks for itself – she would be nothing more than a rubber stamp for Leader Jeffries’ extreme agenda that would wreck our economy and make our communities even less safe. Meanwhile, Congresswoman Chavez-DeRemer had the second-most bipartisan voting record in Congress last year and has more labor union endorsements than her opponent – her record proves that she only answers to Oregonians.”
Chavez-DeRemer touts 20 union endorsements, most from smaller local unions, though she also has the sole endorsement of Teamsters Joint Council No. 37, which represents roughly 20,000 workers in various industries across Oregon, Idaho and southwest Washington. Oregon’s largest private-sector union, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555, gave both Bynum and Chavez-DeRemer its “greenlight” stamp, indicating that both candidates’ values align with the union’s.
But Melissa Unger, executive director of Service Employees International Union Local 503, told the Capital Chronicle that Chavez-DeRemer’s union endorsements are misleading. Unger introduced Bynum, and representatives from SEIU, the Oregon Education Association and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations were at the press conference supporting Bynum. SEIU represents 72,000 public sector employees and caregivers across Oregon, OEA represents 41,000 educators and AFL-CIO has more than 300,000 Oregon members.
“She can maybe go rack up a lot of small union support, but when it comes to working families, they were represented here today and they’re supporting Janelle Bynum,” Unger said.
Bynum said she hears a lot of excuses as a mom — she has four children and balances political life with her family, including heading straight from her teenage daughter’s Saturday cross-country practice to a canvass launch last month.
“I hear a lot of chit chat,” Bynum said. “I hear a lot of talk from my kids, and so I can discern when people are trying to cover up for a poor record. I can discern when people are part of a damage and chaos agenda, rather than an agenda that wants to move America forward.”
Democrats hold an advantage in voter registrations in the 5th District, which stretches from Bend to Portland, and President Joe Biden won the district by 9 points in 2020 before Chavez-DeRemer’s 2-point 2022 victory.
Marcia Schneider, a volunteer with the Multnomah County Democratic Party, said voters she talks to are more excited about the election than they were in 2022. Schneider is part of the Oregon Democratic Party’s neighborhood leader program, which recently received $125,000 from the Democratic National Committee and trains volunteers to convince their neighbors to vote. All neighborhood leaders receive lists of a few dozen nearby addresses, and it’s their job to convince their neighbors to fill out and return their ballots.
“I think that any sense of complacency that might have been there is gone,” she said. “The urgency of this is evident. People have a sense that I can’t forget to turn in my ballot, that’s not OK.”
She said she sees increased enthusiasm even within her own family – her sons have been wishy-washy about voting in the past, but after Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president, there was a “palpable” shift.
“From young people especially, we’re hearing ‘I am fired up. I am absolutely going to vote. This race matters.’” Schneider said. “That is really an enormous shift.”
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