Portland’s Wide-Open Municipal Election

Pity the voters of Portland, Ore. Their options are very nearly endless.

Nineteen candidates are running for mayor in the Nov. 5 election. The field of candidates runs the gamut from fairly prominent former officeholders to relative no-names. It’s enough to overwhelm even the most informed voters in typical times. But to complicate matters more, voters are also using a ranked-choice voting system for the first time. Each voter can choose up to six candidates for mayor and rank them in order of preference. There are nearly 20 million ways to do this.

And if all that weren’t complicated enough, Portland voters are essentially creating a new government for the first time. In 2022, they voted to overhaul the existing city commission system, consisting of a mayor and five city councilors elected at large, and to create a new district-based City Council with three council members elected in each of four districts. This is the first election under the new system. Nearly 100 people (98 at the last count by Rose City Reform, a local nonprofit voter information site) are running for City Council. Two districts have 30 candidates each. Voters in those districts have more than 400 million ways to vote for City Council.

There are also local ballot questions, judicial seats, the state attorney general’s office, congressional races and the presidential election to be decided. As a small mercy, the incumbent Portland city auditor, Simone Rede, is running unopposed.

“I think people are excited. I think people are curious. I think people want it to work,” says John Horvick, senior vice president at DHM Research, a nonpartisan polling firm based in Portland and Seattle. “But it’s a big lift for an everyday voter.”

The political backdrop to the wide-open municipal elections is widespread discontent that has swept the Pacific Northwest city, long considered one of the best urban places to live in the country. The rising cost of housing, a spike in unsheltered homelessness, civil unrest, and a short-lived experiment with decriminalization of drugs have made residents unhappy with city leaders. Prior to the 2022 election, Horvick says, polls showed just 8 percent of residents felt the city was heading in the right direction.

“I strongly believe that voters in 2022 were ready for change not because they had deep underlying feelings about our commissioner form of government, but because our city wasn’t working and this was the opportunity to say yes to something new,” Horvick says. “You could have put a lot of different reforms in front of them and they would have said yes.”

The negativity has softened somewhat in the last few years. But the portion of residents who think the city is heading in the right direction is still historically small, around 20 percent. That has opened up space for a different type of candidate to gain momentum in Portland. Some of the mayoral frontrunners, for example, are campaigning on law-and-order platforms, in a break from the city’s longstanding reputation for left-wing vanguardism.

“There used to be a real social expectation to toe the line on the most progressive positions,” says Jake Weigler, a Portland political consultant. “That consensus has really broken down. People who are more willing to challenge the progressive orthodoxy are in a better position in these races than they have been in a while.”

The switch to a unique style of ranked-choice voting, called multiwinner ranked-choice voting, has also altered the tenor of campaign season, Weigler says. Candidates only need to win more than 25 percent of the vote for a guaranteed spot on the council, and they have a chance to secure that by garnering second- and third-place rankings, as well as first. (For a more in-depth explanation of the multiwinner ranked-choice voting system in the City Council races, see here.) This has created fewer incentives for candidates to attack each other and more incentives to work together, per Weigler — after all, candidates don’t want to alienate their rivals’ supporters when they still have a chance to be a second or third choice.

A lot remains unknown about how to successfully run for office under the new system, including how many raw votes it will take to win office. “You don’t necessarily have to run to win. You just want to get enough second- and third-place votes,” says Jim Moore, a political scientist at Pacific University in Oregon. “I don’t think anyone has really mastered how that works.”

The multiple-representative districts also create a new dynamic. Because each district will have three representatives, candidates with shared priorities have some incentive to run as a type of slate. Those slates haven’t been formalized, but there’s a new collegiality in the City Council races, Weigler says: Candidates are carpooling to events together and have created an email listserv to communicate with each other.

Another layer of complication is changes to campaign financing. In previous elections, candidates could count on a 9-to-1 public match for small campaign donations. But the city has less money to allocate to the match program this year. Many campaigns are trying to get by with hundreds of thousands of dollars less than they were anticipating a year ago.

“In the mayor’s race four years ago, a candidate would have had over $700,000 in match. Now it’s limited to $100,000,” says Dean Nielsen, a political consultant in Portland. “It’s very difficult to run competitive campaigns in a city the size of Portland with such little money.”

Voters have a lot to consider. And even after the election, much will be up for grabs in Portland. The mayor’s office has technically been weakened under the new governing system, and the City Council is theoretically newly empowered. But the next mayor and City Council will do a lot to define the actual power dynamic in the city by the way they establish norms and customs that aren’t written into the city charter. And some of them will have to turn around and run for office again more or less immediately. Half the council seats will be re-elected in two years.

“It’s a real shot in the dark, which I’ve got to say, as a political person, I love,” Moore says. “These are campaigns that are not well-oiled machines. It’s amateur campaigns. I think we could see some interesting things, but we could also see the reassertion of the normal power structures.”