Today the ballots will be counted in Oregon’s primary. In the absence of a race for the governor’s office or a contested presidential primary, Portland’s tight mayoral race takes the spotlight in the local political arena. The three prominent candidates, Eileen Brady, Charlie Hales and Jefferson Smith, sit in a dead heat as the polls close tonight.
Today the ballots will be counted in Oregon’s primary. In the absence of a race for the governor’s office or a contested presidential primary, Portland’s tight mayoral race takes the spotlight in the local political arena. The three prominent candidates, Eileen Brady, Charlie Hales and Jefferson Smith, sit in a dead heat as the polls close tonight.
Between three recent polls commissioned by news outlets like OPB, The Oregonian and KATU News over the last two weeks, all three candidates hold roughly 20 percent, with another 20 percent up for grabs. Some polls give Hales a slight lead, while others put Brady ahead. All show Smith gaining momentum after months of trailing at a distant third. As a state senator, Smith was prohibited from fundraising while the Oregon State Legislature was in session. Meanwhile, momentum for Brady has stalled, and Hales has maintained a steady presence. In any case, all surveys put the candidates within a margin of error; close enough to make the primary anyone’s game.
All three have assembled a strong grassroots volunteer base and, in a low turnout election, there is an urgency not just to gain favor with the voters but also to get them to vote in the first place.
“The more the electorate reflects the population, the better it is for our campaign. If geographic, ethnic age diversity reflects the breadth of the city, the greater degree to which it does that the more it helps us, so we want more people to vote,” Smith said.
Smith praised the work of his many youth volunteers, the demographic he currently dominates, catching the campaign up to its opponents via extensive fundraising and knocking on many doors. “Our campaign is about the present and it’s about the future, for people who are focused on what’s happening today and what’s happening tomorrow. For someone who can’t donate $1,000, our campaign is still really relevant. Not every younger person can afford that, in fact almost none can,” Smith said.
Hales expressed a similar confidence with the face-to-face, grassroots methods that each campaign has employed to connect with voters: “We all have to raise money and do other things of campaigning, but the best part of campaigning in Portland is getting to get out here and meeting voters personally, to have that unscripted contact between those who are running and those who care about the place. I find that, as a candidate, I learn a lot from those encounters. It’s important that it’s a two-way conversation and not just a marketing opportunity,” Hales said.
Meanwhile, the Brady campaign has utilized its substantial financial advantage, augmenting her already extensive ground team by running ads that have recently proliferated Internet, television and social media. As her opponents have caught up to her once-substantial lead, Brady has focused on the issue of education and Portland public schools in nearly all of her ads.
“I think that people are really concerned about education and that we have real career pathways. I think you are going to see, going into the general election, a lot of conversation around how to do that,” Brady said.
She reiterated the need to create connections between the private sector and high schools to create technical programs with the purpose of readying graduates with applicable skills to enter the workforce. Brady also stressed more high school feeder programs into the university system as a way to accelerate students entering into specialized degree programs.
In regard to Portland schools, Hales pointed to his calling on Mayor Sam Adams and Multnomah County Chair Jeff Cogen to allocate funding to prevent looming school closures and the layoff of more than 100 teachers. “If you have a rainy day fund, this is a rainy day. Even though the city isn’t technically responsible for schools, the technicality doesn’t matter when it comes to this kind of emergency,” Hales said.
Smith echoed some of the same urgency, with fiscal prioritizing and advocacy for funding: “The first thing is to protect the general fund and not make it worse—before the city adopts tax breaks for big projects that we can’t afford that make it harder to pay for things, leading us to further cut budgets.”
Smith claimed to be the only candidate to campaign for the last statewide measures with funding for schools and services. “I think the mayor has a pulpit from which to advocate and help convene people for school funding,” Smith added.
In spite of all the rhetoric around the issues, it may not be schools or fixing pot holes that decides the race, but the voters’ perception of how each candidate would approach the day-to-day work of being mayor.
“You need collaborative approach to leadership, a leadership culture where the best idea wins. The mayor is successful to the degree to which the mayor can empower the best objectives of the advocacy of city council and city workers,” Smith said.
Brady argued, “I think that when you have a weak mayor system, what you need is for the mayor to be very good leader in terms of providing vision and being a coalition builder in terms of achieving community consensus. Those are the things that I bring; I think the most successful mayors have been those that have been able to do that.”
Hales claimed his opponents’ backgrounds don’t reflect the kind of experience needed to navigate the egalitarian voting process to get things done in City Hall. “It’s an environment in which you have to practice elaborate leadership, in which you are first among a team of people. It requires a style and a set of habits that are very different from the debating society of the legislature or the authoritarian style of a business,” Hales said. “I think we’ve seen mayors who thought they could just come in and give orders. Tom Potter comes to mind, but it doesn’t work that way. That’s not the Portland way, and that’s not the Portland model of government.”
