All six Portland City Council incumbents running in two districts appeared to be headed toward reelection despite voter frustration with City Hall and a bevy of challengers vying for the seats, according to partial returns Tuesday.
Preliminary results showed Councilor Steve Novick garnered the most first-choice votes among the 21 candidates in District 3, which covers much of close-in Southeast Portland and a portion of Northeast. Fellow Councilors Tiffany Koyama Lane and Angelita Morillo were close behind while their most competitive challenger, Kellie Torres, who received significant financial support from an outside political action group, trailed the trio.
In District 4, which encompasses the city’s west side and Southeast Portland’s Sellwood and Eastmoreland neighborhoods, Councilors Olivia Clark, Eric Zimmerman and Mitch Green were clear frontrunners in the field of 12 candidates. Behind them: Portland bike cop Eli Arnold, followed by environmental activist Jeremy Beausoleil Smith and former City Hall staffer Jamey Evenstar.
Voters in each district are electing three City Council members to represent them using Portland’s unique and relatively new version of ranked-choice voting.
Under the election system, voters can choose up to six council candidates in order of preference, and candidates need only 25% plus one of first-, second- and potentially even third- and fourth-choice votes to win.
Additional movement in each district race will unfold as more votes are tallied, which could potentially take into next week. Those additional ballots, postmarked by 8 p.m. on Election Day, could cause some changes during updated rounds of vote counting.
However, the closest challengers in each of the two council districts currently trail the trio of incumbents by thousands of votes.
The contested council races come as Portland continues to grapple with a host of challenges, including a shortage of housing, rising concerns about affordability, shoddy emergency response times, and deepening budget and infrastructure woes.
It also comes as Portlanders appear pessimistic about their elected lawmakers two years into a sweeping government overhaul. A recent survey commissioned by the Oregon Values and Beliefs Center found that fewer than a third of voters said they felt anyone on City Council represented them and only slightly more said they trusted the body. Only 22% said Portland had an effective government.
Driving some of the frustration has been the City Council’s persistent struggle to establish a governing majority or articulate a clear vision of how to best serve residents, while growing pains and divisions among members play out publicly on a weekly basis.
Despite a smattering of political wins, the council has remained evenly split on a range of major issues, often between a closely aligned six-member progressive caucus — which includes Green, Morillo and Koyama Lane, all democratic socialists — and the other councilors such as Novick, Clark and Zimmerman, who are less in lockstep.
Disagreements between various factions have flared on policing, livability and other contentious topics. There have also been sharp differences on governance, council operations and oversight of the executive branch, which sometimes devolved into bitter feuds, finger pointing and personal attacks.
While all six incumbents decided to run for reelection this year, a few prominent challengers and their political allies attempted to break the City Hall stalemate and shift the balance of power on the legislative branch toward one of the rival factions.
A number of established business, labor and Democratic leaders rankled by the council’s progressive bloc rallied behind Torres in District 3, who focused much of her campaign on supporting small businesses and creating cleaner, safer neighborhoods.
An outside group funded largely by the Portland Metro Chamber’s political arm spent more than $400,000 on commercials and other advertising that promoted Torres, a Portland Parks & Recreation official and former chief of staff to Councilor Dan Ryan, campaign finance records show.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of America and an array of progressive advocacy and social justice organizations helped buttress Morillo, Green and Koyama Lane with their endorsements and by turning out large numbers of door knockers.
Many of those left-leaning groups also threw their support behind Evenstar and Beausoleil Smith, while asking voters not to rank Torres, Arnold, Clark or Zimmerman.
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