Despite a tsunami of outside funding to candidates running to the right of Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, her popularity broke through and she took home 41% of the vote for her City Council seat.
That’s just one of the big headlines from last night’s primary election.
Many observers thought the combination of voter outrage at the state of Portland’s problems and an influx of money from a political action committee backing Hardesty’s opponent would do more damage to her chances. But Hardesty was all smiles at her election night gathering at Redwood Cafe on SE Stark and 79th where sources say the good vibes lasted well into the night.
With about 32% of ballots counted, Hardesty has 41% of the votes. She’ll be in a runoff with either Rene Gonzalez or Vadim Mozyrsky, who are currently separated by only 879 votes. Gonzalez is currently at 24.2% and is barely edging out Mozrysky at 23.4%. There will be many opinions as to which challenger has a better chance of overtaking Hardesty in November. Gonzalez has been much more direct in his campaign against Hardesty and many of his views on key issues like policing (he’s endorsed by the Portland Police Association) and housing are further to the right than Mozyrsky’s; but he’s not nearly as well-funded.
In the other contested Portland city council race, incumbent Dan Ryan did what most people expected him to do. He handily overcame challenger AJ McCreary by a split of 58% to 25% and avoided a runoff.
Here are a few more thoughts and results from other races we’ve been watching closely:
- Tina Kotek has won the Democratic nod for Governor with 56% of the vote. She’ll likely face Republican Christine Drazan who’s received 23% of the vote so far.
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- In Metro Council District 6 interim incumbent Duncan Hwang has nabbed 68% of the votes, more than double his challenger Terri Preeg Riggsby who managed 32%.
- Hwang will serve on what is arguably the most progressive Metro Council we’ve seen in decades. He’ll join Oregon Walks Executive Director Ashton Simpson (who ran uncontested) and incumbents Juan Carlos Gonzalez and Christine Lewis, who easily beat out challengers last night.
- Metro Council President Lynn Peterson will avoid a runoff with 58%. Her challenger Alisa Pyszka has 32%.
- The race for Multnomah County Commissioner will go to a runoff with current Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson earning 40% of the vote so far. She will likely face Sharon Meieran who currently has about 19%.
- Oregon’s new representative in the U.S. House District 4 will be (former The Street Trust board member) Val Hoyle who has 54% of the vote. Her closest rival, Doyle Canning, has just 15%.
- Progressive candidates also did well in Beaverton where Kevin Teater, a regular at bike advocacy rides, won his race for a seat on city council with 55% of the vote so far. “Beaverton’s Council is taking a huge progressive step forward. This is really exciting,” Teater shared on Twitter this morning.
- Michael Trimble, the Portland resident and daily bike rider who has no arms and who we profiled last year finished fifth (out of 15) in the governor’s Democratic primary race.
There’s a lot more analysis and results still to come in, so stay tuned! The next update in the counts is scheduled for 6:00 pm today.
One last note about the results, counts in Clackamas County are going very slowly so we don’t have a good picture of how that part of the region voted.
What struck you about last night? Are you happy? Hopeful? Sad? Despondent? Meh?
As expected, Gonzalez and Mozrysky split the centrist votes (having run on nearly identical platforms). I will be shocked if very many Mozrysky voters go for Hardesty in the fall. This is going to be a close race, and I would say that she’s already behind. No one ran to the left of her, so 41% might be her ceiling.
McCreary was destroyed in the position 2 race.
I disagree with you Chris,
I think there was some difference in their platforms and I think Hardesty will get some Mozyrsky votes… it will be very close though! But she has a lot going for her: Momentum after doing better than anyone thought she’d do, she has the bully pulpit of an incumbent, and she has proven to be a very skilled campaigner. I think Gonzalez is further to the right than most folks realize and if he makes it into the runoff, he’ll have a lot more explaining to do. Will enough Portlanders like what they learn about him? Remains to be seen, but this is a very very left-leaning town at its core. Yes a LOT of folks are sick-and-tired and some of them might have flirted with one of these guys, but I think some of them will “come home” in the general…. Just how many could decide if she wins or loses.
Will also be fascinating to see if Hardesty leans into her progressive stances or if she tries to appeal more to the center from here on out.
The big story of this election for me is this:
1. PBOT commissioner attended meeting with PBOT’s cycling advocacy apparatus and admitted she had never even heard of the Big Plan to improve cycling in Portland.
2. JM, publisher of the biggest cycling blog in Portland, supported her.
No surprise that a lot of cyclists are walking away – or riding away, fast – from this blog.
I ultimately see that as yet another failure of PBOT and our form of government.
It’s just absurd that we vote for Bureau heads but don’t get to vote for what Bureau they head. I don’t remember her campaign being all that passionate about roads the first time. Rene and Vadim haven’t said anything about roads. Nobody in city council really cares about roads. Ted put her in charge of PBOT hoping she’d flounder and she’s done pretty okay, and I sincerely hate PBOT.
Of course, why would she bother to read a dusty plan that PBOT never had any intention to follow? All the Bureau heads are brought up to speed by the Bureau when they take over, or should be, and PBOT didn’t even bother to mention the 2030 plan because its a complete joke. It probably didn’t even cross their minds.
PBOT, and the city bureaucracy generally, is completely broken. The bureaucrats are more interested in having their 500th community outreach event than actually doing work and it shows. No Bureau head is going to change that. If Rene or Vadim got in, they would just be another version of Mapps and Wheeler, doing nothing but not saying anything controversial and then next election there would be some other reason all these men aren’t to blame. I guess it’d be all Rubios fault.
No one on the city council is competent, but Hardesty has obviously achieved the most which is why I ended up voting for her over Vadim. It’s hard to kick out the only one who has achieved literally anything useful in the last four years.
A list of accomplishments would be nice if you have any?
It really depends on what you consider an accomplishment. I don’t personally ascribe bureau accomplishments to the city council member who is the bureau head for any of them unless I can really tell they had something to do with it. So I’m glad that 82nd ave transfer is complete, I’m glad Better Naito is complete but PBOT works on a timeline of years. The stuff they are doing today was planned before she was in charge and the stuff they are planning today might get done after she is gone.
I personally value her work to get the Portland Street Response going and her continued willingness to hold PPB accountable for their violent, anti-social behavior.
I’d personally replace all five of them if we could find better people. I don’t think any of them are good at their jobs, but of the five, she’s just done the most.
But I see you’re still here…
I ride year round and I am voting FOR Hardesty
She is the incumbent and could not get 50% of the vote…
Please….this cheerleading for the status quo is so depressing… Do you seriously argue she has done anything in 4 years?
PBOT works so well doesn’t it, so responsive….,
I don’t consider her progressive at all.. Give me a list of her “Progressive” accomplishments.
A couple big ones:
Portland Street Response.
Transfer of 82nd Avenue.
Do the other progressive accomplishments include diversifying housing, police, addressing livability issues for lower income people?
Because None of that has happened in the last 4 years.
This city is a wealthy white enclave now under the Progressive leadership of Hardesty and Wheeler.
Bike use Down.
Transit use Down.
Cost of housing through the roof.
If I want diversity I go to Beaverton these days…..
If you don’t want to have to walk through tents and trash at your neighborhood parks, have graffiti and idiotic ANTIFA riots, Beaverton is much better. Time to take the city back
What does that mean, putting antifa in all caps? It’s not an acronym. It’s short for antifascist, which is a fine thing to be.
DWK. You want diversity? Come to East Portland.
Hardesty is progressive and walks the walk. Those items that havnt been completed are not because she not working for them, it’s because wheeler and the others fight against progress.
She has done a number of incredible accomplishments, especially when you consider this was her first term, and she often was the lone voice of reason and compassion on a hostile, pro-business council.
Get rid of get her ASAP
West of 82nd is very left leaning and only parts of SW. East of 82nd feels like you’re in a
different state. I believe Hardesty didn’t win a single district east of 205.
The third map at bottom shows what percentage of the vote went for Hardesy, by precinct. Only in inner eastside neighborhoods did she receive over 50% of the vote. She had her least support in East Portland, with many precincts returning less than 20% of the vote for her.
It would be nice to know what the turnout was, by precinct.
https://projects.oregonlive.com/data-points/election_22/voteshare.html
There was nothing “centrist” about either of the opponents’ fear-based campaigns. Anyone with a head and a heart will vote for Hardesty.
I find it very ironic that Mozrysky is the lone supporter of plurality voting on the Charter Commission (every other member prefers ranked choice or STAR), and he’s about to be bumped out of the primary due to narrow vote splitting that only occurs with plurality.
I hope it will be informative, for Mozrysky and for anybody who voted for what Chris calls the centrist position – vote splitting sucks regardless of your position. Vote out plurality voting in November when you get the chance (though it’s likely the Charter Commission will be pushing ranked choice over STAR, which doesn’t actually eliminate vote splitting – it does mitigate it somewhat, though).
I like runoffs. It gives us a better chance to learn about the top candidates than if everything were decided at once when they were 20 candidates running.
I’d like STAR a lot better if we used it to narrow the field to 2 and then had a conventional runoff.
The second part of STAR does this automatically. The “AR” in STAR stands for “automatic runoff”. It sounds like you’d simply prefer score primaries. This would certainly be a significant improvement over what we have today, but honestly doing away with primaries altogether is one of the big benefits – it’s less costly, creates less voter fatigue, centralizes decisions to when most voters are active/engaged, etc.
I won’t argue that (to use your example of 20 candidates) mulling over 10% of the field is easier when 90% have already been decided on by some smaller subset of voters, but I do think that is ultimately harmful and tends to distort representation.
Exactly, and this is why I don’t like STAR. When you have 12 candidates running for an office, and when there are many races going on, it is really hard to get the information you need to make an informed decision. Coverage/analysis of candidates is necessarily too shallow.
Is it the runoff that is distorting, or the first-past-the-post system? I’m not arguing for continuing with our current system, but rather looking for ways to incorporate runoffs with a STAR-like system. In several cases, I really did not feel I was able to ferret out the information I needed to make a fully informed decision in this election. And, I promise you, I worked at it more than 99% of voters.
Yep. Democracy’s hard. It’s probably why we’re not very good at it. But what you’re ultimately advocating for is some smaller group filtering options for the larger majority. That’s distorting.
No disagreements on any particular point you’ve posited – news coverage sucks. It’s hard if not sometimes impossible to get quality information. But none of that goes away with a primary, it just shifts it earlier and to a smaller group. Sure, that makes it easier for the larger group later on in a general, but what if the best options were already filtered out?
If you did the STAR runoff and stopped when you had two candidates rather than one, would that really introduce much “distortion”, and would it really result in top candidates being filtered out? If it did, then that top candidate would still be filtered out if we processed the final elimination and ran STAR to its intended end.
“Democracy is hard” is not a great response. Access to information is a fundamental problem, not a “nice to have” extra bonus. News coverage of two finalists will inherently be better than coverage of a dozen.
Yes, because the electorates are different. That’s the crux of the problem with primaries, regardless of method used.
Again, you’ve not got rid of this problem with primaries – you’ve simply moved it earlier, to a smaller group of people.
Democracy is hard. You’re arguing to make it easier by moving choice from the larger electorate to a smaller one. I don’t disagree that makes it easier. But it remains distorting because the primary electorate is not the same as the general electorate, and the general electorate is being given less choice. The general electorate has to hope that the primary electorate is representative, shares similar values, etc, but there’s no reason that has to be true.
The primaries are open to everyone, so if someone chooses not to vote, they can’t really complain that they weren’t given a choice in the general election. I should probably say I have been picturing non-partisan races like those for city council. If we moved to open primaries, my arguments would hold for partisan races as well.
Thank goodness…I agree that 2nd and 3rd will coalesce to defeat Hardesty. Good riddance
If it’s Hardesty vs Gonzales, I think half of Mozyrsky voters go to Hardesty and she gets a narrow win. I know people who voted for Mozyrsky who can’t stomach Gonzales. That police union endorsement is a kiss of death in Portland elections.
That’s my hunch too Paul. And based on what he’s said post-election, Gonzalez is likely to tack even more to the right in the General campaign. I think a lot of people in this town are misreading the mood of voters.
In most cases we supported the incumbents. Does that mean folks are secretly happy about how things are going?
Paul, it’s interesting you say “half” the Mozyrky voters will vote for Hardesty. I appreciate that, because I’m in that half that might not be able to get my pen to make a mark next to the Hardesty bubble. (And I’m certainly not voting for Gonzales.)
As far as Jonathan’s comment about “misreading the mood of voters,” the town recently gave Wheeler a 2nd term over Ianaronne, and also elected Mingus Mapps. More than half the primary voters rejected Hardesty, despite her leg up-and really questionable ethics–in using office resources to campaign.
A doorknob could have won over Ianaronne, She is running Street Trust into the ground… Portland has extremely low standards for the people who run the city.
Hardesty is great example of doing nothing and exciting J Maus…
If she gets half of Mozyrsky voters, it won’t be a narrow win. (Unless a lot of people who did not vote in the primary turn out and vote for Gonzales in the general election.)
Uh no, that’s not how it works, Chris. You don’t have to be shocked when Hardesty wins. Come help with the campaign and be even less shocked! Thanks.
I will definitely be donating to Hardesty’s campaign and will probably will do some canvassing. I see Gonzalez as the worst viable candidate in any of this year’s primary campaigns. And I continue to feel deep shame for how much blame for issues like homelessness Portlanders place on the shoulders of commissioner Hardesty alone, given that she is the first black woman elected citywide in our city’s history, and has no more power than any other council member (although she is the only effective one imo, the only other person who’s effected change is Mingus Mapps and his have proved very bad).
Provide a list of her accomplishments in 4 years…
I will wait..
https://www.joannforportland.com/achievements
I’m so relieved to learn that gun violence, pedestrian deaths, and the homeless crisis have all improved over the past four years. Mission accomplished.
Nice straw man.
I see 33 items on that list.
The two items that deal with gun violence don’t say it has improved. A pilot program was very successful at reducing gun violence in a single neighborhood. Investments were made in outreach, engaging with victims, and restorative justice, all of which should have long term positive impacts.
The two items that deal with traffic violence and deaths don’t even mention pedestrian deaths or say that the situation has improved. Emergency safety improvements were implemented and red light camera red tape was reduced, both of which should have long term positive impacts.
The two items that deal with homelessness don’t say it has improved. They both deal with the creation of the Portland Street Response, which has been successful and has been recommended for expansion.
You don’t even address the other 27 items on the list.
These problems are not a Portland specific problem. Gun violence, traffic safety, and homelessness has all spiked during the pandemic nationally across US. Hardesty has put money into safer streets, helped get more shelters, among pilot programs with promising results.
They have spiked more in Portland than they have nationally. We are clearly doing worse at something, and it isn’t the local economy. After years of turmoil and a lack of support, staffing at the PPB is lower per capita than any other comparable city. Our lack of enforcement is making our city more attractive for urban campers and drug addicts. Some of these things directly relate to policies of officials like Hardesty, but obviously, the problem is much bigger than just her.
https://www.police1.com/police-recruiting/articles/why-portland-has-fewer-cops-now-than-any-point-in-past-30-years-Zhqu31wioG0Nj7PX/
https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/544860-436054-street-lives-portlandians-dopesick-blues-
[Man could move back to Utah to live with family, but chooses to stay here due to lax drug laws]
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/01/15/2021-was-a-record-year-for-homicides-in-portland/
Your third point isn’t really an apples-to-apples comparison. While murder rates rose 30% nationally, plenty of cities saw larger increases in year-over-year murder rates in 2020. Lots of higher income people left urban cores during covid, so the denominator in murder rate calculations shrunk. Comparing a given city to the national trend isn’t fair, you should compare within a given level of urbanicity.
Another way to put that: Portland was among dozens of major American cities that experienced a sharp increase in murder rates between 2019 and 2020.
Larger cities like Los Angeles or New York saw less of an extreme bump because their population is so much larger, per capita rates are less sensitive to extreme changes. Cities like Jacksonville and Austin saw even larger increases than Portland. Feels to me like this is part of a much larger context and not the fault of 1 of Portland’s 5 city councilors?
Context matters, says the commenter who goes by a slur.
unnecessary name calling
what, people emphasizing violence using guns. Sounds like Chicago in the 20’s 19 and 20
For me the police oversight measure + portland street response are huge accomplishments she 100% owns.
She got us new bathwater. Too bad about the baby, though.
When voters are not looking at a page full of names in November the voting dynamic will be quite different. Also, who knows what climate catastrophes await us this summer and fall; could massive wildfires, deadly heatwaves, some other severe natural (human-accelerated) event change a candidate’s fate…I think yes!
We do need to push those still in the race to make significant policy statements about their intent to push efforts that mitigate climate chaos.
Overall, I see an exciting November ahead.
I didn’t vote for Gonzalez, but I have to admit, he hits the Parks/MUPs/Sidewalks point again and again in this interview:
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/05/09/portland-city-council-candidate-rene-gonzalez-answers-opbs-questions/
Hopefully he wins and he gets PBOT. It seems like our best chance to reclaim our bike infrastructure in this city.
But he doesn’t talk about biking or non-car transportation at all in this interview.
He mentions clearing and reclaiming MUPs and sidewalks multiple times. How does that not relate to cycling and non-car transportation?
He’s talking about arresting homeless folks. It’s not about pedestrians and folks on bikes.
Yeah not the most inspiring news.
I’m a progressive and I’m not relieved. I am however hopeful she will lose the the runoff.
yes sorry Bryan. Should have said “some” progressives. I’ve changed the headline.
Why may I ask that your hopeful she will lose?
Just take a look around at all the squalid drug camps everywhere.
Homelessness is not directly Hardesty’s purview. There are a number of officials and bureaus that are directly in charge of homelessness.
Why has there been an effort to tie her to homelessness and why have Portlanders fallen for it?
There is real animosity between her and the police. I think if she is gone the city will have a smoother time.
Our biggest issues in the city: gun violence, homelessness, and traffic deaths will flow through or around the police one way or another. Hardesty lost my support when she blamed officers for fires downtown. I know she recognized the gaffe and apologized, but the damage was done. We have to have a council that can work with the police union. The union currently doesn’t want to anything to do with 20% of city council. We have to reset relations.
Why not hold her responsible? She is a city commissioner, and in our current form of government the council bears collective responsibility for the state of the city. She is not solely responsible for the city’s ills, but it is completely reasonable for voters to provide negative feedback to a city-wide elected official who bears some measure of responsibility.
The county is primarily responsible for homelessness services. The Joint office on Homelessness is part of the county, not the city.
The thing she has done that’s had a great impact is to deliver the Portland Street Response. That program responded to 900 calls for service with none of them resulting in arrest. It makes a ton of sense to send people trained to provide mental health services to mental health related situations. https://katu.com/news/local/psu-to-share-one-year-evaluation-of-the-portland-street-response
Also, since when are we OK with the preferred practices of our police bureau. I’m not anti-police at all. I appreciate them wholeheartedly. But, when I have friends who had tear gas in their houses and see racial disparities play out, I think it’s good to question. It’s good to put pressure on to create change in practices and policies that are unjust or that result in more violence than required.
Hardesty is a critic and rightly so. The experience with police of our black neighbors is something to acknowledge and respect. As a black woman, she has to know way too many people that have had bad experiences. We know that she has herself because the police union leaked faulty information about her to make her look bad. https://www.opb.org/article/2021/12/30/jo-ann-hardesty-hit-and-run-false-report-portland-oregon-commissioner/
Do we support police retaliation towards someone who dares to question practices and strives to change the system? I sure hope not.
I think it’s a good question about why this is being pinned on her. The entire council should be holding the bag equally.
I like Hardesty because she is brave. I like her because she truly centers on equity. I like her because she supports bikes and is a champion for radical action to fight climate change. And, I like her because she has gotten some important things done.
Vote for Hardesty.
We need police to enforce laws. One of our biggest problems is also the DA. ANTIFA groups that attach police and cause vandalism should be locked up.
I agree that police should enforce laws! Which is why it’s great to have Portland Street Response reduce the amount of calls police has to go to for calls that are primarily mental health responses.
That measure, in itself, tells us nothing about whether the program is working or not. If the responders went to Starbucks instead of answering the call, you’d get the same statistic.
What matters is whether PSR was able to address the problem, how that success rate would compares to the police, and what the cost differential was. If PSR is getting people off the street, preventing issues, and otherwise making things better, then that’s great.
I view PSR positively, though I see them as an extension of rather than a competitor to the police*. Ideally, they would all be part of a comprehensive menu of emergency services that would be dispatched when and where needed, just as we currently dispatch police, fire, and medical services on an as-needed but often overlapping manner.
I want my city leaders to collaborate with the police, and help them understand what Portland needs and how to do their job better. That’s hard to do if you can’t grow beyond the “critic of police” mindset.
*And, when, as is inevitable sooner or later, a PSR staffer gets assaulted on the job, be prepared for them to start working much more closely with the cops.
Elizabeth, Adam, thanks for answering all of my questions. It’s interesting that there were at least three incumbents up for election in metro, the county and city council that are directly responsible for implementing programs to address homelessness, but Hardesty received more blame for homeless camps and the response to the homeless crisis than they did. I wonder what makes Hardesty different than them. Hmmm
I think Kafoury has done a terrible job as well.
Maus chose to focus on this specific council race, for some reason, which spurred a debate focusing on Hardesty.
You will find that those of us who voted against Hardesty also voted against the incumbents at the county level. It’s easy to assume that people who don’t agree with you are all racist morons, but that isn’t necessarily the case here.
Person who runs a website about transportation chooses to focus on race that the current head of PBOT is in, doesn’t seem odd to me.
Did JM have a whole cover story about Eudaly losing?
Stop playing the martyr! No one called you or any individual a racist moron. But, we have to acknowledge that racism exists and has consequences. I mean, Ryan hasn’t delivered on the rest villages, but somehow the vitriol about that isn’t too much in the conversation. Nor was it in the vote.
Do you think that the crew in neighborhood associations who lead the charge on fighting back rest villages were happy they weren’t delivered? I sure think so.
If you look at the campaign material for Vadim, it’s filled with folks who fight these types of housing services, whether they be shelters or villages, every step of the way. So, they supported Vadim, who thinks NAs aren’t able to stop enough things, and Dan who didn’t deliver a key service that the NAs don’t want anyway.
Unfortunately, people don’t have to be “racist morons” to be swayed by messaging that ties candidates from racial backgrounds that are traditionally lower socioeconomic status to problems that involve people of low SES. The campaigns running against Hardesty used this tactic without hesitation. For example: https://twitter.com/shanedkavanaugh/status/1526003672735309824?s=20&t=OhV9RUHa4tHaIwcbKGt4tw
Aw yes,,the race card and the homeless card all in One.. No one gives one rip about what color Hardesty is except her defenders.. For the last time. she is as Incompetent as Ryan and Wheeler are, and they are the whitest people I know.
Which of Gonzales’ policies do you think will improve our situation relative to Hardesty’s? In what sense are you a progressive?
Cracking down on the environmental disaster of broken down leaking RV’s for one.
Cleaning up the MUP’S for another one.
Do you also think like so called progressives Hardesty and Wheeler that human beings sleeping in garbage is progressive?
That not immediately funding Drug and Mental health treatment when the city is flush with money is somehow progressive?
That not funding and taking care of the trash problem in the city is progressive?
In what sense are you a Progressive??
I’m a progressive in the sense that I am generally supportive of social reforms that I think will improve marginalized peoples’ lives.
I don’t think Rene Gonzalez has much if a concrete policy platform laid out, but he seems to be broadly in favor of allocating more money to the PPB and keeping schools from enacting covid safety protocols. Those are distinctly conservative positions. It’s fine not to be a progressive all the time, you could own that!
Can you share his views on school Covid protocols, because I’m not finding them? Did he oppose remote learning last school year?
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but it now seems clear that PPS moving to full remote learning for the 2020-2021 school year was a mistake. It didn’t measurably reduce harm, and it inhibited learning, especially for lower-resource students.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/briefing/school-closures-covid-learning-loss.html
Yeah his group ED300 has plenty of info online, here’s a pretty holistic summary.
These all seem to be supported by the studies cited in the NYT article above. Again, hindsight is 20/020, but I don’t think this is going to be the best way to smear Gonzalez. Most PPS parents are going to agree with this document.
Well there was this interesting answer from Rene during the WWeek debate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDvbQaA1mJI&t=2695s
I personally don’t have strong opinions on when PDX schools should have been opened back up, but I do think his answer was revealing – it strikes me as an irresponsibly cavalier and hasty approach to a global pandemic that we knew little about in those early months, that was claiming lives and straining our healthcare system at a severe rate, and that we had no effective treatment for and no vaccine for until a year later. 2 weeks? Huh.
His opinion was the schools should have been open sooner like all of Europe did…
I’m progressive in the sense that I think families shouldn’t have to worry about getting shot at the park or mugged at the bus stop. Hardesty’s words and deeds have made Portlanders more dangerous, and Gonzalez has a plan for restoring shared spaces and infrastructure, so he’s getting my vote.
A tsunami of outside funding??
Do you do any research?
“Hardesty, Gonzalez and Mozyrsky are all participating in the city’s Small Donor Program that matches small contributions with public funds. Gonzalez has reported raising the most money, $335,207. Hardesty was in second place with $291,128 and Mozyrsky was third with $232,404.”
Money was a wash at best. Hardesty had plenty.
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/05/12/portland-united-political-action-committee-campaign-finance-city-council/
Their candidate is losing… thanks for making my point.
This is supposed to nest under AMA response.
I voted for Rene, but given a pending move to Wilsonville this summer, and in the interest of reducing any seller’s remorse to zero, I kind of hope Hardesty pulls it off in the fall.
The election comments are truly entertaining. As JM puts it with Portland being “a very very left-leaning town at its core” we are well on our way to becoming the wealthy utopian progressive enclave that many argue against but is inevitable when you vote for leaders as far to the left as possible. Don’t take my word for it. Just observe what has become of Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and NYC to name a few. Name a single progressive US city that has economically diversified their population. You can’t. Poor people are fleeing to the suburbs & beyond. Urbanism is the new status symbol in America for the progressive elite.
I’ve lost sight of what “left-leaning” means anymore in terms of city progression. Does it mean bikes and buses? We’ve lost the mass use of these things. Does it mean drugs being done open air? Does it mean allowing encampments? Does it mean making housing affordable? Is Boulder progressive? Is San Francisco? We certainly are NOTHING like any European city whatsoever.
To many, it’s “all things bad”. And vice versa. In other words, in most contexts used in American political discourse, it’s completely meaningless, much like “progressive” is.
Being progressive doesn’t mean you have to tolerate and enable a drug epidemic that is destroying our communities. Real progressivism is partly about strengthening our communities, not letting them disintegrate to the point decent people of all kinds feel they have to move out of them to escape crime and squalor.
The United States has free movement and the free purchase of property. No city successful city will be actually affordable when we have extreme wealth inequality as a nation. Really has nothing to do with cities.
Who knew that allowing people to own property without paying taxes on capital gains and imputed rent would create a rigged system where the owner-class conspires with captured government to create zoning oligopolies and grant themselves massive tax deductions on the margin interest of their highly leveraged asset*.
*The federal government also deeply subsidizes their margin interest rate
I admire your optimism, but I wouldn’t just assume Val Hoyle will win the 4th in the general. DeFazio only beat Skarlatos by 5 points 2 years ago, & while the new boundaries are more favorable to Democrats, Hoyle obviously is lacking DeFazio’s incumbency advantage and seems to be less appealing to the democratic base. Hopefully the governor’s race & the Supreme Court will inspire democrats to turn out but if not, I think Skarlatos has a chance (which sucks because he’s a corrupt, incompetent fascist).
I support local candidates who bring creativity, motivation AND financial integrity to Portland’s political scene. Candidates can be bursting with excellent ideas for “making Portland great again” however if their book-keeping is shoddy, I move on. Book-keeping integrity is the very foundation of any effective governance.