By Leighton Woodhouse
Tuesday, November 01, 2022
PORTLAND,
ORE.—Christine Drazan—a pro-life, pro-gun rights Republican best known
for fighting a state climate-change bill—is in a dead heat to become the
next governor of Oregon.
I
repeat: Oregon.
Oregon,
where Democrats have controlled the governor’s mansion for four decades, and
the state legislature for 15 years. Oregon, where medical marijuana has been
legal since 1998 (trailing only California) and assisted dying is a birthright
and hippies have long been a major constituency. (In 2013, the real-estate
blog Estately ranked Eugene the No. 1 city in America
for hippies.)
If you
want to know why super-progressive Oregon is thinking about voting red,
consider one small community of people living in houses floating on the
Columbia River.
Linda
Donewald is one of them. She moved here from the Phoenix suburbs because her
husband dreamed of living on the river. They’re not especially political. They
love Portland for the same reason most people love Portland. “The downtown area
is filled with history and a variety of restaurants, shops, theaters, and an
awesome Saturday Market on the Waterfront,” Donewald said of the Portland she
knew a few years ago. Now, she said, downtown Portland “looks like a war zone.”
Until recently,
the city’s biggest homeless encampment stood just across the street from the
floating-homes community, in what’s called the Big Four Corners Natural Area. The camp was founded in 2018 by homeless activists on a
protected wetlands site. They used to call it the Village of Hope.
By 2020,
hundreds of people were living in the Village of Hope, and crime was rampant.
Houseboat community residents started finding their car windows smashed in.
Thieves stole their catalytic converters, and then their cars. On one occasion,
a resident returned to his floating home to find someone in his bathroom taking
a shower.
“We
considered hiring a nightly foot patrol, but it was too expensive,” said Denise
Olson, another floating home resident. “We felt terrorized.”
The
sound of gunfire became routine, residents told me when I visited the site last
week. One said you could smell the paint thinner-like odor of meth labs in the
encampment, which burst into flames on several occasions. City firefighters
refused to go into the encampment; it was too dangerous.
Then the
homeless started stealing neighborhood dogs for ransom, Kevin Dahlgren, the
president of a Pacific Northwest homeless advocacy group, told me. One homeless
person told Dahlgren that bodies of deceased camp residents are buried in the
site’s marshy ground.
Trying
to get the city to do something about it was useless.
Residents
said they got bounced from one unresponsive government agency to the next,
until they finally got a meeting with an aide to their state representative,
Democrat Zach Hudson, Olson told me.
The aide
told the houseboat owners that their homeless neighbors “just need a hand-up.”
She suggested they organize a barbecue for the homeless. A barbecue?! The
houseboat owners were stunned.
“I've
never experienced anything like this,” said Donewald, who, with Olson, created
a neighborhood security committee. “There’s been a failure of
leadership.”
It seems
like everyone here is talking about “failure of leadership” right now.
The
outgoing, term-limited governor, Kate Brown, a Democrat, is the least popular governor in America. In April, a poll showed Oregon voters preferring a generic
Republican over a generic Democrat by 18 points.
For most
of October, Drazan led her Democratic rival, Tina Kotek, by a
few points. In the last week, the race has tightened, with both candidates now
at 39.1 percent. They are joined by third-party candidate Betsy Johnson, a
moderate Democrat, with just under 14 percent. (Drazan and Kotek overlapped in
the state House, with Kotek serving as Speaker from 2013 to 2022, and Drazan
serving as Kotek’s counterpart, minority leader, from 2019 to 2021.)
Homelessness
is the number one issue among Oregon voters, particularly in Portland, followed by drugs and crime. The
gubernatorial race has become a referendum on political leaders’—and, really,
Democrats’—handling of these issues, and on the general deterioration that has
taken place on their watch.
Signs of
that deterioration are everywhere.
The
murder rate is surging in Portland, especially among those
living on the street. In a recent survey of Portland residents, 84% of those
polled said they felt unsafe downtown at night, and 61% felt the same way
during the day. Eighty-two percent want more police in the city.
Drug
addiction is as bad as ever. “There is no evidence that Measure
110 has reduced drug use, drug-related crime, or overdose in the state,” Keith
Humphreys, a psychologist who specializes in addiction and served as a senior
advisor in the Obama administration, told me, referring to a progressive 2020
initiative that decriminalized drug possession. Meanwhile, Mexico’s Sinaloa
drug cartel is active in “every corner of the state”, as The Oregonian puts
it. (Police in Eugene recently seized 18 pounds of fentanyl in a single traffic stop,
enough to kill most of the state of Oregon.)
And, for
the first time in over a decade, Portland is shrinking, with young adults leaving in particularly large
numbers: between 2020 and 2021, the county that includes Portland had a
net loss of more than 4,000 residents between the ages of 25 and 29. Oregon as
a whole has experienced one of the biggest slowdowns in population growth in the
country.
All of
which has led lifelong Democrats to reassess their loyalties.
Angela
Renteria, a longtime Portland resident who used to work for a downtown branch
of U.S. Bank said she’s watched Portland “completely turn to shit.”
“The
homeless situation has skyrocketed,” she said. “Mental health has gone
downhill.” The decline has cast a pall over public life. Renteria is a smoker,
and every time she lights up a cigarette outside, she said, she’s accosted. “I
work really hard for my $10 pack of cigarettes,” she said. People come up to
her and ask to bum one after another after another. When she says no, they call
her “a fucking bitch,” she said.
“The
biggest thing to me, though—the most off-putting thing, is open defecation,”
she said. “I’m walking down the street with my kids going to a bookstore, and
someone is squatted on the sidewalk taking a shit.”
“My
kids, there are times they want to go to Portland and check out shops,” Diana
Sapera told me. “Now, I don’t feel comfortable doing that. My kids are scared,
seeing grown adults yelling, hitting things, throwing things. They see needles
and are like, ‘What is that?’”
“I don’t
know one person who says ‘I want to go downtown today, want to come?,’” said
Olson. “Nobody wants to go there.”
Sapera,
a social worker who has voted Democratic her entire life, said: “It feels like
night and day from even just this last year.” She cast her mail-in ballot for
Drazan.
Sapera’s
husband, George Carillo, was similarly disgusted with Portland’s spiral. Like
his wife, Carillo has been a lifelong Democrat. Now he’s not so sure.
“It’s
single-party control,” he told me. “Things are going downhill: inflation,
crime, homelessness, addiction, overdoses. Here in Oregon, look outside—you see
the homelessness, people dying in the streets from overdoses, people having
psychotic breaks. It’s in shambles right now. It wasn’t always like this.”
Carillo
became so frustrated with the status quo in Oregon that he ran for office for
the first time in his life in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. After
dropping out, instead of going with his party’s nominee, he threw his support
behind Christine Drazan.
Drazan
has positioned herself as a moderate—unlike many Republicans, she acknowledges
that Joe Biden is the freely and fairly elected president of the United
States—but the caucus she comes from is far from it. Last year, a Republican
state representative opened the doors of the state Capitol to allow
armed, anti-lockdown protesters inside. The protesters pepper-sprayed cops and
attacked journalists. A month later, the Oregon GOP called January 6 a “‘false flag’ operation” and compared it to the Nazis
burning down the Reichstag.
Even so,
13% of undecided voters leaning toward Drazan are registered Democrats,
according to a recent poll. (Among undecided voters leaning toward Kotek,
only 4% are Republicans.) In an era of hyper-partisanship, that degree of party
disloyalty is remarkable. According to a Pew study from 2020, only 4% of voters that year
cast ballots for a major candidate of the opposite party.
Key to
her appeal is Drazan’s break with the status quo on homelessness—rejecting
the Housing First philosophy that has become
orthodoxy in progressive cities up and down the West Coast. Housing First
posits that the main reason people are living on the streets is lack of
affordable housing, and the best way to solve the problem is to build more of
it.
Drazan
thinks the real problem is drug addiction—not high rent. She wants to “end encampments,” repeal Measure 110 and expand
addiction-treatment services, in addition to building more housing. “We have to
help Oregonians get sober and stay sober,” she said in August in response to a series of
questions posed by Oregon Public Broadcasting.
If
Drazan wins, it will be “a shock to the system,” said Parker Butterworth, a Democratic consultant who works frequently
for Oregon candidates. Democrats will be relentless and myopic in positioning
themselves to win the seat back in four years. “Right at the beginning she has
to make the case to Democrats, to the center left, that she’s not an enemy. She
needs to tap into that old Oregonian way of independence and populism.”
George
Donnerberg, the developer behind the floating-home community, has seen this
return to political independence among Portland voters firsthand.
Donnerberg,
who traces his family history in Portland to 1864, lives in one of the floating
homes himself. The mayhem he has witnessed from the Big Four Corners camp
compelled him to run for state representative—as a Republican. His district,
like pretty much all of the Portland area, is overwhelmingly Democratic—“I'm
walking a tightrope on this thing,” he told me. But, he said, he keeps meeting
disillusioned Democrats while knocking on doors.
One of
those disillusioned Democrats, a self-described “union guy” from a union
family, told me that nearly every vote he’s ever cast has been for Democrats.
This time, he’s voting for Drazan. He insisted on staying anonymous out of fear
of drawing attention to himself.
“There’s
a stunning amount of violence from Antifa,” he said, referring to the
self-styled radical “anti-fascist” activists who are particularly numerous and
active in Portland.
Antifa
has become the most dramatic symbol of the city’s lawlessness.
Angela
Renteria’s old job, at U.S. Bank, was near where the Black Lives Matter
protests in the summer of 2020 happened. “They had to shut down the
branch—people were blocking the streets, throwing trash cans at cars,” she told
me, adding: “Right after Columbus Day, they spray-painted our bank. Our
higher-ups and security instructed us on what to do if things got out of hand:
you’re going to lock yourselves in the vault.”
She said
the entire time she worked at the branch, she saw “maybe two police cars the
whole time. I saw ambulances, fire trucks, but no cops. They just let them do
their thing.”
Denise
Olson, the floating-house resident, echoed Renteria. “A solid year of
rioting—daily, nightly,” she said. “The city of Portland allowed that rioting
to go on for so long.” She believes the rioting contributed enormously to the
crime in her neighborhood by tying up the police downtown and leaving the rest
of the city to fend for itself. “If there wasn’t an immediate life or death
situation you weren’t going to get a response,” she said.
The
question is where all these people—these newly unaligned voters—go next. After
the midterms are over. After 2022.
“The
Republican Party has almost nothing to offer me,” the unnamed “union guy” told
me. He described himself as a “1960s Civil Rights type,” the kind of person who
believes that “the best way to end discrimination is to end discrimination.” In
2016, he voted for Bernie Sanders. Now, he said, the Democrats are all about
dividing the world into victims and oppressors. “It seems to be their goal,” he
said. “They want more division.”
Olson is
likewise disillusioned with the party she grew up in. She was born and raised
in Portland, in a Catholic family, and she mostly voted Democratic. Now, she
felt embarrassed to admit where she came from. When people asked, she’d say,
kind of sheepishly: “I’m from Port…land.” Everyone in her floating home
community agreed that it was great that the city recently cleared away the homeless encampment across
the street, but it took ages, and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t come
back, and if they did, you couldn’t rely on the old Democratic leadership to
take action.
Olson’s
politics are shifting. The first time she voted for a Republican was in
2016—for Donald Trump. She couldn’t stand Hillary Clinton. “The Democrats will
stay with the status quo, and nothing will change,” she said of this year’s
election. “Kate Brown has had eight years, and I can’t recall one thing that
was a good thing that she’s done. I’m voting for Christine Drazan.”
Diana
Sapera told me that she had hoped to be able to support Tina Kotek. She was
a social worker, after all. Social workers vote for progressives.
But she couldn’t do it.
Because
of the three-way race, whoever wins next week will almost definitely have less
than 50% of the vote, Butterworth said. The victor will have a lot to prove.
Symbolism and ideology won’t be enough—voters need the kinds of results they
can see with their own eyes in places like downtown Portland. Speaking of the
mood of Oregon voters, he said, “This sort of tribalism—I’m left, you’re right,
we have nothing in common—has got to go.”
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