Rarely do cities or other governments go through such a big organizational change, while at the same bringing in mostly new leadership, as Portland is doing now.
There’s a chance the next mayor will be a relatively little-known candidate who has never been elected to office, city or otherwise, just as the city’s governing structure is being upended.
But there may be a message beyond Portland for the whole state coming out of this city election, in the form of ranked choice voting. Portland is using this system right now, at a time when Oregon voters are being asked to decide whether to adopt it on a statewide scale.
On the far side of this election, Portland’s mayor and council – whoever is elected – will be a lot different than what the city has had. The job of mayor will be far smaller than it traditionally has been, and it will have a much smaller management role while still serving as the speaker for the city. The council will have its traditional semi-management role stripped away, and at the same time, many more council members will share the legislative work.
The city’s new mayor-council lineup may be among the least experienced in recent city history, though there’s plenty of Portland precedent for electing mayors without prior work background in City Hall.
There’s real uncertainty about who may win. The ballot is crowded, with 19 contenders vying for the role, which makes prediction all the more difficult.
This campaign does have some structure. Three of the candidates are incumbent council members: Rene Gonzales, Carmen Rubio and Mingus Mapps, and the limited polling has shown them rising toward the top, though name familiarity may have contributed to that early on.
Portland does have a more or less front-runner in terms of conventional wisdom: current council member Rene Gonzalez, who has been described as a Biden Democrat (and self-described as a “centrist”) who is also law enforcement-oriented and not a favorite of the cultural left. He has a strong collection of endorsements, though, including that of The Oregonian/OregonLive, and he may win. Polling by DHM Research for The Oregonian gives him 23% of the first place choices, twice the percentage of any other contender, though that’s still a small slice of the vote.
The other candidate often mentioned as a top prospect is fellow council member Carmen Rubio, who has been active on city policies from energy to housing, endorsed as the top choice by the Portland Mercury and backed by a number of liberal-leaning organizations. But she also has problems and bad headlines, stemming in part from a series of personal issues, many related to driving and parking tickets.
Most of the other candidates, including council member Mapps, seem to be trailing in endorsements and polling metrics. But there is another factor, a wild card, in this election.
It is the changed election method, ranked choice voting, in which voters can rate their preferred six candidates – or fewer if they wish – in order of preference. If no candidate gets more than half the vote initially, the lowest-ranking candidates are one by one struck from contention as other candidates get their votes. That means the person who normally might be the top choice might lose to a candidate who may not be the first choice of the most voters but has the broadest appeal expressed by second- or third-place choices.
Remarkably, that might happen in the case of a lesser-known candidate who has never served in elective office, business owner Keith Wilson. He has the endorsement of Willamette Week, which said issues with Gonzalez and Rubio “have left many voters throwing up their hands and asking, isn’t there another choice? There is. It’s Keith Wilson.”
That may sound like a lightweight reason to support a candidate, but it’s more than just speculation. An Oct. 18 poll that showed that a third of Portland voters were undecided still indicated Wilson had enough support beyond first-place voting to defeat Gonzalez by an estimated 53% to 47%. Wilson, the CEO of a trucking company who has also done work on homelessness, appears to have picked up significant late-campaign support.
This election, which will reshape the structure of Portland city government, will make a big difference on how it addresses most of its key civic issues.
And how it chooses its new mayor may give Oregonians elsewhere food for thought when it comes to ranked choice voting.
Randy Stapilus has researched and written about Northwest politics and issues since 1976 for a long list of newspapers and other publications. A former newspaper reporter and editor, and more recently an author and book publisher, he lives in Carlton. oregoncapitalchronicle.com