Category: Portland, Oregon Local News

GOOD MORNING, SUNDAY! It’s the perfect time to catch up on some of the great reporting and stories the Mercury churned out this week! (PRO TIP: If you despise being “the last to know,” then be one of the first to know by signing up for Mercury newsletters! All the latest stories shipped directly to your email’s in-box… and then… YOUR HEAD.)

• County Commissioner Candidate Saw More Than $40K Funneled to Her Husband by a Board She Oversees

Multnomah County Commissioner candidate Jessie Burke’s vision and methods for Old Town’s rebirth have raised eyebrows. Meanwhile, the board she oversees has been accused of being hostile toward homeless service organizations.

• POP QUIZ PDX!

Calling all brainiacs: 🤓 It’s time for another super fun edition of POP QUIZ PDX! This week’s trivia game includes sassy-ass Qs about VOLCANOES! STRANGE LIGHTS IN THE SKY! (And Jill Biden?) JILL BIDEN! See how well you score! 🤔

• What Multnomah County Voters Could Learn From Others Who Ousted Progressive DAs

Fears over crime and safety can fuel election outcomes, but in cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia, where progressive DAs were ousted in favor of “tough on crime” prosecutors, research shows little evidence that DAs impacted crime rates.

• As Maxine Dexter Touts Progressive Values, Conservative Donors are Flooding Her Campaign Coffers

With the election to determine who will take over Oregon’s 3rd House District just days away, will Maxine Dexter’s flood of opaque donations impact the race?

• Portland Transportation and Climate Groups Sue Over I-5 Expansion Plan

Five Portland groups are suing the state’s transportation department to stop its $1.9 billion plan to expand I-5 through central Portland, alleging the project is out of step with local climate and growth plans—despite the state’s effort to say otherwise.

• Mercury Music Picks

Seattle hardcore band Blood Brothers reunite for US tour, Pickathon delivers second 2024 lineup, Babehoven headlines Polaris Hall, and more music news and picks!

• Popular Music From Parenthetical Girls

You may remember Zac Pennington from defunct Portland band Parenthetical Girls. With their new group, Popular Music, Pennington and Prudence Rees-Lee’s recorded Minor Works which includes a 17-piece Russian chamber orchestra that was recorded via Zoom.

• THE TRASH REPORT

Calling all trash pandas! 🦝 Line up for your weekly spoonful of garbage-y gossip with THE TRASH REPORT. This week: Jill Biden does Lake O, the latest inbred dog news, and Kelly Ripa is doing nothing but ruining everyone’s day.

• Laughing Matter

This interview with the fascinating Laraaji might be the best thing you read today. Just some of the topics discussed: Frog puppets, laughter as medicine, being investigated by butterflies, and making music with plants.

• Theater Review: Hand2Mouth’s Spring Show Speaks With the Living, the Dead, and Death

Spoiler alert: Everybody dies at the end of Hand2Mouth’s Memento Mori. But they also die at the beginning and middle, onstage and offstage, in anticipation and in memory. That’s the point.

• SAVAGE LOVE

“I’ve never been able to orgasm, and my current sexual relationship stinks. So why should I continue trying?” Dan Savage and a guest expert ride to the rescue with some solid advice in this week’s SAVAGE LOVE!

WOW, THAT IS A LOT OF GOOD READIN’. I hope you didn’t have any other plans this weekend! Dig in, and remember: Producing all this hard work costs moolah—so please consider contributing to the Mercury to keep it all coming! Thanks!

HILLSBORO, Ore. — Hillsboro Police are searching for a driver who allegedly struck a pedestrian, killing them, on late Thursday evening. 

Officers responded to Southeast Tualatin Valley Highway and Southeast Cypress Street around 10:08 p.m., where a dark-colored pickup truck struck a pedestrian and fled the scene. 

Though life-saving measures were attempted, the pedestrian, who has not been identified, died of their injuries. Washington County Sheriff’s Office Crash Analysis investigators went to the scene. 

Police said the truck is a newer pickup truck with a bed cover. If anyone has information about the owner of the truck or its location, call the non-emergency dispatch at 503-629-0111 and reference case number 24-9665.

See a typo in this article? Email web@kgw.com for corrections.

The final weeks of the campaign to replace Rep. Earl Blumeaneur in Congress have been dominated by reporting on a single issue: the millions of dollars of outside spending that have flooded in to try to stop the candidacy of former Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal. 

The money, as The Intercept and other outlets have reported, is coming predominantly from one source: AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that appears to have soured on Jayapal for her pro-ceasefire stance in the aftermath of the October 7 attack in Israel and subsequent assault on Gaza. 

With no limit on outside spending, the deluge of money spent to defeat Jayapal has been eye-popping: Jayapal’s key opponent, state representative and physician Maxine Dexter, is reportedly being backed by an outside expenditure campaign on pace to exceed $3 million by the time the primary ends on Tuesday. Dexter’s campaign  raised nearly $220,000 in a single day last week, with the vast majority of those contributions coming from outside of Oregon. 

The outside spending, in some ways, is setting the race up as a test of how amenable Portland voters are to outside campaign interference, generally, as well as outside spending from the Israel lobby and aligned right-wing forces in particular. If Dexter wins, the consequences may be wide-ranging. 

It’s not just the 3rd District race that has seen a flood of outside money. The Democratic primary in the 5th District, where Jamie McLeod-Skinner is facing Janelle Bynum, has seen a similar surge of spending on Bynum’s behalf from the same political action group that is supporting Dexter. McLeod-Skinner has been the beneficiary of a smaller independent expenditure as well. 

Local races have had their share of outside money, too. District Attorney Mike Schmidt, facing prosecutor Nathan Vasquez in his re-election bid, has received substantial backing from the Working Families Party and has also been attacked by outside spending from reactionary groups like People for Portland. 

This level of outside spending is antithetical to the wishes of Portland voters, who have consistently voiced their opposition to big money in politics when given the chance. 

The city has long used public financing to fund campaigns through its Small Donor Election program, and in 2018, Portland voters passed a measure instituting campaign finance limits by a wide margin. Earlier this year, the state legislature passed a bill limiting campaign contributions on a statewide level. 

But states and municipalities can’t do anything to stop independent expenditures in federal elections, and it remains to be seen whether opposition to interference from outside groups—particularly those groups who are aligned with right-wing causes—will sway voters when it comes time to fill out their ballots. 

John Horvick, senior vice president of DHM Research, argued that voters lack consistency on the question of outside spending—that they care deeply about the issue when it hurts candidates they support, but care less about it when it aids them. 

“Voters will tell us that there is too much money in politics,” Horvick said. “Voters will tell us that they want campaign spending limits. Voters will vote for campaign spending limits. But when you ask people to name all the things they care about on a candidate or an election… how much money was spent just doesn’t come up or so rarely comes up.”

Caleb said he isn’t so sure. 

“Prior to the pandemic, I would say Portland was a place where it kind of hurt you to be seen as the big money candidate,” Caleb said. “I think that people would look at that suspiciously and oftentimes vote against candidates who have the most money in a race or were excessively wealthy.”

But Caleb posited that the pandemic may have upended that paradigm—and Jason Kafoury, an attorney who works on campaign finance reform with Honest Elections Oregon, said anger about the state of the city might be upending longstanding norms around attack ads and dark money.  

“In any other cycle that I could think of, I think it would have a huge backfiring influence with the voters, because it’s way too nasty for Portland,” Kafoury said. “But in this particular cycle, because voters are just so sick and tired of the state of things in Portland, I’m worried that it might be effective.”

Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe the dark money forces in support of Dexter are not fully comfortable with how their intervention may be perceived. One reason is that AIPAC appears to have gone an awfully long way to attempt to hide where the money it is injecting into the race is coming from.  

In early May, The Intercept reported that AIPAC was funneling donor funds through a political action committee called 314 Action Fund, a group ostensibly formed to support Democratic candidates with a science background, to spend in support of Dexter’s candidacy. The fund has declined to disclose its donors, though subsequent reporting from The Intercept has tied a portion of that money to AIPAC donors. 

Dexter issued a statement on May 3 broadly condemning an unmanned “dark money group” for airing attack ads directed at Jayapal, but has not called on 314 Action Fund to disclose its donors before Tuesday’s election, and has claimed she is unsure of where the dark money supporting her candidacy is coming from. Notably, 314 Action Fund has also spent in support of Bynum, though far less than its spending on behalf of Dexter.

“It shows, I think, that AIPAC doesn’t want to be identified with that money—that they would see it as potentially limiting the impact of it,” Caleb said. 

Given the lack of publicly available polling of the District 3 race, it is difficult to ascertain how the deluge of outside spending has changed the trajectory of the campaign—whether advertising voters have received attacking Jayapal has hurt her campaign, or whether it may be having the opposite effect.  

If anything, Horvick said, the outsized spending has hurt not Jayapal, but the third major candidate in the race: Gresham City Councilor Eddy Morales. 

“The space is being filled up by two other people, particularly Dexter, and that leaves him with just less ability to compete for mindshare,” Horvick said of Morales. 

In the bigger picture, however, Horvick suggested that the people most likely to be swayed by the extent and origin of the big spending are not likely undecided voters. 

“It’s an issue to people who have already made up their minds,” Horvick said. “It’s an issue to people who are very highly engaged and probably have strong opinions about the candidates one way or another already.”

Time will tell. AIPAC and DMFI spending has upended Democratic primaries in the past, including a 2022 race that saw Rep. Summer Lee win election to Congress in a Pittsburgh-based district and a 2021 race that saw Rep. Shontel Brown elected in a Cleveland-based district. 

But those districts are politically distinct from the district Blumenauer currently represents, and those campaigns were contested prior to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza that has seen Israel accused of genocide at a top United Nations court. 

Given the extent of the spending, the 3rd District race and races elsewhere may give Portlanders the opportunity to clearly reject the presence of dark money in their elections. If the dark money boosts Dexter to victory, however, Kafoury predicts it will make an impression leading into pivotal local elections in November. 

“I think what you’ll see is the United for Portland, real estate, the big, more conservative Portland money will dump even bigger into the Portland city races,” Kafoury said. “If this works in the primary, then they will do that in the general. Big time.”

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Kevin Foster contributed to this story. 

Over the past two weeks, it’s become clear that Maxine Dexter’s campaign to represent Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District in the United States House has been the beneficiary of millions in donations from political action committees (PACs) with unknown contributors. 

Dexter’s campaign has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent contributions from individual, out-of-state donors—many of whom have donated to Republican candidates and pro-Israel groups in the past. Millions in PAC money has gone toward mailer ads attacking Susheela Jayapal, Dexter’s top opponent in the race. 

Jayapal and Eddy Morales, another candidate in the race, have both spoken out strongly against the recent flood of donations. Jayapal and Morales—along with dozens of Portland voters—say Dexter hasn’t condemned the dark money spending strongly enough. 

While Dexter has continued to tout her progressive stances, opponents have also suggested that the wave of donations—and even more, who they originate from—show she is more conservative than she lets on. They also worry if Dexter wins, dark money PACs and conservative groups would feel more comfortable getting involved in Portland races in the future. 

The influx of last-minute, outside spending has changed the dynamics of the race in a firmly blue district where voters aren’t used to this kind of national attention and money. But with the election only days away, it remains to be seen how voters will respond to the news. 

Shady donors 

Last week, the Mercury reported on claims that the super PAC 314 Action Fund—a mega-donor to Dexter’s campaign—has been serving as a front for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to get involved in the race for Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District. The fund, formed in 2016 to help elect “pro-science” Democrats to public office, is one of two super PACs contributing to the 3rd District race. The other group, Voters for Responsive Government (VRG), is much newer and more opaque, having only formed in April. 

As of May 16, 314 Action has contributed $2,212,990 to Dexter’s campaign. VRG has spent $2,407,665 exclusively targeting Jayapal. 

A May 3 story in the Intercept first connected 314 Action with AIPAC, based primarily on testimony from two anonymous Democrats in Congress. In a follow-up story in the Intercept, an anonymous 314 staffer said the PAC has “turned its back on science in order to be used as a weapon against progressives by Zionists.” 

The 314 PAC cast doubt on the outlet’s sources, writing in a social media post that the stories were made up “out of thin air.” The PAC says their connection to Dexter is clear: She’s a doctor, and they’ve supported her since she first ran for the Oregon legislature in 2020. In fact, Dexter said in a May 3 KGW debate that 314 “recruited her” to run for the Oregon House four years ago. 

The science background of other candidates 314 has endorsed in this election cycle, however, is more tenuous. For example, 314 has spent $473,514 on Janelle Bynum’s campaign in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District. Bynum has an engineering background, but received a Master’s in Business Administration and calls herself a “small business owner.” 

Jayapal and Morales say Dexter’s campaign has been the recipient of millions of dollars from “MAGA Republicans,” suggesting 314 Action and VRG are funded by far-right donors. Dexter’s campaign has firmly refuted this, saying Jayapal and Morales’s “attacks fall apart at the first hint of scrutiny.” 

Dexter’s campaign has also called Jayapal and Morales “hypocritical” for their condemnation of the dark money donations, considering they have also accepted PAC money. But PAC contributions to their campaigns have been much less significant in comparison: Jayapal received $150,000 in donations from the Indian American Impact Fund, and Morales received $58,500 from the National Association of Realtors, which has given mostly to Republican candidates during the current election cycle.

The super PACs aren’t required to reveal their recent donors until Monday—the day before the May 21 election—so the political affiliation of the PAC donors is currently unknown. However, campaign finance documents show Dexter’s campaign has received thousands in individual contributions from people who have also donated to pro-Israel PACs including AIPAC, Republican politicians including Nikki Haley and Ted Cruz, or both.  

Larry Mizel, a Denver-based business executive and philanthropist, contributed $3,300 (the maximum donation) to Dexter’s campaign during a single-day fundraising spree on May 7. That day, Mizel’s campaign raked in more than $200,000—almost half of which was donated by people who have previously given to AIPAC or other pro-Israel PACs. Mizel, a longtime Republican big spender, was a campaign finance chair for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, and donated hundreds of thousands toward Trump’s campaign in both 2016 and 2020. 

In a statement to the Mercury, Jayapal’s campaign manager, Andrea Cervone, spoke out against the conservative donors. 

“We now know based on Maxine’s own FEC reports that she has been accepting money from the same people who have given millions of dollars to the likes of Donald Trump, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mike Johnson, Mitch McConnell and even George Santos,” Cervone wrote. “These donors and the agendas they support, agendas that are anti-choice, anti-LGBTQIA+, and anti-climate, are in complete contrast to the progressive values of Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District, and what [current District 3 representative] Earl Blumenauer has embodied.” 

Dexter has been a proponent of abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, strong climate action, and more liberal causes—which doesn’t seem to make her the ideal candidate for major rightwing donors to support. While Jayapal has been more outspoken than any other candidate about her stance on Israel’s war in Gaza, calling for a cease-fire back in November, Dexter’s message hasn’t been too far off. At the very least, she hasn’t publicly expressed the kind of gung-ho support for Israel you might expect from someone receiving this much money from AIPAC-aligned donors. 

“I urgently want to see an end to the fighting and achieve long-term peace in Israel and Gaza through a negotiated cease-fire that ensures: (1) an end to the violence, (2) the immediate release of the remaining hostages, and (3) the immediate delivery of much-needed humanitarian aid, including food, water and medicine into Gaza,” Dexter told the Mercury in April, responding to our endorsement questionnaire. “U.S. aid, by law, is tied to strict humanitarian requirements and I would call on President Biden to ensure U.S. law is followed to the letter.” 

Dexter was endorsed by advocacy and lobbying group Pro-Israel America, which said she “believes Israel has a right to defend itself, by itself,” is “against the [boycott, divest, sanction] movement,” and “feels Iran poses an existential threat to Israel and a direct threat to America’s national security.” But it’s unclear where—or if—Dexter made statements confirming those beliefs. 

“Who is going to represent us?” 

Dexter has spoken in favor of campaign finance reform, including after the flood of dark money spending was revealed. Dexter said she didn’t solicit the PAC donations and in the KGW debate, she said she “wasn’t condoning” the wave of dark money donations. She also  said she wants to “take care of campaign finance reform…[and] change the laws.” While voters have called on her to more strongly denounce the donations, Dexter’s campaign has kept its focus on her political credentials. 

“Maxine Dexter is the only progressive in this race who has actually worked with others and delivered on our values,” Nathan Clark, Dexter’s campaign manager, wrote in a statement to the Mercury. “Maxine is immensely proud of the broad and diverse coalition of progressive support that is powering her campaign, including Oregon labor unions, gun violence prevention advocates, and dozens of Democratic elected leaders who know that in Congress, Maxine will work with others to actually improve lives.” 

On Wednesday, the Dexter campaign released a “state of the race” report outlining how “Maxine Dexter is the strongest candidate in the race.” One of the metrics the report cited was fundraising numbers—Dexter’s campaign raised “more than what her two closest opponents…reported raising combined.” 

Her opponents haven’t disputed Dexter’s strong fundraising numbers—they just say it comes with baggage. 

“The most important issue is that this district election is being bought by two outside dark money groups. Democratic voters in this district need to be aware of that. It’s misleading, it’s cynical, and it flies in the face of Democracy,” Morales said during the KGW debate. “This election should be decided by [people in the district]…not by rich people who are connected and know how to use these vehicles.” 

Several of Dexter’s congressional colleagues also wrote a letter in support of her, saying they “refuse to stand by and allow…Dexter’s integrity and rock-solid progressive values to be questioned,” adding that “the idea that she would ever do the bidding of any group or special interest is offensive and wrong.” 

“We have all worked directly with Dr. Maxine Dexter. We know she is a person of enormous integrity. She is an effective advocate for this community and always will be. We’ve seen firsthand how Maxine looks at the science, dives into the facts, and works with others to get things done,” the letter states. “We condemn these attacks on her character and we are proud to stand together to vouch for her integrity.” 

But for those concerned about the impact of outside spending on elections, none of these statements are enough. Voters are concerned that if Dexter wins, similar spending campaigns will become the norm in Portland. 

Jonathan Tasini, a long-time political strategist who is currently running for Portland City Council, told the Mercury he believes the “connection to the AIPAC money really raises the question: Who is going to represent us?” 

“What are the politics going to look like for the next 20 or 30 years?” Tasini said. “I don’t want the influence of that kind of money with that kind of political bent [in this seat.]” 

Whoever wins Tuesday’s Democratic primary will effectively win the general election for the US House seat, considering how liberal the district is. The super PACs, 314 Action and VRG, are required to disclose their donors by Monday.