Oregon stays Democratic and even appears to flip a district in Congress

Democratic state Rep. Janelle Bynum speaks to supporters at a canvass launch on Sept. 7, 2024 while her daughter watches. (Julia Shumway/Oregon Capital Chronicle)

Although Oregon mostly held to its usual political patterns this election, that doesn't mean nothing changed.

The pre-eminent example of that is Oregon's 5th Congressional District, where the parties flipped control and the vote changed a little.

A close look at the election results showed some other shifts, down to the county level, happened elsewhere, too.

But a good place to focus is on the 5th District race. The district crosses the Cascades south of Portland and includes all or part of six counties: Clackamas, Deschutes, Jefferson, Linn, Marion and Multnomah. Only a thin slice of Multnomah is included along with a tiny number of people in Jefferson County, which is mostly in the 2nd District. That leaves the weight of the vote in the 5th concentrated in Clackamas and Deschutes counties.

Taken as a whole the district leans slightly Democratic, but not by a lot.

Two years ago, in the first election of this newly configured district, Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer defeated Democrat Jamie McLeod-Skinner by 50.9% to 48.8%.

This year, running against Democrat Janelle Bynum, she appears to have lost by a similar margin, 45% to 47% as of Wednesday evening.

What accounted for the difference?

One obvious distinction is that while in 2022 the Democrat and Republican were alone on the ballot, this year three other candidates — Andrea Thorn Townsend (Pacific Green), Sonja Feintech (Libertarian) and Brett Smith (Independent Party) — were on the ballot as well. Smith's total alone was larger than the gap between Bynum and Chavez-DeRemer, but the three minor party candidates probably affected the overall result only slightly.

That is because DeRemer pulled significantly fewer votes in 2024 —167,600 — than she did in 2022 — 178,813. Meantime, Bynum's vote outpaced McLeod-Skinner's prior run 178,054 to 171,514, suggesting the Independent Party candidate in this case drew more from the right than from the left.

But that wasn't the only distinction between the vote totals in the two elections.

Both, it turns out, and in contrast to much of the country this month, edged slightly more Democratic in the 2024 election.

Among Oregon's 36 counties, few registered a change in preference between the two major parties from the 2020 election to 2024.

The three largest shifts based on the vote for president were toward Republicans, but they were in relatively small counties which long have voted strongly for the Republican for president: Jefferson with a 6.5% margin shift, Umatila at 5.8% and Morrow at 5.1%.

The eight counties which shifted toward the Democratic nominee for president included Wheeler and Lincoln counties, which each saw a shift just over 4%. They're both small, especially Wheeler, Oregon's small county, and a change in a small number of residents can have an outsized impact.

In the larger counties, the biggest shift toward Democrats was in Deschutes, with 2.1%. That may reflect newcomers into the fast-growing county, the same as new arrivals may have accounted for shifts in some other counties around the country, including in Idaho, for one example. That shift also may have been reflected in the county's choice of Democrat Anthony Broadman to take the seat currently occupied by Sen.Tim Knopp, a Republican, who can't serve again due to his participation in the 2023 walkout by GOP senators.

The other dominant county in the district, Clackamas, was not among the Democratic shifters at the presidential level: It edged from 2020 toward Donald Trump by 1.2% but still preferred Democrats for top jobs. Clackamas, historically a purple county, voted for Democrat Kamala Harris for president, and locally ousted Republican Tootie Smith from the chair of the county commission.

And the next largest county in the 5th District, Multnomah, which is already extremely Democratic, actually moved even more leftward in the 2024 election compared with 2022.

Taken together, the shifts were enough to apparently have cost Chavez-DeRemer her seat in Congress. The overall Oregon atmosphere may have been part of the reason why incumbent Democrats in Oregon's other two close-run districts, Val Hoyle in the 4th and Andrea Salinas in the 6th, improved their leads from two years ago.

Bynum has beaten Chavez-DeRemer twice in legislative races, and there also was another factor at stake in the 5th: She fared well in the debates and in a district that leans slightly Democratic, the October campaign visit from Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson may have been ill-advised.

Onn election day, Chavez-DeRemer seems to have faced a hill too steep to reach the top though she tried, positioning herself as a moderate who frequently crosses the aisle.

Bynum's apparent win means the 5th District, even with redistricting, will likely go back to the Democratic control it has had since 1996.