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I found out that the Prost brewery here in Portland hosts a free annual Thanksgiving meal. They ask for volunteers to help serve and offer the food free. That’s pretty cool.

Find other free and cheap things around Portland here.

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Hailed as a way to break up the 2 party system, encourage more moderate candidates, and improve voter engagement – Portland embraced ranked-choice voting. Despite it having been tried in numerous locals since the early 1900’s – it has often been later repealed. So how did it work for Portland?

There were 2 ranked choice selections this year: your district city council member and mayor. Each had nearly 20 candidates. An entire front and back page of the ballot were just those 2 races. Unfortunately, it appears the exact opposite happened with regards to engagement.

Despite getting up to 6 total rank votes and having 19 candidates, 1 in 5 voters who cast ballots chose no one for Portland city council which was far more than in the previous two city council election cycles. For mayor, 11% of returned ballots didn’t vote for any of the 19 mayoral candidates compared to 6% in the previous 2020 election. In short, voters almost doubled the rate of leaving a position blank.

What was interesting is that Portland had between 50-85% voter participation, with many districts in the 80% range – which is very encouraging.

However, I do think Ellen Seljan summed up my own experience.

“My overall conclusion is that the voters were overwhelmed, found the system and number of candidates too hard and didn’t feel confident in their vote choice,” said Ellen Seljan, a political science professor at Lewis & Clark College. “The easier thing to do is to skip those races entirely.”

I can confirm it required a TON more work sifting through the nearly 40 candidates for the 2 offices. I didn’t skip any races, and did rank all the folks I was interested in. It exhausted me enough I did it in chunks over a few days.

Sadly, many of the candidates were clearly fodder: single issue candidates, extreme candidates, completely inexperienced candidates, and unknown candidates. Too many didn’t submit statements or have a website. We had one candidate that wanted to tear down/convert city infrastructure to bring back horses and let homeless help manage them. Another guy was an unemployed legal student living in his parents basement (his own words).

I think the big failure is the lack of information – critical information. With no other info, I found myself looking some of the people up in LinkedIn or checking if they have a criminal record. You have to do all that vetting yourself – a dangerous lack of information as many voters likely don’t have that time.

Oregon Live has more interesting charts and data:

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2024/11/portlands-ranked-choice-debut-causes-voter-engagement-to-crater-1-in-5-who-cast-ballots-chose-no-one-for-city-council.html?gift=b5be0308-e613-4099-ace9-f5de966b4b63

“There is one girl here who they are trying to get her out of here. She has tried to stab me twice and I filed reports on that”

“The problems with this building happen to be TPI moving in drug addicts who are not rehabilitated, and need to be rehabilitated, but they are not.”

In the past month, there have been two homicides in front of the the Home Forward Louisa Flowers building in the Pearl – and an egregious animal abuse case caught on camera in their elevator. The building has graffiti on walls and windows. Residents report apartments that smell of fentanyl, unwanted guests are often found in the building, and residents shared multiple photos from inside of trash piling up in the hallways and stairwells.

The response?

On Thursday the building leadership had a pizza party for all residents where they invited case workers and other community resources to connect with the residents. Home Forward workers said they hope to ‘foster strong, supportive networks among the residents,’

Sounds like exactly like the kind of comically ineffective plans we’ve come to expect when dealing with homicidal residents, serious drug addiction, and a quickly deteriorating living environments in Portland. Instead of experts coming in to deal with serious drug addiction and violence – we’ll have a pizza party and talk about it. Meanwhile, animals are being abused openly, fentanyl is wafting around the building, and other residents are having their lives threatened on a daily basis.

Sadly, this is what happens time and again when largely untrained non-profit employees (non-profits who are switched out every time the money runs out) try to deal with very serious criminal and drug abuse issues in Portland.

Articles:

• https://www.kptv.com/2024/09/13/lloyd-district-apartment-residents-raise-concerns-over-safety-security/

Portland just tried ranked choice voting. It was an interesting experience. I’m not sure if I’m 100% sold just yet, but it seems to have worked reasonably well. If nothing else – it’s a fascinating dive into the data.
On the plus side: I did like having the ability to pick 2nd and 3rd choice candidates. In one case, my 2nd choice candidate won.
On the down side: it required a LOT more work. There were almost 20 candidates for mayor alone, and a decent number of them didn’t submit any information about themselves, were odd-ball one-issue candidates, or were borderline quacks. This easily took me 2-4x the time I would have normally spent. Doing this for a dozen candidates at state and local levels would be exhausting.

As with all things, the unintended consequences are likely what is most interesting. I suspect it’s going encourage candidates to start overlapping on stances in order to steal/appeal each other’s 2nd and 3rd votes – especially if they are not a front runner. This could make the voter’s work even more tough as it’s more like splitting hairs than decisive differences. I think it’s also going to encourage candidates to be more homogenous. Outliers and more extreme ends – on both the left and right – were very soundly defeated. This is probably a good thing in such a far left state like Oregon that’s had some pretty extreme candidates in previous elections. It’s definitely going to make campaign strategy much more interesting, and likely break up the entrenched homogenous political structure of Portland.

Anyway, if you’re curious how to see how each round of voting went, the Multnomah website has a neat visualization how each of the rounds worked out:

Alternatively, a local forum user put together a Sankey diagram of the way the votes flowed from one candidate to the next as candidates were eliminated:

The district 4 councilor race was even more crazy:

Here was district 2 with Kanal starting out a resounding 3rd and ending up bubbling to the top, while Guiney started first and ended 2nd:

Bonus:

KGW8 did a great mayoral candidate interview. I liked the format a LOT. They had some pre-canned questions, but I loved the fact they asked audience submitted ‘raise your hand’ questions that made the candidates actually state their opinions in a yes/no fashion instead of just waffling around like the career candidates usually do.

Dustin Witherspoon, Portland mayoral candidate

Continued below average recovery in Portland and Oregon and declining population has lead to Portland having the most job losses in the top 50 metro areas of the country. Unemployment rates are still officially low at 3.9% because they are at the same time experiencing a population decline.

Portland’s true unemployment rate last year was 20%, compared with its official rate of nearly 3.9%, according to a study from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP).

https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2024/05/09/true-unemployment-rate-layoffs-economy

Summary: The cost goods and services in Portland are more expensive when compared to other large cities, but nothing like California and cheaper than Seattle.

Article:

• https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2023/11/14/cost-of-living-portland-oregon-home-transportation-food-prices