The first election in Oregon’s new congressional district is anything but typical

An eclectic collection of candidates and big national donations are creating an unpredictable race in CD6

"US Capitol" by keithreifsnyder is marked with CC BY 2.0.

A new congressional seat, no incumbent of any kind, and the national balance of power in the House up for grabs. Oregon’s sixth congressional district is seeing a contest that is pretty rare in this part of the political world, where incumbents tend to stay for decades and voters seem insulated from national trends.

The 2022 primary elections are kind of odd across the board. Candidates have taken a lot longer than usual to start reaching out to the bulk of voters (as measured in ads appearing on radio and television). We see the results of this in polling for the Oregon gubernatorial contest – half or more of voters have not made up their minds just a few weeks before the ballots go to voters. While there is no public polling on CD6, it would not surprise me to see the same pattern among voters.

A congressional race for a new district is unpredictable by nature. There are no previous voting patterns to study. Candidates don’t have to live in the district – two of the better-known candidates don’t. And new districts, which have no incumbent, tend to attract big national donors – which certainly has been the case in CD6.

Seven Republicans are betting that they can win this unique congressional race. The odds for them are better than they have been in years. The new district leans Democratic in its registration (31.8% D to 26.1% R) but parts of it have a long history of sending Republicans to the Oregon Legislature. Only one Republican legislator is taking the plunge, Ron Noble. Noble, who has served in the House since 2017 and previously was McMinnville police chief, will be a known quantity in the area around McMinnville. But, like the rest of the candidates, he needs to introduce himself to a lot of new voters.

The other six candidates are an assemblage of those who have tried for higher office before and lost big, those who have held higher office (Jim Bunn was swept into Congress in the 1994 Republican wave and then swept right back out in 1996 with questions about his judgement swirling around him), and candidates who support the Constitution and the right to life.

Noble probably is the favorite, but Nathan Sandvig and Mike Erickson have raised enough money to run credible campaigns. They could win over enough voters to win, but we need to see those ads.

Democrats, all nine of them, have a similar mix of those who have held state legislative seats, those with ideas (health care and environment are big), and those who are new to politics. Teresa Alonso Leon and Andrea Salinas have served in the Oregon House since 2017. Their current districts have some overlap with the new congressional district, but Salinas is garnering the big endorsements and has raised a lot more money ($520,000 to $67,700). One strike against Salinas with some voters is that she lives outside the district.

The rest of the candidates are less conventional. Loretta Smith, longtime politician from Multnomah County, announced she would be running the new sixth district in June 2021, no matter where the new boundaries were. She’s in the race but lives out of district. She worked for Senator Ron Wyden for years, so she is using that expertise to appeal to voters – she knows their issues. Kathleen Harder, a physician, has raised over $400,000. Her message is focused on health care and her frontline expertise.

And even more interesting. There are three candidates with a lot of money who are running for their first elective offices. Matt West is a lifetime member of the Democratic Socialists who has raised more than $800,000 to become the Bernie Sanders of Oregon. Cody Reynolds is a West Point grad who became an entrepreneur, and he has $2.5 million ($2 million was a loan from himself). Carrick Flynn has worked around Washington, D.C., for years (and for and with federal agencies), but has moved back to Oregon, and decided to run for Congress with $830k in his campaign war chest.

Flynn has become the biggest mystery in the race. He is being supported by two political action committees, one committed to spending several million dollars to get him elected, and the House Majority PAC (the House Democrats campaign fund), which committed to spending $1 million on his behalf. When asked why, Flynn has told reporters he is just as surprised as anybody else.

He may be surprised, but the nature of the ads themselves raises fundamental questions. Here are the rules: Independent expenditure campaigns cannot coordinate in any way with the candidates they support. Most of the time these independent ads hit on national issues of important to the PAC, then invite viewers/listeners to consider one candidate or another, or even to call an incumbent and complain about some policy.

That is not what the independent ads for Flynn look like. Flynn appears in all of them, looking like an affable person who cares about issues. There is no discernible difference between these independent ads and those that might be put out by Flynn’s campaign except that at the end Flynn’s voice does not say “I approve of this ad.” Thus, the question: If there is no coordination between these PACs and the Flynn campaign, where on earth did all the Flynn footage come from? Our colleagues the Liftoff have characterized it as b-roll footage. That’s nice, but did the Flynn campaign just put it out there so anybody could pick it up and make flattering ads with it?

Whatever is going on, Flynn’s $830,000 is being amplified by about seven times.

It has become so odd, that Flynn’s Democratic opponents had a press conference last week to point out that Flynn never shows up to the various forums and appearances that are the hallmark of running for Congress in Oregon. They also were miffed that Nancy Pelosi’s House Majority pack has picked a candidate in the May primary rather than waiting for the Democrats of the district to make their choice to take on the Republican nominee in the fall.

If this were a normal election for an open congressional seat, I would expect Andrea Salinas to win a plurality from among the nine candidates. She’s got a certain amount of name recognition, she’s run campaigns before, and she knows the issues of the district. Our last two open congressional seats yielded exactly these types of winners from the Oregon legislature—Cliff Bentz (R) in CD2 in 2020 and Suzanne Bonamici (D) in CD1 in 2012.

If not Salinas, then probably Loretta Smith (Teresa Alonso Leon just has not raised enough money). There would be a small chance for the well-heeled non-politician candidates (the last one to win was David Wu for that same CD1 seat in 1996—but Wu had been a Democratic activist for years), but just a small chance.

Ballots arrive in voters’ mailboxes at the end of next week. I’ll be watching very closely to see if all the money spent on behalf of Flynn ends up winning him a primary. And setting up a very interesting dynamic for the November elections.