3 policy-aligned progressives vie to replace U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer in 3rd Congressional District
The winner of the May 21 Democratic primary is likely to cruise to victory in November, as registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district by more than 3-to-1.
The trio of progressive Portland-area Democrats leading the race to succeed U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer in Congress are barely distinguishable from each other when it comes to policy positions.But each of the candidates say they have a track record and leadership style that best qualify them to replace Blumenauer, an influential lawmaker who climbed to significant influence during his nearly 30 years in the U.S. House. All three are current or former elected officeholders with experience representing parts of Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District, which stretches from the Willamette River to Hood River.Eddy Morales, a Gresham city councilor and former Washington D.C.-based organizer, is emphasizing his plans to build affordable housing and overhaul the U.S. immigration system. Former Multnomah County Commissioner and corporate lawyer Susheela Jayapal says she’ll seek more federal investment for housing, homelessness services and climate change. State Rep. Maxine Dexter, a medical doctor whose district includes the west side of Portland, is calling for health care reforms as well as investment in housing, homelessness and clean energy.It’s likely the winner of the May 21 Democratic primary will cruise to election in November. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in the district more than 3-to-1.The seat is open for the first time in a generation after Blumenauer, 75, announced his retirement last spring. He handily won reelection 13 times after his first successful campaign in 1996.If elected, the three front-runners all said they would join the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is chaired by Jayapal’s sister, U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington.They also share support for the Green New Deal, reproductive rights and Medicaid for All, although Dexter says smaller reforms are first needed to pave the way for single-payer health care. So far, the candidates have found common ground in polite debates.But they say differing personal, professional and electoral track records set them apart in important ways.Dexter, 51, was raised in a working-class family in Washington state. She is a practicing critical care physician and pulmonologist in Kaiser Permanente hospitals and is in her second full term in the Oregon House. She is supported by Democratic state lawmakers, the American Medical Association and gun control advocacy groups.As the chair of the House Committee on Housing and Homelessness, Dexter helped pass major investments in affordable housing and rental assistance championed by Gov. Tina Kotek. She has also sponsored legislation that ramped up the distribution of a life-saving opioid overdose reversal medication and banned restaurants’ use of Styrofoam takeout containers.Jayapal, 61, was born in India and moved to the U.S. when she was 16 to attend college. She was general counsel for Adidas until 2000 and since served on a slew of nonprofit boards. She began representing Northeast Portland on the Multnomah County Commission in 2019.Jayapal pitches herself as a strong progressive and coalition-builder. As a county commissioner, she says she helped increase rent assistance for low-income families. She also pushed a program that helps residents replace wood stoves with climate-friendly heat pumps and enthusiastically supported the county’s $51 billion lawsuit against oil and gas companies over the deadly 2021 heat dome. Jayapal is endorsed by environmental groups, Multnomah County Commission Chair Jessica Vega Pederson and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.Morales, 44, was raised in Woodburn and Portland by an immigrant mother from Mexico. A gay man, he could be Oregon’s first out LGBTQ member of Congress. In the 5th District, Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a lesbian, is one of two Democrats seeking the party’s nomination.Morales spent more than a decade organizing voters and says he helped generate key support for the Affordable Care Act and youth immigrant “dreamers.” A city councilor in Gresham since 2019, he touts the city’s development of affordable housing complexes and a program to reduce youth gun violence during his tenure. He is endorsed by a bevy of labor unions, the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, Georgia voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams and nine state lawmakers.Campaign financeAs of March 30, the most recent data available, Jayapal had raised $611,000, the most of any candidate, federal records show. Morales had raised $494,000 and Dexter had pulled in $338,000. All three have raised funds from a mix of individual donors and liberal political committees, according to the nonprofit analysis site Open Secrets.Dexter, however, is buoyed by a notably mammoth $1.25 million from the 314 Action Fund, a political action committee that aims to elect progressives with backgrounds in science.No other committee is independently spending to support or oppose the other candidates, according to Open Secrets. Last year, some observers speculated that pro-Israel political groups would oppose Jayapal over her brief reluctance to condemn Hamas for the group’s Oct. 7 attack. Jayapal has since criticized Hamas while calling for a ceasefire amid Israel’s brutal response. Morales and Dexter offered similar statements this spring, and pro-Israel spending in the contest has not materialized.Sarah Bryner, director of research and strategy at Open Secrets, said spending could intensify as the primary approaches.Michael Jonas, a Portland attorney and owner of Rational Unicorn Legal Services, is also vying for the Democratic nomination. He has raised about $16,000 and touts endorsements from metro-area LGBTQ organizations, civic leaders and entrepreneurs. Other Democratic candidates are Ricardo Barajas, Nolan Bylenga and Rachel Lydia Rand.In the Republican primary, attorney Joanna Harbour has raised $6,000 in direct donations. A perennial candidate, she captured about a quarter of votes cast when running against Blumenauer in 2020 and 2022. Two other Republicans, Gary Dye and Teresa Orwig, are also running for the nomination.The 3rd District seat is up for grabs for the first time since 1996, when Blumenauer was first elected. He spent 28 years in the U.S. House and rose through the ranks to become a member of the influential Ways and Means committee, which writes tax bills and oversees government programs including Social Security and Medicare. He is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.Any of the three front-runners would enter Congress with far less influence than Blumenauer. However, Jayapal said it’s “certainly possible” that constituents would benefit from her close relationship with her sister.“I think she can open doors for me. That is a reality,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive.Susheela JayapalNakamuraEnvironmental championJayapal earned her law degree from the University of Chicago and worked for two decades as a financial analyst and corporate lawyer before stepping away from paid work to raise her children. Since 2000, she has held volunteer leadership roles at Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette, the Oregon Community Foundation and other nonprofits.During her nearly five years on the Multnomah County Commission, Jayapal said, her influence was limited by the powerful role of the commission’s chair, who has wide latitude to steer the board’s agenda. She casts herself as a pragmatist who worked behind-the-scenes to fill funding gaps and help steer the county through the pandemic and intertwined crises of homelessness, behavioral health and addiction.Jayapal said she was an early proponent of long-term rental assistance, which can prevent residents from becoming homeless, and battled to pass a modest pay raise for employees at nonprofits that provide much of the county’s services for unhoused residents. She was a vocal critic of the Zenith Energy fossil fuel storage site in Northwest Portland and the use of leaded gasoline at Portland International Raceway.Jayapal has “real policy bonafides” and doesn’t mince words when advocating for climate action, said Damon Motz-Storey, director of the Oregon chapter of the Sierra Club, which endorsed her.“Those are the things that we look for in a climate leader,” they said.If elected, Jayapal said she would work to ramp up federal investment in affordable housing and rental assistance, which is often unavailable to residents because of high demand. Along with a Green New Deal and the establishment of a single-payer health care system, she calls for legislation to prevent deforestation and leaks of methane, a greenhouse gas responsible for 30% of global temperature rise.Maxine Dexter, a doctor in her second term in the Oregon House, says she would use her clinical experience as well as her successes building relationships in the state Legislature to increase her odds of accomplishing policy wins in Congress.Dave Killen / The OregonianData-driven doctorGrowing up, Dexter attended public schools and worked a unionized job in a grocery store. She graduated from the University of Washington’s medical school.She has worked as a doctor for more than 20 years. In 2020, she was appointed to fill a vacancy in the state Legislature. Dexter said her family currently lives slightly outside of the 3rd District but plans to move back in.Dexter said she has effectively pursued evidence-driven solutions to health policy, affordable housing and homelessness, climate change and other complex issues.“We can solve these problems if we have experts in the room,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive editorial board.Dexter criticizes the role of for-profit companies in health care and recently sponsored a failed bill that would have limited the influence of private equity companies in owning medical practices or centers. In 2021, Dexter helped pass a law that directed the state health agency to study the creation of a public health insurance option serving more low-income Oregonians. That plan has come to fruition and will roll out in July.As chair of the House housing committee, Dexter advanced “some of the biggest housing reforms and housing investment packages this state has ever seen,” said former House Speaker Dan Rayfield, D-Corvallis, who endorsed her.If elected to Congress, Dexter would aim to simplify what she called an overly complicated health care system. She said her “ultimate goal” is advancing a single-payer health care system without causing “chaos” in the process. Dexter said she would also work to expand a federal low-income housing tax credit and seek federal funding for detox beds.Eddy Morales, a Gresham City Council member who spent about a decade working on political causes in Washington, D.C., said tragedies that left three of his siblings dead motivate him to fight to revise past policy failures.Mark Graves/The OregonianD.C., Oregon experienceOn the campaign trail, Morales stresses his family’s lived experience with policy failures. His two brothers died in gun violence and his sister died from opioid and alcohol addiction, he says.“These are the things that have really motivated me for the last 25 years,” Morales said.He touts his longtime work as an organizer for progressive causes. He has served as president of the Gresham City Council. Morales founded East County Rising, a political committee that works to engage voters in east Multnomah County, call attention to their priorities and promote candidates of color and other progressive candidates for local offices.He also served as treasurer of the Democratic Party of Oregon, including during the time when the party falsely reported its largest ever contribution, $500,000, came from a Nevada cryptocurrency funds processor instead of an executive at now-disgraced cryptocurrency firm FTX. Although Morales was not copied on the string of emails in which party officials agreed not to name the true donor, a state lawyer wrote that Morales “did not perform the necessary due diligence to confirm the accuracy of the contributor.”The state party returned the funds once criminal wrongdoing by FTX executives including Sam Bankman-Fried came to public attention, Morales noted. “I am glad he and his cronies have been found guilty and sentenced,” Morales said.Morales got his start advocating for farm workers as a student at the University of Oregon. Beginning with a stint as president of the United States Student Association, Morales was based for about a dozen years in Washington, D.C., a perch from which he advocated for the Affordable Care Act on behalf of the nonprofit Center for Community Change. He also mobilized Latino voters in the South and Southwest for The Democracy Alliance.“Eddy has a skill or a personality to motivate people, to engage people,” said Gresham City Councilor Dina DiNucci, who has endorsed his bid for Congress. He is also adept at building political alliances, she said.In Gresham, Morales helped advance two affordable housing complexes largely funded by Metro housing bonds: the 225-unit Rockwood Village and the 180-unit Wynne Watts Commons, which is billed as the largest net-zero energy, affordable housing complex in the region.As a member of Congress, Morales said he would work to fund multi-generational affordable housing and update first time homeownership grants that he says are outdated. He would also advance offshore wind development and work toward a comprehensive overhaul of the U.S. immigration system that reunites separated families and safeguards the asylum-seeking process, he said.-- Grant Stringer is a freelance journalist in Portland; stringer.grantj@gmail.com; @Stringerjourno
