Few American cities experienced 2020 like Portland. For almost a year, the city’s downtown saw sustained demonstrations and an intense response from local and federal law enforcement. The protests and ensuing criticism of the aggressive actions taken by local police hobbled the tenure of moderate Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler and energized popular calls to reform the city’s commission, its governing body at the time.
In 2022, voters approved Measure 26-228, changing Portland’s legislative structure from four at-large commissioners to a twelve-member city council drawn from four multimember districts elected with ranked-choice voting. Combined with a small donor public financing scheme enacted in 2016, this system significantly lowered the bar for political participation in the 2024 election.
In many ways, the new electoral format catered well to DSA’s strengths. Smaller-district and multimember elections benefited candidates who could mobilize large field operations while also being able to hold a clear lane within a crowded field — unlike in previous elections, candidates would only need 25 percent +1 to win. Similarly, ranked-choice voting allowed candidates to pick up votes from coalition allies, benefiting those with platforms that spoke to a wide range of voters, while the matching funds program helped campaigns critical of the city’s traditional donor class to compete.
These reforms came right as Portland DSA was trying to revitalize itself. The pandemic had seen a sharp downturn in the chapter’s membership, and organizers began looking for opportunities to rebuild their capacity.
One came as part of a push to establish universal pre-K that the chapter had initiated in mid-2019 with the goal of getting a measure on the November 2020 ballot. A month after the Universal Pre-School Now! (UP Now!) coalition submitted the proposed language for the measure, pandemic restrictions were enacted in Oregon, hampering signature collection. Simultaneously, UP Now! faced competition from a more moderate universal pre-K project at the county level called Pre-School 4 All (P4A).
That summer, the chapter threw itself into building support for the campaign and managed to collect more than 32,000 signatures. Its success facilitated a merger with an updated P4A in order to avoid both proposals appearing on the ballot and potentially failing due to voter confusion. The unified measure passed overwhelmingly and marked one of Portland DSA’s first real electoral wins. Both of the chapter’s future 2024 city council candidates, Mitch Green and Tiffany Koyama Lane, were involved in the effort.
“It was an interesting test of our organizing ability,” said Green. “We were able to pass that, and that built the foundations for our city council races.”
The chapter also saw large success during the 2021 Nabisco strike and the 2023 Portland teachers’ strike, when its members organized fundraisers, held rallies supporting strikers, and walked picket lines. Both periods brought in new members and reactivated existing ones. The work also surprisingly helped convince the chapter to take another look at running candidates, according to Coburn.
“Having some elected officials weigh in on the side of the strikers proved to be more impactful to the strikers than many of us thought it would be and also ended up sometimes being more impactful on negotiations than many of us thought it would be,” he said.
