WASHINGTON — It's been nearly a week since the Nov. 5 election, and the dust is beginning to settle. At the national level, the obvious outcome is that Republicans swept to power — returning former President Donald Trump to the White House, retaking the Senate, and likely holding onto the House.
At the state and local level, it was a different story. Democrats did well in Oregon, even returning a supermajority to the state Senate, and it looks like Portland's electorate overall favored some more progressive candidates in city government instead of continuing to swing toward the comparative hard-liners on homelessness and crime.
For more insight on what Tuesday's election outcomes will mean for all of us, we turned to Jim Moore, a political scientist at Pacific University. He's one of the most sought-after voices for political insight in Oregon, and Pacific University recently announced that Moore will retire in May — leaving both teaching and political analysis behind, for good.
This means that Nov. 5 was Moore's last rodeo, so we're making the most of it by picking his brain while we still can.
What do these Republican wins mean for the country?
"People are using the word wave a lot. This is not a wave. It's a very close election. But as we're speaking, it does look like the Republicans will probably have control of the House and definitely have control of the Senate. So what does it mean in terms of just the closeness of the election, because that's not very much movement.
"Remember, in the Senate you have to have 60 votes to do anything because of the filibuster ... Remember, Biden had the initiative that dealt with inflation and green projects and things like that. They turned it into a fiscal plan, a budget plan, and that has slightly different rules. So the Trump people would have to do that to pass anything major through the Senate.
"In the House, the Republicans — even if they have a majority — remember the Republicans ... they couldn't pick a speaker for days. They got rid of the speaker. They couldn't pass major legislation because there was always a group of anywhere from five to about 40 Republicans who said, 'No, we want more.' So they're gonna have to have a lot of party discipline to make things happen."
What policies could Trump potentially enact, given those barriers?
"Well, there's kind of two main things to look at. So, the first thing is kind of everybody's daily life — and remember, the president is actually pretty far removed from most people's daily lives — but will the Trump tax cut be renewed? That's kind of the first big test coming up here.
"Then secondly, there are sets of issues that are important. So in Oregon and Washington you've got all the federal lands. Are we gonna allow more timber cutting? Are we gonna increase the grazing? Will there be mining, those kinds of things? Not so important in the Portland metro area. But when you get out into some of the more rural areas, especially in eastern Oregon, (that) can make a big, big, big difference.
"And then there's kind of a third set of things. The immigration idea, if there's going to be truly mass deportations and things like that, there's a lot of towns in Oregon and Washington that are gonna be in a load of hurt because the workforce is gonna diminish, and there still are not enough people to fill those jobs right now. It's going to hit them really, really, really hard. Look, especially in the construction industry, a lot of agricultural — tons of things, agricultural processing — those are going to be hit really hard with the Trump policies."
What about for Oregon's elected positions? Did anything change there?
"The state politics, you know, the Republicans tried once again to break out of the 40-45% range in statewide races. Lathrop was barely able to do it. But the Democrats always get 50%-ish. And they got 50%-ish, and they won. So no change there.
"And then the state legislature, where there could have been some real movement, hardly any movement whatsoever. Republicans lose one seat that was expected in the Bend area in the Senate. So in the Senate it's now a supermajority, 18 to 12, for the Democrats ... but in the House, the Republicans kept the battleground seat, and so it's still 35-25, no supermajority. So very little change there.
"The remarkable thing to me about this, the state legislative races, though there was no campaigning on big issues, when the Democrats win, 'This is what we're going to do' — we've had this in past years. 'We're going to do climate policy, we're going to do the tax system, we're going to look at land use,' none of that. And so we're waiting to see what they're going to do. It seems like transportation is going to be the big focus, but that was not central to the campaigns. All of which is a big, big, big change."
(Here Pat Dooris suggested that this didn't make it into campaign pitches because it will likely mean Oregon residents will be paying more to fund transportation, one way or another.)
"Yeah, exactly. And I saw that ... I was giving talks all over the place, and especially anywhere kind of from McMinnville along I-205 to the airport, boy ... a lot of, 'Vote for this person and don't have any tolls.'"
How much of a difference did Portland's ranked-choice voting make in election outcomes?
"I don't think there's any difference whatsoever. The classic case is the mayor's race, where Keith Wilson had kind of a two-to-one advantage in first-place votes. And guess what? When you had went through all the 19 cycles, he won. Big surprise. And the same kind of thing happened in city council races. If you look at the people who have basically been called for each of the districts, they were usually the top three in the first round. So I don't think it did anything at that level.
"What it did do, especially in the city council races, it changed the tenor of the election. (It wasn't), 'I want to sabotage somebody else.' The election was, 'Here's who I am,' and often groups of candidates got together and kind of ran as a slate. And so that's fascinating, and much more positive.
"We saw a little bit of sabotaging going on in the mayor's race. There was a coalition of people that said, 'Anybody but Rene Gonzalez' to keep him off the ballot. I don't think that was fundamental to his losing the race, but that kind of thing did happen. So I think it's a mixed bag. At this point, we'll have to wait and see as we move forward.
"Now, Keith Wilson is an outsider. You would not have expected him to be able to play a role to win. But I think the things that got him in there were not the ranked-choice voting system, I think it was his own candidacy, the clarity of his idea about dealing with the homeless population — whether you agree with it or not, it was darn clear. And that Oregonian poll that all of a sudden he was credible, that had him getting a bunch of second- and third-place votes and people looked and said, 'Hey, you know what, I'm going to give him first-place votes,' and that's what got him through."