There’s a chance this post will be redundant by the time it’s published: Americans go to the polls in just a few hours, after all. In the heartland of American “progressivism”, Portland, Oregon, voters will not just be voting for seats in Congress — they’ll also be voting on ballot measures that could potentially completely overhaul Portlandia.
But will it be for better or worse?
Portland’s official slogan is “The City That Works,” but after a tumultuous few years, many residents feel the city is anything but that.
Homelessness and gun violence are surging and parts of downtown are struggling, unable to recover from the coronavirus pandemic and the racial justice protests that gripped the city in 2020 […]
Portland is known for its progressive politics. But many residents now think it’s on the wrong track, thrusting matters of municipal bureaucracy into the political spotlight as outside funding pours in.
Now, along comes Measure 26-228. The Measure, if passed, would completely overhaul Portland’s system of government and how councillors are elected and run the city. Measure 26-228 grew out of the so-called “racial reckoning”, and aims to make government “more accountable and equitable”.
The changes were intended to make City Hall more inclusive, but no other U.S. city uses this specific voting system for multi-member districts in city council elections — a point opponents have seized on […]
“We are moving from a government that no one is using anymore to an election system that no one is using,” said Vadim Mozyrsky, director of Partnership for Commonsense Government, which opposes the measure.
Portland, he says, has a history with “experimenting” — it’s certainly seeing the results of its latest experiments, with the city a regular battleground of roving far-left street thugs. “Now, it seems like people are intent on experimenting with democracy itself.” This particular experiment includes what we would call here “preferential voting”.
So, will Portlanders back it?
Certainly, it appears that a great many of Portland’s progressives aren’t that happy with “progress”.
Pollster John Horvick has observed the shift in the hundreds of voter focus groups he’s conducted over the last 15 years.
“In 2007, 66% of Portlanders on average that year thought the city was headed in the right direction. Now, it’s about 10%,” said Horvick, senior vice president of DHM Research. “People are really upset with the way that the city is going.”
But that might mean that they’ll try anything new.
Critics have denounced the outside spending and claim the measure is too complex at a time when many voters are questioning the integrity of America’s electoral systems […]
But polls suggest that Portland’s voters are too frustrated with the city’s woes to care about potential downsides of the reforms.
“The likelihood of passage, no matter what was being put forward to voters, I think is much higher now than it’s been in the last century,” said pollster Horvick. “Just given the fact that, you know, people are mad.”
Associate Press
If there’s one thing Portlanders ought to have learned over the past few years, though, it’s that change for the sake of change doesn’t always work out like they were told it would.
Update:
With ballot counting still incomplete, Measure 26-228 is slightly ahead, on 56%.
