Oregon Democrats keep statewide offices, but new taxes are still a hard sell

Editor’s note: For Election 2024, OPB has been diligently following local races, providing comprehensive coverage of campaigns and measures. Check results on the presidential race, key congressional battles and other outcomes at OPB’s elections page.

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Oregon and Washington voters maintained a tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office, but they awoke to news that much of the country chose a very different direction.

In unofficial results, voters in Oregon selected Democrat Tobias Read as the next secretary of state, Democrat Dan Rayfield as the next attorney general and Democrat Elizabeth Steiner as the next state treasurer.

Read and Rayfield will likely see their new jobs defined by the reelection of former President Donald Trump and the prospect that national Republicans will attempt to crack down further on abortion access, transgender rights and vote by mail.

Two hotly contested congressional races — one between Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Janelle Bynum in Oregon, and another between Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Joe Kent in Washington — were still too close to call Wednesday morning.

Washington voters also elected a new governor, Bob Ferguson. He was the state’s attorney general the last time Trump was president, and he played a leading role nationally in legal challenges to Trump policies, including efforts to bar travel from Muslim-majority countries.

Oregon voters rejected Measure 118, an attempt to raise taxes on large corporations and redistribute that money to Oregonians in the form of an annual rebate estimated at $1,600 per person. They also said no to Measure 117, which would have established ranked choice voting in statewide races.

And in Portland, which is using ranked choice voting for the first time this year, trucking company owner Keith Wilson had a healthy lead in the race for mayor. But up to half of the votes are still to be counted, so that result could change.