UPDATE (Wednesday, May 20, 7:08 a.m. PT) – Portland City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly will likely face a November runoff, though it's not clear which challenger will earn the right to challenge her. And it's still possible she could fall out of the race entirely.
Four years ago, Eudaly became the first challenger to defeat an incumbent on the Portland City Council in 24 years by promising to champion tenants and limit rent hikes. As of Wednesday morning, returns showed her leading with 30.87% of the vote — far below the more than 50% needed to hold onto her seat.
Former city employee and political scientist Mingus Mapps and former Mayor Sam Adams were close behind her and within a few hundred votes of each other.
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Eudaly, a former independent bookstore owner, succeeded in office in pushing through stronger tenant protections, but she often feuded with colleagues and groups that opposed her on issues. Perhaps most crucially, she angered many Portlanders by trying to revamp the role of the city’s powerful neighborhood associations.
As a result, Eudaly attracted a strong slate of opponents, most notably Adams. He was seeking a return to local politics eight years after deciding not to run for re-election following a sex scandal. Adams retained a strong cadre of followers from his previous life at City Hall — where he had also been a city commissioner and chief of staff for Mayor Vera Katz during her 12-year tenure.
Long before Adams entered the race, former political science professor Mingus Mapps was laying out his own challenge to Eudaly. He had worked for several years with an umbrella group of those associations, and he had briefly overseen the neighborhood associations as a city bureaucrat in an agency overseen by Eudaly. That gave him a base of activists that he used to attract a strong network of supporters.
Eudaly, Adams and Mapps all raised enough money from small donors to qualify for matching funds from city taxpayers under Portland’s new campaign-finance system. So did another candidate in the race, Pacific Green Party activist Seth Woolley.
In addition, two unions provided most of the money for an independent advertising campaign promoting Adams. Local 49 of Service Employees International spent nearly $50,000 on the campaign while the NW Carpenters Union spent another $40,000. Under the city elections law, the two entities were barred from donating directly to Adams since he was accepting public money.
Four other candidates were in the race, including trucking company owner Keith Wilson. He ran as a liberal Democrat but criticized the city’s approach to homelessness. He won the endorsement of the Portland Tribune.
The other three major newspaper endorsers split among Eudaly, Adams and Mapps, providing an indication of how fractured support was in the race.