Oregon Democrats skeptical of claims Schrader would have won 5th Congressional District

When Lori Chavez-DeRemer won a second congressional seat for Oregon Republicans last week, national pundits had an easy answer: Conservative Democrat Kurt Schrader would have won if he hadn’t lost his primary to a more progressive candidate.

Allies of Jamie McLeod-Skinner, the progressive Democrat who defeated Schrader and fell a few thousand votes short in the general election, had their own theory: National Democratic groups didn’t support McLeod-Skinner the way their Republican analogues backed Chavez-DeRemer. 

These dueling narratives matter nationally, as Democratic donors and voters choose which candidates to support in upcoming elections. And in Oregon, where Democrats hope to reclaim the 5th District in 2024, questions over what makes a winning campaign will remain a top concern in the coming months.

And local Democratic leaders, who largely supported McLeod-Skinner and objected to what they viewed as meddling by the national party in the 5th and 6th congressional district primaries, are looking for bright sides. While McLeod-Skinner lost, they say her campaign organization and joint canvassing with down-ballot candidates helped Democratic candidates win in key state House races and city council elections. 

“There’s no evidence that Kurt Schrader would have performed better in the counties where Jamie lost badly,” said Sal Peralta, co-founder of the Independent Party of Oregon, which cross-nominated McLeod-Skinner. “I don’t think he would have done as well in Deschutes County, and I think had he run it would have actually negatively affected the slate of Democratic candidates that were running throughout CD5.”

Schrader’s case

Schrader, who has represented the 5th District since 2009, has long been part of a group of conservative Democrats who style themselves “Blue Dogs” – a title that stemmed from a complaint a former Texas congressman had about being “choked blue” by Democrats to their left. He maintained that his brand of moderate politics was the only way to win in the 5th District and his suburban home county of Clackamas. 

After McLeod-Skinner’s loss, national pundits and analysts tended to agree. Axios compared McLeod-Skinner and Democratic gubernatorial nominees Stacey Abrams of Georgia and Beto O’Rourke of Texas to a pack of Trump-endorsed Republican candidates who lost their elections under the headline “Midterm stunner shows extremes don’t pay.” A Washington Post column called it a “candidate quality problem.”

On Twitter, Mike Baker, a New York Times national correspondent based in Washington, compared McLeod-Skinner’s loss to election-denying Republican candidate Joe Kent’s loss in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District. Both McLeod-Skinner and Kent ousted incumbents considered moderates.

The House Majority PAC, controlled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, abandoned the race several weeks before the election, instead buying ads in the 4th and 6th congressional districts. The Republican Congressional Leadership Fund spent more than $6 million attacking McLeod-Skinner, while her biggest independent support came from the Working Families Party, which spent about $1 million. 

After his primary loss, Schrader blamed the Oregon Legislature for including portions of Portland and Bend in his redrawn district. 

“That’s not Kurt Schrader’s crowd, per se,” he told Portland-based TV station KATU in June. 

And he declined to endorse McLeod-Skinner or campaign for her or other candidates, though he did endorse nonaffiliated candidate for governor Betsy Johnson. After Democrats lost the House, Schrader told a CNN reporter that Democrats needed to return to being a “big-tent party” and needed moderates to win a majority in the U.S. House. 

Jason Burge, chairman of the Deschutes County Democratic Party, said Schrader’s comments weren’t a surprise. 

“I think Schrader knows that had he won the primary, one of the champions on the trail for him would have been Jamie, and I can tell you that with 100% confidence,” he said. “Meanwhile, as a sore loser, Kurt Schrader picked up his toys and then left the building. If Schrader was as strong as he believes he was in CD5, then he should have been out there as an advocate.” 

McLeod-Skinner was cross-nominated by the Independent Party of Oregon, a self-described centrist political party that has supported a mix of Republican, Democratic and third-party candidates since it formed in 2007.  Peralta, the party’s cofounder, said Oregon independents have a different view of moderates than the pundit class – and McLeod-Skinner, who led the rural community of Talent through wildfire recovery, fit that mold. 

“Our idea of moderate is basically a rational type of populism that doesn’t seek to divide people or inflame people against each other, but instead looks for people who want to solve problems for communities,” he said. “And in Jamie’s case, that’s exactly what she does. Her perspective is very much more community-oriented, even if some of her personal views tend to be a little more liberal than some voters in her district.”

Linn County mattered

Winning two out of every three votes in Linn County, home to 18% of the district’s voters, was key to Chavez-DeRemer’s victory. (She also captured more than two-thirds of the vote in rural Marion County, but those votes were more than canceled out by McLeod-Skinner’s 80% margin in the portion of Multnomah County included in the district. About 25,000 5th District residents voted from each of those counties.)

Jerred Taylor, chair of the Linn County Democratic Party, attributed Chavez-DeRemer’s strength in his county to a local sheriff’s race that caused more Republican and conservative-leaning nonaffiliated voters to participate than expected. Sheriff Michelle Duncan, who was appointed to the job in January and made headlines this week for declaring that she won’t enforce a new voter-approved law banning ammunition magazines with more than 10 rounds, won a contentious election against a deputy. 

“Republican turnout was just astronomically higher than what any of us had predicted,” Taylor said. “I think as of last count, Republican turnout was 10 points higher than Democratic turnout within Linn County, and the non-affiliated vote was also higher than a lot of other counties’ non-affiliated voter turnout was, assuming that most of those folks were also conservative voters.”

Those unusual circumstances in Linn County could be a good sign for Democratic candidates in 2024, as voters who support them typically vote at higher rates in presidential elections than midterms. 

Down-ballot Democratic victories

Local leaders credited McLeod-Skinner’s campaign for helping motivate voters and volunteers in a way that helped win down-ballot races, even if she couldn’t win her own race. 

“I think somebody like Jamie definitely excites Democratic voters and excites unaffiliated voters,” Taylor said. “We just had unfortunate circumstances on the ground here with the sheriff’s race. I think if we wouldn’t have had that dynamic happening, the results would have been much closer than what they were.”

In Albany and Bend, for instance, Democratic slates of candidates won every city council race on the ballot. And Peralta contends that McLeod-Skinner and her team helped push Democratic state House candidates Emerson Levy in Bend and Annessa Hartman in Gladstone over the finish line – Levy won by just more than 400 votes and Hartman by fewer than 150. Both were cross-nominated by the Independent Party. 

In Deschutes County, Burge, the party chairman, said the expectation for local Democratic candidates is that they’ll work hard on behalf of their campaigns as well as every other Democratic candidate on the ticket. In the past several elections, Deschutes County Democrats have won some seats – including securing an entirely progressive city council in 2020 and 2022 and picking up two state House seats in Bend – and lost others, including Congress and the two county commission races on this year’s ballot. 

“To get that kind of response from someone high on the ticket, like a person running for Congress, and having that effect ripple down all the way to the city council level and then from the city council level back up, that’s how you can win those really tight races,” he said.

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