Portland businessman and political newcomer Rene Gonzalez soundly defeated incumbent City Council member Jo Ann Hardesty in a bruising race that offered striking contrasts in track records and policy and competing visions for how to best bring the city’s multiple crises under control.
Gonzalez had garnered 54.3% of the vote in partial returns tallied as of 10:45 a.m. Wednesday., compared to 45.4% for Hardesty. With tens of thousands of votes still uncounted, including some that will arrive by mail Wednesday or Thursday under Oregon’s new voting law, final vote shares remain to be seen.
Persistent concerns about crime, intractable encampments and a battered downtown placed Hardesty, 65, and her unwavering progressivism at odds with much of the electorate.
Residents’ restless anger over City Hall’s seeming inability to tackle these problems further imperiled the longtime civil rights and police reform advocate’s chances at securing a second term in office.
Yet Hardesty’s commitment to reducing social and racial inequities allowed her to capture and keep the support of Democratic lawmakers, liberal organizations and social justice activists that hold sway in Portland politics.
Meanwhile, a mix of affluent, middle- and working-class Portlanders rallied behind Gonzalez, 48, who campaigned as a law-and-order centrist, a parent and a fifth-generation Portlander focused on restoring the city’s livability.
His commanding lead in multiple polls leading up to Election Day was further bolstered by an outside political group bankrolled by business and downtown property owners that spent six figures on his behalf in the final weeks of the campaign.
“I think what we did resonated with a lot of folks,” Gonzalez told The Oregonian/OregonLive late Tuesday. “We kept it simple. Our goal from day one was to give people a choice.”
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Gonzalez will join a version of the City Council that includes at least two members aligned with his anti-crime, pro-police, tough-on-homelessness stances. It’s unclear which bureaus he will oversee, as Mayor Ted Wheeler has yet to decide whether to give him Hardesty’s portfolio or shift other commissioners’ assignments.
Despite a daunting political landscape, Hardesty, the first Black woman to serve on the City Council, and her supporters leaned into what they described as a record of transformative accomplishments during her first term and hailed what they said had been her relentless focus on how the city treats its most vulnerable.
Hardesty galvanized the 2020 measure that voters overwhelmingly embraced to increase police accountability. She launched and expanded the city’s non-police response to crises on the streets. And she used her role as transportation commissioner to try to decrease traffic fatalities and drive-by shootings.
The renter and east Portland resident also pushed the council to address racial and economic disparities, called for bolder action on climate change and advocated for systemic reforms to public safety.
“I am proud of the values we represented and the accomplishments we brought to life in Portland,” Hardesty told her supporters Wednesday after she conceded the race to Gonzalez. “My hope going forward is that our city will be a place where people of all backgrounds can thrive, where no one is scapegoated because they are poor. This place we call home is suffering.”
Hardesty was forced to adjust to the reality that her longstanding criticism of the Portland Police Bureau made her vulnerable as public views on public safety rapidly shifted from those held during the height of the city’s racial justice protests.
While as recently as July 2021 she maintained she could not “in good conscience add more police officers to a dysfunctional police force,” she said she now supports filling more than 100 vacancies within the bureau.
During the final weeks of the campaign, she repeatedly called for law enforcement to crack down more aggressively on open-air drug markets that have proliferated around Portland.
Hardesty also attempted to paint Gonzalez, a lifelong Democrat, as someone who supported conservative candidates and causes and who couldn’t be trusted to represent Portland’s values.
By contrast, Gonzalez cast his opponent as an emblem of City Hall dysfunction that had spurred widespread pessimism in local elected leadership. He portrayed Hardesty as anti-police during a relentless spate of gun violence and ineffective at curbing a proliferation of homeless encampments and trash.
That message was amplified by a political committee, Portland Accountability PAC, which spent at least $360,000 hammering Hardesty and bolstering her challenger.
An Eastmoreland resident, Gonzalez openly embraced strong citizen oversight of Portland police and unarmed public safety alternatives throughout the campaign. But he also insisted the city needed to dramatically increase the number of police officers and crack down on violent and property crimes.
To tame the crisis of people living unsheltered along streets and on other public property, Gonzalez said the city needed to acknowledge the addiction and mental health problems driving the humanitarian crisis and quickly accelerate creation of shelter spaces, including massive outdoor encampments like the ones the city of Portland is now considering.
-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh; 503-294-7632
Email at skavanaugh@oregonian.com
Follow on Twitter @shanedkavanaugh
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