Monthly Archives: May 2024

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Don’t Count On Allegations of Campaign Financing Foul Play In McLeod-Skinner’s Race Stirring Things Up

Jamie McLeod-Skinner

I’m a political junkie. Have been forever. When I was a kid, i went with my father to drop off Eisenhower/Nixon campaign material at homes in our neighborhood, in the 8th grade a local paper printed my first letter to the editor on a national policy dispute, and my career included serving on the staff of a committee of the House of Representatives. Even now, Lord knows how many political news sites I monitor.

But I’m a peculiar outlier. Face it, most folks could care less about politics most of the time. They ignore day-to-day political drama. A recent Gallup poll found that only 32% of Americans pay close attention to politics.  I think it’s less.

I bring this up because some may think the current dust-up over campaign contributions in the Jamie McLeod-Skinner/Janelle Bynum Democratic primary race in Oregon’s 5th District is going to influence a lot of voters. 

I doubt it.

The Democratic establishment, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Gov. Tina Kotek (D) are backing Bynum. But now a new super PAC, Health Equity Now, has reserved about $352,000 in advertising with spots supporting McLeod-Skinner, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. The ads began running in the Portland market on Wednesday. 

The PAC didn’t register with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) until May 3, allowing it to avoid filing information on its donors before the election occurs next Tuesday, May 21.

News media have jumped on the story. OPB said the whole affair is “raising questions about whether Republicans are trying to tilt the scales in the contest.” The Oregon Capital Chronicle Outside reported the outside money money “…spurred accusations from Democrats that Republicans are meddling to ensure incumbent GOP Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer faces a weaker opponent in November. “

ABC News reported a Bynum spokesperson said the ad buys “certainly looks like there are ties to Republicans.” 

“Let us be crystal clear, Jamie McLeod-Skinner is House Republicans’ dream opponent because they know they can beat her — making this shady GOP election meddling in a Democratic primary all the more alarming,” said Blakely Wall, a spokesperson for the Bynum campaign.

So why do I think this tempest won’t much matter?

Sure, there are incessant polls on political opinions, but that doesn’t mean people are constantly paying attention to politics in general or political shenanigans in particular. 

“We often talk about high-information voters versus low-information voters,” Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told Columbia Journalism Review. ” What we leave out is the no-information voter. They’re the ones on social media or watching these crank news shows from the far right.… They actually know less than they would if they didn’t watch news at all. I’m very pessimistic.”

Most Americans think the country is in deeply polarized times, but sixty-five per cent of respondents to a Pew survey last year said that they were “exhausted”, not absorbed,  when thinking about politics. It’s probably worse now.

Even if some of our population have some interest in public policy, it’s hard to find it. A recent New Yorker article referred to when the late Neil Postman, an education scholar at New York University, wrote of the distinction between George Orwell and Alduous Huxley’s visions of the future. “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us, Postman wrote. “Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

In the Internet/AI age, meaningful political information is “drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” And what does get through is more likely to be disinformation or to stir cynicism. A recent University of Michigan study shows that people regularly on social media were exposed to more political attacks and came away more cynical and distrustful of politic. Instead of becoming more involved, that can make them frustrated, disgruntled and disengaged. 

Then there’s the diminishing availability of real political news. Newspapers, once the main source of such news for everybody from business leaders to rural smalltown farmers, are a dying breed. And many of the ones that survive are on a resources diet. The Oregonian, once a powerful force with statewide coverage, is a shell of its former self. 

And if you are reading this, you are a tiny, and shrinking, part of politically engaged Oregonians.

So don’t be surprised if the hullabaloo about McLeod-Skinner’s fundraising causes barely a ripple in the general public’s views on the campaign. That’s just the way things go.

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Is Portland’s Ranked Choice Voter Education Project Stumbling?

In its early years, the electric vehicle start-up Fisker tried to stimulate public interest by showing off a concept sports car, the EMotion, going down a desert road in a flashy 2017 marketing video. The problem, revealed by the Wall Street Journal,  – the car in the video didn’t have a motor or battery. It was propelled by people hiding inside who were pushing it forward with their feet through a hole in the floor.

To say the least, it was a deceptive start of a good idea, a worthy concept that stumbled in its execution. 

Portland’s voter education project on the city’s new ranked choice voting system to be utilized in the November 2024 election seems to be like that.

A Request for Proposals on a voter education contract “…from qualified proposers with demonstrated experience in voter and community education and outreach” went out on April 7, 2023 asking that proposals be submitted by May 3, 2023. The intent was to post an intent to award the contract to a specific bidder on June 9, 2023.

The first slip-up occurred when a winning bidder wasn’t chosen until July 2023.

The winner of the $675,000 contract was United Way of the Columbia-Willamette in collaboration with Democracy Rising, Portland United for Change (a fiscally sponsored project of the United Way) and Brink Communications of Portland. United Way of the Columbia-Willamette was the sole legal entity awarded the contract and has oversight over it.

Portland United for Change was tasked with leading the day-to-day management of contract activities and to support subcontractor grant recipients working to implement the education and outreach effort for harder-to-reach voters. Samantha Gladu, Coalition Director at Portland United for Change, was expected to manage the overall project.

Democracy Rising was expected to apply its expertise in voter education efforts in five states on ranked choice voting.

Brink, which described itself as “…a queer woman-owned, BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+-led marketing and communications agency united around justice, equity and solidarity”, was expected to provide four members of a six-person Project Team working on the voter education effort. 

A second slipup occurred two months later, however, when Brink, a 12-year-old 43-employee firm, unexpectedly ceased operations. “The disruptions of the pandemic, the recent economic downturn and upheavals in the marketing industry have been very difficult for our small business,” the company said in a LinkedIn post. 

Rather than switch to another bidder, the city left it to United Way to find a replacement firm for Brink. It took until January 2024 for United Way to accomplish that by selecting Hearts & Minds Communications LLC of Portland, a company founded in 2021 which describes itself as “…a growing collective of communicators, designers and strategists united by our approach to center racial justice in our work”.

Hearts & Minds has not responded to inquiries seeking information on who on its staff would replace the Brink employees serving on the Project Team, details on their roles and qualifications and specifics on their projected hourly rates.  

Then another problem. 

Two months later, on March 13, 2024, Samantha Gladu, Coalition Director at Portland United for Change, abruptly left the organization and transitioned to another employer. She had been expected to be the day-to-day contact with the city, helping to coordinate all the meetings and directing the appropriate people to meetings regarding various elements of the project. 

As of May 16, 2024, United Way had still not replaced Gladu and it’s not clear who’s running the show. “I think we can all agree that this is a very competitive market for employees, and we are not at all surprised that Samantha was poached away from her role at United Way. United Way is recruiting for this position,” said Shoshanah Oppenheim, Charter Transition Project Manager with the city.

All this turmoil occurred while the original timeline for the entire project had  envisioned that two key phases of the project would be underway.

First, Nov. 2023 – Feb. 2024 was supposed be spent identifying and engaging local voter education partners, building out infrastructure and collateral for different campaign focuses and working with election officials on ranked choice voting implementation.

Then, during Feb. 2024 – June 2024, the project team was expected to focus on outreach to coalition partners to extend capacity, the recruitment and training of organizational and volunteer leaders on voter education, and engagement of stakeholders and media to facilitate their understanding of the new election system.

The winning bidder was expected to use this time to offer sub-grants to “…local non-profit and community-based organizations who can assist in disseminating this vital information through trusted mediums to members of populations who traditionally lacked access to inclusive voter education and are most likely to benefit from focused, supplemental outreach.”

United Way’s original bid said the voter education effort aimed “to be operating on all cylinders” in June. The way things are going, it’s doubtful that will be the case. 

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Mail-In-Voting Is On The Ballot in Oregon

In 2020, Donald Trump filed several lawsuits in an effort to stop vote-counting or force recounts after his campaign said post-Election Day increases in vote totals for President Joe Biden — many of which came from mail ballots, that were counted following the in-person votes — were evidence of fraud. 

None of the lawsuits succeeded. 

But Trump has continued to denigrate mail-in voting and promulgate theories that the 2020 election was contaminated by voter fraud, and his true believers are falling in behind him. (A humorous aside is that many Republican groups are also spending millions of dollars this year promoting voting by mail to spur turnout, particularly in competitive states)

Even though elections researchers have demonstrated that making it easier to vote by mail generates higher voter turnout for both parties, and incidences of fraud are rare, in December Trump called for an end to mail-in voting entirely. Following a “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face” strategy, he claimed in March that “any time the mail is involved, you’re going to have cheating”.  

Some election experts expect Trump to prematurely claim victory on the basis of early in-person votes in 2024 and to litigate the election going forward.

Now we have all three Republicans running to be Oregon Secretary of State, which oversees the state’s elections, hyping claims of voter fraud and affirming their desire to end Oregon’s long tradition of running elections by mail.

The three Republicans in the primary race are Beaverton real estate broker Brent Barker, state Sen. and rancher Dennis Linthicum and Salem business analyst Tim McCloud.

Brent Barker’s campaign website spells out his support for:

  • Statewide In-Person Voting
  • Limiting mail-in ballots to Military and Absentee Voters
  • Resetting all voter registration rolls to zero and requiring everybody to re-register
  • Hand counting tally results for all elections with observers

Linthicum, on his campaign website, pledges to:

  • Restore election integrity and promote diligent custodial ownership of election records
  • Advocate for in-person local precinct voting with ID
  • Safeguard the elections for the integrity of every Oregonian’s vote

Tim McCloud has not set up a website with campaign pledges. He was, however, a plaintiff in a lawsuit intended to end mail voting and electronic voting tabulation in Oregon.

A federal judge tossed the lawsuit, saying “generalized grievances” about the state’s elections aren’t enough to give a group of unsuccessful Republican candidates and other election deniers standing to sue.

McCloud has also commented on election issues in general. In responses to a questionnaire from KATU News, he said, “I will heavily fortify our election system against attacks, and implement fail-safe systems to prevent any disruption of our election system by bad actors. Additionally, I will advance all efforts for more access to Oregon’s public elections records, including more transparent processing of ballots, and conducting routine and thorough voter roll audits statewide.”

Whatever the merits, or failures, of mail-in voting, one thing remains true. As political analyst Larry J. Sabato, has said, “Every election is determined by the people who show up.”

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America’s Elites Showcase TikTok, National Interests Be Damned.

Supporting Tik Tok is chic. 

At least that’s the message I get from the decision by Vogue’s Anna Wintour to choose Shou Chow, TikTok’s chief executive, as an Honorary Chair of this year’s over-the-top Met Gala in New York City tonight. 

TikTok declined to reveal to The New York Times its financial contribution to the Met Gala, but sponsors in previous years are known to have each kicked in roughly $5 million (TikTok and China are probably delighting in how cheaply the glitterati can be bought off).

The New York Times even took note of Chow’s high profile at the Met Gala with an article in Sunday’s paper, “TikTok’s Boss Takes On a Flashy Gig”.

All the official co-chairs of the splashy event – Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny and Chris Hemsworth – are likely on board, too, caring less about matters of substance than celebrity visibility.

All this at the same time as Washington, D.C. is focused on TikTok’s corrosive influence in the United States, its massive collection of potentially sensitive user information and its ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance. Those concerns have prompted the U.S. government to pass legislation banning the social media platform unless it is sold to a government-approved buyer.

China has criticized the congressional action, saying it undermines US claims of support for free speech, an ironic assertion since speech is tightly controlled in China, where the government maintains a vise-like grip on media, the internet, and personal expression and any dissent can result in arrest, torture and imprisonment. Moreover, American platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) have been banned in China for years.

(TikTok filed a federal lawsuit on May 7, 2024 challenging the constitutionality of the new law. The lawsuit accuses the government of trampling on TikTok’s First Amendment rights—as well as the free-speech rights of Americans—under the banner of national security)

Still, the style elite seem perfectly happy to help TikTok elevate its presence and influence, national interests be damned.

It may be because in their jaded eyes they see moral equivalence between the United States and authoritarian countries such as China, even though the evidence is clear that, as Douglas Murray, a British political commentator, wrote in The Free Press, “We have enormous moral authority, and…there is an oceanic gulf separating the many failures and shortcomings of the United States and the intentional and wanton taking of human life that is all too common in more authoritarian climes.”

It brings to mind Donald Trump’s admiration of authoritarian leaders. In a 2023 interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox, Carlson asked, “How smart is [Xi]? Could you tell?” “Top of the line,” Trump replied. “President Xi is a brilliant man. If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find [them], there’s nobody like that: the look, the brain, the whole thing.”

You may think that elites elevating questionable or authoritarian figures shouldn’t be of any concern. But people who enable dark forces, and even cheer them on, are ignoring the threat that China poses to democracy and rule of law around the world. 

China’s abdication of its responsibilities under the 1985 Sino-British Joint Declaration, where China promised to preserve the judicial system, legislative and executive autonomy, and all the key freedoms to which Hong Kong people had become accustomed, is hard evidence of China’s intentions.

The fact is that dismissal of China’s threat is naive. China is seeking to displace the United States and restore China to its rightful place. Lionizing people like Shou Chow ignores that reality.