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Oregon's past statewide and federal elections are full of spoiler candidates and non-majority winners.
No one likes spoilers. Spoiled food, spoiled plans…and spoiled elections.
In 31 contests over the past dozen years, candidates for statewide or federal office in Oregon have celebrated victory without first winning majority support.
In other words, in almost one-sixth of Oregon races (16 percent), more voters selected non-winning candidates than cast ballots for the ultimate winner.
Take the most recent governor's race. Democrat Tina Kotek won with 47 percent of the vote---about 67,000 votes more than her main competitor, Republican Christine Drazan. But nonaffiliated candidate Betsy Johnson received 168,000 votes, which was more than enough to swing the election.
Similar cases pockmark state election records. Third, fourth, or even more candidates have complicated over half of Oregon's gubernatorial races in the past twelve years. They have done the same in races for US representative, secretary of state, and state treasurer.
In all these cases, it's not clear if the person who won was actually preferred by the voters. If different candidates had run or if a spoiler candidate had dropped out, the outcome might have shuffled. These "plurality winners" may not represent the will of the people and might push ideas at odds with the desires of the bulk of the electorate.
Some states, such as Georgia, employ separate runoff elections to avoid this predicament. California and Washington use top-two general elections for the same reason. And Oregon could, like its cities of Portland and Corvallis, use ranked choice voting to ensure that winners earn a majority of votes.
Indeed, the availability of simple solutions like ranked choice voting makes the prevalence of the spoiler problem grate even more.
In general elections, third parties change the game
Third-party candidates influenced three of the past five general elections for Oregon's governor. And in a fourth case, the winner only barely logged a majority.
Even before the 2022 governor's race, Democrats worried about Johnson's candidacy spoiling the election for Kotek. They had seen a similar dynamic unfold in both 2010 and 2014 but in the inverse: it helped the Democrat.
Democrat John Kitzhaber won in 2010, with a margin of victory of about 22,000 votes more than Republican Chris Dudley but just short of a majority. Two third-party candidates each received almost enough votes to make up the difference between Kitzhaber and Dudley: Greg Kord (Constitution Party) with 20,475 and Wes Wagner (Libertarian) with 19,048. Either candidate could almost have been a spoiler, pulling voters away from Dudley; together, they very likely changed the election outcome just by running.
In 2014 Kitzhaber won reelection with 49.9 percent of the vote, which was much closer but still not a majority.
The 2018 governor's race barely ended with a majority winner. Although Democratic incumbent Kate Brown received more votes than her closest competitor, she had just 1,999 more than the total votes cast for other candidates.
Spoiler candidates show up on ballots besides those for governor. In 2016 Republican Dennis Richardson won the race to be Oregon's secretary of state with 78,580 votes more than the next candidate, Democrat Brad Avakian, ending Democrats' fourteen-year hold on statewide offices. But four other candidates received almost 175,000 combined votes, which was more than enough to change the outcome.
The same year, Democrat Tobias Read earned 42,000 more votes than his Republican opponent, Jeff Gudman, to win the race for state treasurer. But two additional candidates received many more votes than Read's modest edge: Progressive Chris Henry with more than 90,000 votes and Independent Party nominee (and former Republican state senator) Chris Telfer with more than 173,000. In 2020 Telfer seemed to realize that she might have diverted votes from Gudman, chose not to run, and endorsed Gudman

And the chance for stronger democracy it creates.
In a 2012 state legislative hearing, the lead proponent of a bill to consolidate local elections in November of even-numbered years said:
This bill would do one thing and one thing only. It would make Election Day uniform throughout the state…[it] ought to be a non-controversial topic. …This bill saves money. It increases voter turnout. …If we believe in representative democracy…we should support this bill.
Was the speaker progressive or conservative? A Republican or a Democrat?
What about the champion of a similar bill in a different state who said this in 2015?
"There is one major contributing factor to low voter turnout - the timing of elections - that could be addressed with a relatively simple policy change."
And how about the legislative sponsor of a 2023 bill in yet another state who proposed to move "every single type of election in the state…to our regular even-year elections" because "doubling turnout - that's all for the good"?
BIZARRE-PARTISANSHIP
The first speaker was the Arizona arch-conservative Clint Bolick, co-founder of the libertarian Institute for Justice. The second quote is from the arch-liberal interest group California Common Cause. The third is from of Montana state representative Mike Hopkins (R).
Is election consolidation (moving local elections to the same November ballot as national elections) a rare political case, then? Is it a reform where the left and right work together?
Not at all. To date, it's been more bizarre-partisan than bipartisan. In these states and others, proponents and opponents recite the same arguments for and against election consolidation. Indeed, if you go online and watch hearings on these bills (as I have done for five states) or comb through media coverage from a half dozen other states considering the idea, you'll learn that the scripts are almost verbatim but the parties keep trading parts.
SWAPPING SCRIPTS
An example from the pro side:
"It's better to have 60 percent of the people rather than 30 or 40 percent of the people choosing,"
Kansas state senator Damon Thayer (R) said in 2020 as he argued against unified Democratic opposition for consolidated elections. Three years later, New York state senator James Skoufis (D) argued incredulously for election consolidation against a phalanx of Republican opponents.
"You have 20 or so percent of voters deciding the outcome for the entire jurisdiction,"
he said.
"Why are you so afraid of 50, 60, 70 percent of voters determining who should hold these local positions?"
And one from the con side:
"[Democrats] will stop at nothing to manipulate the system to rig themselves into total and permanent power,"
state Republican party chair Nick Langworthy of New York complained in 2022. A year later, Tennessee House Democratic caucus chair John Ray Clemmons called a Republican's election consolidation bill a way to
"manipulate the democratic process for the sole purpose of consolidating even more power."
Watch enough of these hearings and you'll experience a singular combination of déjà vu and whiplash.
ROLE REVERSALS
Leaders' actions matched their words. Almost every state election consolidation proposal in living memory has split legislators along party lines. In red states, Republicans vote yea and Democrats vote nay. In blue states, vice versa. It's an unusual pattern that's possibly unique.
Often, the proposals were almost identical, even borrowed. In 2012, for example, the Arizona legislature passed the bill Bolick was testifying for (HB2826 2012). Championed by the conservative Goldwater Institute and supported by GOP mainstays like the Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry, the bill won with three-fourths of Republican senators and four-fifths of Republican representatives voting yes. Republican governor Jan Brewer signed the bill, which almost all Democrats opposed, into law.
Three years later, in 2015, neighboring California considered a similar bill (SB 415). On

Should people who qualify for subsidized housing get to have home offices? And other odd questions.
On Wednesday, the Portland city auditor's office released an investigation of Portland's inclusionary housing program, the affordability mandate that applies to new buildings of 20 or more homes.
The audit makes some good arguments and some confusing arguments. It found one fairly glaring problem in the program: a two-year backlog in the city's work to check that landlords and tenants are in compliance. Then, to make things more confusing, The Oregonian decided to make a seemingly scandalous headline of something the auditors hadn't even recommended changing---the fact that the program has covered part of its own administrative costs using the relative trickle of money it collected directly.
Because Sightline has a long history of caring deeply about inclusionary zoning and wanting Cascadian governments to get it right, I decided to dedicate a throwback Thursday to a bloggy point by point response to some findings and recommendations of this audit.
I'm going to try to minimize technical language, but things may still get a little obscure. In classic blogger fashion, I'd be happy to talk more in the comments.
Okay, without further ado:
"Improve Program goals so they are specific to the Program, attainable based on who the Program is designed to serve, and measurable."
Sightline's take: yep.
Portland's inclusionary housing program ("IH") was put together in a hurry, in an environment of justifiable urgency that verged on panic. In 2014 and 2015, a construction collapse followed quickly by a migration boom had sent Portland rents and displacement soaring at the fastest rates in many years. In November 2016---the same day they funded the city's first local affordable housing bond---voters would take matters into their own hands by putting tenant advocate Chloe Eudaly, a thoughtful bookstore owner who barely campaigned but happened to be really upset about rising rents and really good at Facebook, on the incoming city council.
In the months leading up to that transfer of power, inclusionary housing, re-legalized by the state legislature one year prior, was Something the City Could Do. The unfortunate result of this enthusiasm was that the city essentially started with a set of desired program specs and retroactively filled in a rationale for them, without ever clearly defining the program's goals.
Yesterday, the auditors found that those original goals "were not effective performance measurement tools and did not accurately convey the Program's purpose."
It's a good point. Better defining success was one of our four recommendations last year for improving the program. New program language (approved this year, after the research for yesterday's audit had already been conducted) is a modest improvement, but the key language ("support the production of units") is still too vague to be a very useful test of whether or not the program is working as intended.
"Fees are intended to fund affordable housing development and preservation, but according to the Bureau, as of June 2023, this had not yet happened. Instead, the fees have gone solely towards Program operating costs."
Sightline's take: More transparency here would be good, but the existence of administrative costs isn't a scandal.
One of the so-called "sideboards" placed on local inclusionary housing programs by Oregon law is that they must offer a "fee-in-lieu option." Developers must have an option to pay cash to the city as an alternative to providing affordable housing themselves. The state doesn't restrict how cities can use this cash, and until this year the city didn't formally promise to use it in any specific way, though it was understood to be intended for affordable housing programs.
Instead, the city apparently used this money to fund its affordable housing program ... in other words, it used the trickle of cash revenue generated by inclusionary housing to cover the exp

Old Town's first new building project has more than double the number of homes and less parking than the city's old code would have allowed. The rest of the city might follow suit.
Bellingham's industrial Old Town district is finally beginning its transformation into the walkable neighborhood city planners have long envisioned - thanks, in part, to a decision last year to try giving builders full flexibility over parking counts in that area.
The experiment has paid off. The first building proposed since the regulatory change will have more than twice the number of homes as would have been allowed last year.
"The shift to no parking minimums was a clear win in this case,"
wrote Ali Taysi, a land use consultant for the project.
The six-story building, located on the former recycling facility at 707 Astor, will house a mix of 84 studio and one- and two-bedroom apartments, with 1,600 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor. Permits are expected to be filed in May, with builders hoping to break ground early next year. The project is likely the first of several coming to the neighborhood, after the city signed a development agreement in 2023 for the eight city blocks that used to serve as scrapyard.
Now, the parking reform is being considered citywide.
UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL OF OLD TOWN
Old Town's transformation from industrial scrapyard to walkable mixed-use neighborhood has been anticipated since 2008 when the area was designated as the city's second "urban village," after downtown. At the time, planners estimated that 1,100 homes could be added there by 2022. Today, only 44 have been built.
The Parberry family, who first started salvaging metals along Whatcom Creek in 1923, owned 46 percent of developable land in the district, or about eight city blocks. Their initial plans to relocate the recycling facility were scuttled by the 2008 recession, but in recent years they discontinued their Old Town operations.
Building in Old Town is no easy feat. Decades of dumping refuse along the tidal mudflats of Whatcom Creek created 13 acres of landfill by the 1950s. The Department of Ecology remediated the area in 2005, removing tons of solid waste and capping the remaining contaminated soil. Excavation work can be prohibitively expensive, and restrictions on ground floor living and daycare centers remain in place. Future residents will also have to contend with the freight trains that run parallel to the district that sound their horns throughout the night.
But at a Planning Commission hearing on April 20, 2023, it seemed like Old Town's future might finally have arrived.
"I wish it would have happened a little bit quicker,"
said Tara Sundin, Manager of Community and Economic Development for the city.
"But I'm just thankful that we have people that have been willing to come forward into one of our riskier parts of town."
Developers Curt O'Conner and Pete Dawson, who both grew up in Bellingham, have paired up for the undertaking by purchasing all but one of the Parberry properties.
A PARKING REFORM PILOT TAKES SHAPE
To make building in Old Town feasible, builders proposed changes to the zoning code with the local Planning Commission. One modification was reducing parking mandates to be consistent with the city's other urban villages. Instead of mandating a parking spot for every studio apartment, for example, the city would only require one parking space for every two.
"The conversation on 'no parking minimums' hadn't really crossed our radar,"
said Taysi, the developers' consultant.
"We thought it might be a bridge too far.
Members of the planning commission, though, thought Old Town might be the perfect place to give builders full flexibility over parking.
"This could be an opportunity to try to go further,"
Commissioner Rose Lathrop proposed.
Another commissioner, Mike McAuley, agreed:
"If we want to pilot something, this would be an amazing place to do that,"
he said.
"If we're forcing the market to pay for a $60,000 park

The city can make three critical fixes to its 20-year growth plan: Let middle housing be bigger, allow apartment buildings in more places, and legalize car-free homes everywhere.
Seattle is in the process of updating its Comprehensive Plan, its 20-year roadmap for growth. Chief among the policies it charts is, of course, housing. Seattle's chronic shortage of homes and the harm that has done to lower-income residents and communities is no secret to anyone.
Unfortunately, the draft plan falls far short of what's necessary to create a Seattle that welcomes households of all incomes. In short, it doesn't make enough room for more homes.
If adopted as proposed, more and more people will continue to be priced out of the city for decades to come. And the city will also fall further behind on goals to reduce climate pollution and sprawl.
The critical fix is straightforward: loosen zoning rules to allow more homes of all shapes and sizes. And Seattle can improve its draft Comprehensive Plan to make that happen in three key ways. (I cover them briefly in the numbered sections below, then expand on each in the rest of the article.)
1. LET MIDDLE HOUSING WITH MORE HOMES BE BIGGER
Allowing middle housing - small-scale homes like fourplexes - in places once reserved for detached houses is an imperative for creating more homes that more people can afford in lower-density neighborhoods.
The good news is that the 2023's Washington state bill HB 1110 requires Seattle to legalize middle housing in areas currently reserved for single-detached houses. Three-quarters of Seattle's residential land will be opened up to more housing, creating the potential for tens of thousands of new homes.
The bad news is that just allowing more homes per lot doesn't by itself guarantee anything will get built. That's because middle housing construction is usually not financially feasible unless zoning rules allow the buildings to add indoor space as their unit count goes up. Seattle's proposed Comprehensive Plan (Comp Plan, for short) doesn't do that, and instead would impose the same cap on buildable capacity as what currently applies to single-detached houses with accessory dwellings. This limitation would not only suppress the construction of middle housing but would also prevent any feasible projects from having family-sized homes.
The solution is to emulate Spokane's best-in-the-US middle housing zoning, which grants generous development capacity and flexibility. Or, at minimum, implement the middle housing capacity recommendations of Washington's Department of Commerce, which stipulate workable increases in capacity.
2. ALLOW LARGER APARTMENT BUILDINGS IN MORE OF THE CITY
Apartment buildings five stories and up, near job centers, transit hubs, mixed-used nodes, schools, and parks, are essential for providing the level of density that both reduces cost and adds homes at the scale needed to address Seattle's shortage. Large multifamily buildings in compact, walkable, low-carbon neighborhoods also yield the biggest dividends on reducing climate pollution and sprawl.
Seattle's draft Comp Plan proposes only a modest amount of upzoning for apartment buildings. It recommends four- to six-story buildings in 24 newly designated "neighborhood centers" confined to just an 800-foot radius, and eight stories in a new urban center at the 130th Street light rail station. Otherwise, it proposes no apartment upzones anywhere else, excepting some slivers of land currently zoned for low density in designated centers, and possibly some 1/2-block strips along arterials.
Seattle's plan could rise to the moment by allowing highrise towers in all regional centers and near all light rail stations, eight-story buildings in all urban centers, and six-story buildings near frequent transit stops and other community amenities like parks. It could also designate more and larger neighborhood centers with apartment zoning.
That may sound like a lot of change, but it's still not European-

Adapting communities to better serve growing elderly populations also makes those places more climate-resilient. A new book charts the path to making this connection.
When climate disasters like wildfires, flooding, heat waves, or polar vortexes grip communities, they hold a sharper threat for older adults, whose numbers in the US and Canada are growing. And even beyond these more headline-grabbing events are the everyday activities that may prove more challenging for older adults to perform independently in a warmer world. In Cascadia, that might look like being able to afford air conditioning to keep cool as the summers get hotter. Or so one can close the windows against wildfire smoke to keep indoor air safer for breathing, especially for those with respiratory ailments.
Housing expert and community resilience advocate Danielle Arigoni argues in her new book that adapting our communities to better serve the needs of older adults - generally defined as those 65 and older - in fact makes our communities safer, more livable, and more climate-resilient for everyone. Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation draws on her long experience in urban planning and community development to offer a new process and framework for how towns and cities can approach both disaster recovery as well as everyday decisions about how they'll build and change.
Sightline interviewed Danielle about her findings. Her book is available from publisher Island Press and other places books are sold.
YOU'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT AND WORKING ON THESE ISSUES FOR DECADES. WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO START WRITING THIS BOOK?
I was compelled to dive into this topic after seeing some statistics that showed older adults dying at much higher rates than the rest of the population in a slew of disasters: Hurricanes Katrina, Florence, Maria, Ian, and Ida. But also in Winter Storm Uri, the California Camp Fire, and then again in the Pacific Northwest heat waves of 2021 and 2022. In all these cases (and more), older adults represented upwards of 50 percent, two-thirds, or even 85 percent of the people who died. When you think about the fact that Katrina was nearly 20 years ago - when 70 percent of the people who died were over 65 - and that the rate of fatalities for older adults is virtually unchanged since that time, it's pretty sobering. And maddening.
I have to credit AARP for really helping me to understand the impacts of our built environment on older adults, which invariably fuels the disaster rates we see here. I am an urban planner and have worked at the intersection of housing, transportation, and infrastructure for 20-plus years - always with an eye to ensuring that it could be improved to deliver better environmental and social outcomes - but I confess that I had some blind spots about the needs of older adults and people with disabilities. My five-year tenure as Director of Livable Communities at AARP really opened my eyes and helped me recognize the connections between the climate resilience work I had done previously at EPA and HUD, and the opportunities to better align that work with the needs of older adults.
I realized that there was virtually no information out there that connected the dots between two massive trends: climate change and our rapidly aging population. My hope was that I could start to create a common understanding of those connections in ways that would compel work in both the aging and climate fields. That is the gap that I hoped to fill with this book.
HOW DO CLIMATE IMPACTS ESPECIALLY AFFECT OLDER PEOPLE IN OUR COMMUNITIES?
Climate impacts older adults in so many ways, some of which are unique to them, but many of which are shared with people with disabilities, low-income people, and disinvested communities.
For example, extreme heat impacts everyone, but for older adults it is especially deadly. 2023 was the hottest year on record on Earth so far, which of course affects everyone - but not equally. Extreme heat is now the leading cause of we