Updates on results will be posted here nightly!

Tonight Portland voters will learn a lot about the new voting system adopted as a part of charter reform. The Mayor, Auditor, and Council will all be selected with ranked preferences form voters. The Council is the unique story here as three winners will be selected from these rankings in each of the four new districts.

We are sharing some initial analyses here to explore the patterns from these elections. But first an important note: These are just preliminary results. The Multnomah County Elections Division is releasing full tabulations each evening. For the next few days ballots will continue to be returned to the County, resulting in updates that may change these results. This is a disclaimer one should remember when also reviewing national returns in general! With that note, lets see what the voters have shared so far.

In the following plots we are visualizing the round-by-round tallies. For more on how this system works, skip down to the end for a quick primer. We have chosen a Sankey bump plot to show the results. This plot shows the ranking of each candidate in each round, and the shifts in rank. Each color is a single candidate, and we have used colors where the final winners are green so you can follow from across the rounds.

A note on turnout and ballot processing: As each of these updates come in the totals will grow. Tonight as we publish this just over 218,000 votes have been counted in the Mayor’s race. For comparison, in 2020 the final certified total was just over 363,000. Oregon Public Broadcasting is reporting that the County is still expecting 115,000 more ballots to be counted. These initial results reflect preliminary tallies and may move. In particular we are seeing lower numbers in East Portland’s District 1 where ballots counted are about half that of other districts. These may be later voters, though there is also likely lower turnout in this district based on past election experiences.

Mayoral Race

Portland’s mayoral race had 19 candidates on the ballot with three Commissioners from the previous model of government. Prior to the election, five of these candidates were receiving much of the press, including invitations to public debates. These five were: Rene Gonzalez, Mingus Mapps, Carmen Rubio, Keith Wilson and Liv Østus. The first three in this list have widespread name recognition from serving on the current City Commission. This race Keith Wilson simply ran away with. Initially eliminated candidates did not substantially combine into a challenge to the candidates that started out in front.

Key Takeaways from Mayor’s Race

• Keith Wilson pulled out to a substantial lead and kept it throughout the round. No meaningful vote transfers occurred until the final three rounds when 4,492 votes moved from Østus, then 8,824 from Mapps, and finally Gonzelez was eliminated resulting in 19,718 votes moving to Wilson.
• We saw no real change in ranked position through out the tallies.
• Gonzalez was not ranked by many voters. The only substantial transfer came when Mapps was eliminated with 8,323 voters picking Gonzelez second (of viable candidates) after first picking Mapps.

District 1 Council Race

A large part of the interest in changing Portland’s form of representation was designing a way for East Portland to have more say in city politics. Symbolically given the first district in Portland, District 1 represents Portland east of I-205, with some portions of the boundary running along 82nd Avenue. The district is the most racially diverse of the four districts. The campaign season in District 1 focused on how to take on public safety concerns, and how to increase inclusion in transportation planning. Going into the election, a several candidates relied on or developed broader name recognition. Loretta Smith served previously as a Multnomah County Commissioner. Candace Avalos has previously run for citywide office and is prominent in the advocacy community, but notable for this experience she played a role in the redesign of the city form of government as a member of the Charter Review Commission. Terrence Hayes ran on a pro-law and order platform, earning an endorsement from the Portland police union – despite himself being formerly incarcerated for 13 years.

Results in this district are the most unique so far in that total ballots processed are about half of those in other districts. We have chose to visualize ballots that are no longer active as exhausted here – meaning they no longer had valid choices. The elimination of Ernst, Routh, and Hayes moved to the front runners, but also included ballots that ranked candidates that had been already eliminated and thus ran out of choices. Some caution here is required as we wait for more results to come in, and this may shift who survives to later rounds.

Key Takeaways from District 1

• Experience in public service mattered in this district. Loretta Smith, Candace Avalos, and Jamie Dunphy all served in various public roles – either elected before (Smith), as a public advocate (Avalos) or as a staff member for an elected official (Dunphy).
• Avalos sent surplus votes to both Smith and Dunphy showing her strength in this district.
• Routh voters in their second choice split pretty evenly with the final three winners and Ernst.

District 2 Council Race

North and Northeast Portland compose District 2, roughly though not exactly north of Sandy and running to the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. The residents of the District are second most diverse of the four, and also have a broad range in incomes. This District has seen rapid changes with the rapid rise in housing costs, displacement of many families from core neighborhoods for Black Portlanders. The District attracted 22 candidates, but includes several with previous experience, including one current City Commissioner Dan Ryan. A note on this visualization, the final round includes rebalancing totals as the final win total may not exceed the threshold, so those votes are taken off and in our visualization sent to exhausted. But voters picked winners in these cases – notable Pirtle-Guiney has a large set moved off her total in that final round.

Key Takeaways from District 2

• Three top candidates stayed in the top ranking and did not move much, similar to the dynamics of the Mayor’s race.
• Pirtle-Guiney and Kanal both benefited from being second (or later) picks for voters that first picked Penson. These two candidates also picked up eliminated votes from many other candidates, suggesting broader support in second or lower picks.
• Dan Ryan received some eliminated transfers, but not as much as the other two winners suggesting a narrower base of support.

District 3 Council Race

This district attracted 30 candidates to the field. The district includes much of Southeast Portland and a portion of Northeast Portland including Rose City Park, Roseway and Madison neighborhoods. Under the over a century of at-large elections for the City Commission, most successful candidates came from District 2. This history might help explain why it also attracted a number of political veterans to run for office. Notable candidates from District 3 include:

• Rex Burkholder who represented a portion of the district for 12 years on the Metro regional government Council;
• Kezia Wanner, a public servant with experience in transportation policy at the City and state levels;
• Tiffany Koyama Lane, a school teacher and labor organizer;
• Angelita Morillo, a policy advocate with City Hall experience and who has experience unsheltered houselessness;
• Steve Novick, who had previously served as a City Commissioner;
• Jesse Cornett who has run for citywide office in the past, and been prominent in advocacy circles

Key Takeaways from District 3

• Choices in this District were very stable with eliminated candidates not generating enough consistent transfers to buoy a single candidate.
• Wanner benefited from transfers from Cornett and Burkholder suggesting some overlap in preferences in these candidates.
• Surprisingly not much movement occurred even across lower rankings, most transfers seemed to maintain the pattern the rankings.

District 4 Council Race

Finally, we look at District 4 which encompasses the westside of Portland and the southeast neighborhoods of Sellwood and Eastmoreland. This district also attracted 30 candidates to the field, matching District 3 in terms of candidates. The district is generally more affluent and white that the other districts, but also spans a number of different communities from leafy residential neighborhoods, to the downtown core, and up to the West Hills communities. Key candidates here included:

• Olivia Clark, a policy advocate with experience in the Oregon Governor’s office and service with the regional transit agency, Tri-Met;
• Eric Zimmerman, chief of staff to a Multnomah County Commissioner;
• Mitch Green, an energy economist and veteran.

Key Takeaways from District 4

• Three top candidates dominated, with Olivia Clark surpassing the threshold in Round 1.
• A sizeable transfer from Eli Arnold (police officer and veteran) propelled Zimmerman above the line to stay competitive.

Closing Thoughts

These initial results provide us insight on how voters made sense of so many choices. Moving ahead we expect campaigns, organizers, and community groups to re-orient their strategies around the election. In this round of elections most if not all candidates played nicely with each other (as advocates of ranked choice voting predict.) But this also led to less of a focus on concrete policy differences. Differentiating candidates was harder as these elections ran more personality or general campaigns. As researchers we will also have access to raw voter preferences later this year, and then we can explore more deeply the interactions of these choices.

What Counts for Success?

I expect many will ask: Did this reform work? First, a reminder on why we made these changes. Portland previously elected candidates at-large, and candidates that won by 50% or more in the primary election, by-pass the general election. In recent elections, this pathway to victory worked for a number of candidates. In 2014 both Commissioners Nick Fish and Dan Saltzman were reelected in the primary. In 2016 Commissioner Fritz was reelected in the primary election. Looking at these vote totals, and assuming they were evenly divided across our new districts, these Commissioners were able to advance with as low as 15,000 votes to city council. This historically resulted in most of our commissioners being from the inner east-side of Portland as mapped here by the Oregonian.

In our new form of voting, we are still waiting to see what the final thresholds will be but in Districts 2, 3, and 4 we are very close to this total – and we are electing three candidates totals. Its a hard comparison to fully make between the at-large and district based systems. But in our new system with three candidates have already each receiving 15,000 votes a piece. A combined total of 45,000 voters were able to advance their candidates in one district – compared to 15,000 in the old system being able to support the sole citywide winner. Here we see a big expansion in the ability of voters to influence the composition of the council. It takes some professional judgement to assess the next component here, but does council look different now? It is early still, but we see more minority candidates advancing and a spread of ideological perspectives finding success so far.

Voters in Districts 3 and 4 will get a chance to vote again in 2026 when the one-time two-year terms for those districts end. The 2026 election will be for a four year term, seeing the city elections return to a staggered set where half the council is up for reelection every two years. What will campaigns, interest groups, and political funders learn and do differently in 2026? Previous research on ranked choice voting has shown city by city in the US, the number of candidates does decrease after the first wave of attention.

Candidate attention in the next round will also be influences by how this new council sets itself up, the issues it decides to focus on, and the degree to which new councilors decide to take on (or not) key questions facing the city. We also expect this new model will place a lot of emphasis on constituent services, changing how city bureaus experience pressure from neighborhoods. Being able to deliver on these requests will also be key for the next campaigns, and a tool for incumbents to hone as they prepare for re-election.