A New Advocacy Group Wants to Turn Up the Heat on Elected Officials. Will It Work?

If you watch television or spend time on social media, you may have seen ads and messaging from a new advocacy group called “People for Portland.”

It’s a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt nonprofit organization that engages in public education. Because of the vagaries of the federal tax code, however, it does not have to disclose its donors. Such groups operate regularly in Oregon—on the environment, abortion, gun rights, and just about every other controversial policy issue.

A couple of things are different about People for Portland: It’s attacking elected officials—at City Hall, on the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners, and at Metro.

All three of those public bodies have a hand in housing and homelessness, and the first two in public safety. But the front men for the group, political consultants Kevin Looper, who has a long history working for Democrats and progressive ballot measure campaigns, and Dan Lavey, a recovering Republican who has advised GOP candidates and many corporations, say they aren’t trying to get anybody elected, nor are they hoping to pass a ballot measure. At least not yet.

Instead, they want to send a jolt of electricity through all local elected officials, using polling results that show Portlanders are deeply unhappy with their city.

Looper, who helped pass the 10-year, $2.5 billion Metro homeless services measure last year, is biting the hand that once fed him. He says elected officials entrusted with putting that money to work to reduce chronic homelessness are “comfortably numb” and guilty of “virtue signaling all day long without actually doing anything virtuous.”

In addition to polling, the pair interviewed Portlanders and put the results on People for Portland’s website. At citizens’ requests, the website delivers emails from concerned citizens to 36 local elected officials.

Lavey says each official has gotten more than 2,000 emails so far. And the website has received pushback: Critics allegedly egged 7th Street Espresso after an interview with the eastside coffee shop’s owner, Amanda Frese, appeared on the site.

In that interview, Frese says after 21 years in business she’s lost faith in elected officials. “I feel like the city of Portland is a ship in the ocean with no one behind the wheel,” she said. “It’s just there, and it’s going to crash and burn.”

Exactly how Looper and Lavey plan to use such sentiments to galvanize officials and what victory will look like remain unclear, even after an hourlong interview, edited her for brevity and clarity.

WW: So your polling found that 91% of people want cops to wear body cameras and 87% would vote against incumbents in the next election if things don’t improve. What in the numbers surprised you?

Dan Lavey: That people want more urgent action. It was like 84% to 12%. I expected our point of view to prevail, but I did not expect that margin.

How many donors do you have?

Lavey: Not disclosing.

How much money have you raised?

Kevin Looper: Not disclosing. Let me just be clear on that. The Oregonian called us “dark money,” like we’re trying to get around election laws. That’s wrong. We’re a 501(c)(4) issue advocacy group operating under the same provisions as Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood doesn’t disclose donors, or people would go and harass them. I wish that more donors were like Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle and willing to be identified.

What have you heard from elected officials?

Looper: Some of them are trying to figure out how to explain why doing nothing is better than pushing for more and faster.

So how long will this effort last?

Looper: As long as it takes. We’ve told donors that where the people lead, politicians will follow. First, we get the public more engaged, then start pushing officials on policy that has public support. Like police body cams and moving more aggressively on shelters. The Portland City Council’s got to be willing to do things based on the will of the majority of people.

The City Council put new camping guidelines in place and promised six safe camping spaces by the end of this year. Aren’t they doing something?

Looper: They are not doing anywhere near enough. We need more than six sites; they’re struggling with two. If the problem is siting, they can change zoning rules.

How do you explain the lack of urgency among electeds?

Lavey: Too often, our elected officials think they represent the government and they take their cues from the bureaucracy agency heads rather than telling the agency heads what to do. If it’s a crisis or emergency, elected officials should act like it.

Looper: The city is dominated by one set of politics, and it is dangerous to challenge the orthodoxy. That keeps people who know possible ways to improve the situation on the streets from speaking up because they’re cowed by the chance of losing funding.

You say your group isn’t about electing candidates or winning ballot measures. So what is it about?

Looper: Our bright idea is, let’s just hold an election every day because politicians instinctively respond to being criticized. They are allergic to it.

You wrote an op-ed in The Oregonian. The next week, County Commissioner Sharon Meieran wrote a similar one. Kevin, you ran her campaign four years ago. Is this campaign part of helping her run for chair next year?

Looper: No. She was there advocating for this stuff long before we came along.

Did you intentionally wait to launch People for Portland until after the effort to recall Mayor Ted Wheeler was dead?

Lavey: Not all. We did our polling in May. We launched in August. Our intention was to launch earlier.

What has the mayor or his staff said to you?

Lavey: I have not spoken to the mayor. Aide Sam Adams has said, “This is good. We need pressure.”

What about the county chair, Deborah Kafoury?

Looper: She’s unhappy. She believes that any dollar spent on short-term homelessness issues is a dollar taken away from long-term fixes. I don’t think the majority of Portlanders agree with that.

You guys have worked on lots of campaigns. How’s this different?

Lavey: This is about people’s passion for their hometown. When you look at their reactions, it’s despair and sadness. I think people love Portland, and even the things some people hate about Portland, they secretly love. That to me is why this is different.

We don’t know who’s funding you or what they want. Why shouldn’t the public think this is a just bunch of rich white guys saying, “Get off my lawn”?

Lavey: If we went out and tried to represent a narrow sliver of the electorate, it wouldn’t work. The homeless mom and son I interviewed in the WinCo parking lot made the most compelling case for the failure of the elected officials to pick up the garbage that I’ve heard. The pride they had in their city just blew me away. At the very end of the interview, she said, “I just never thought Portland would let us down like this.” Portland—not the government, not elected officials—her home, her city, her town.