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Political machines are being assembled to recruit and train candidates in anticipation of the 2024 election cycle, which will determine who serves on the regionally elected 12-member council seated in 2025 under the city’s new form of government.
A smattering of training academies, boot camps and political action committees have formed—or are in the works—to train and promote candidates sympathetic to specific political leanings.
The groups include a training academy run by former mayoral candidate Sarah Iannarone for progressive candidates, training for labor-friendly candidates held by the Oregon Labor Candidate School, a program hosted by political powerhouse academy Emerge Oregon, and a soon-to-be-formed political action committee that represents business interests, likely in partnership with the Portland Metro Chamber (formerly the Portland Business Alliance).
The various groups forming will seek to occupy as many City Council seats as possible come 2025. That means voters in each district could choose among leftist, labor and law-and-order tickets.
Here are the groups forming to place candidates of their choosing on the 2025 City Council.
Doug Moore and a business-forward political action committee: Moore, who stepped down from his longtime position as the executive director of the Oregon League of Conservation Voters this spring, will form a PAC that recruits and funds centrist City Council candidates. “We have to elect people that are going to be problem-solving, pragmatic people,” Moore tells WW. “This is a really important election to make sure we elect a council that’s going to take a look at what the city needs to do and set us on a good path. We have problems, but they’re fixable.”
Moore declined to say whether the Portland Metro Chamber was directly involved, but payments made by the chamber’s PAC in recent weeks to Moore suggest he is working closely with the group. Moore says the PAC could train candidates, too. The chamber declined to comment.
Sarah Iannarone, Our Portland: Iannarone, who narrowly lost to Mayor Ted Wheeler in 2020, announced her training academy earlier this spring. The two-week program, which says it provides training on media relations, policy, campaigning, fundraising and messaging, will begin in September. (It was supposed to start in July, but Iannarone pushed it back to September to await voting district boundaries, which are now being drawn by a volunteer commission.)
Advertised speakers at the program include Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, former City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, and onetime Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury.
The Oregon Labor Candidate School, which for years has trained labor-friendly candidates for office, will host a one-day intensive training session for prospective candidates, culled largely from its alumni list. Dan Torres, the nonprofit’s executive director, says the training is a “crash course” that will touch on fundraising under the city’s small donors elections program and ranked-choice voting. The OLCS doesn’t fund candidates, but Torres says well-funded labor organizations—think the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union—will likely pick up the baton and fund candidates they deem friendly to their causes.
Emerge Oregon, the powerhouse political training academy for women, is also training candidates for City Council. (Emerge has received significant scrutiny this year after one of its alums, former Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, lost her job to a moonlighting scandal.) “We can’t wait to see what the Emerge women who run for City Council in 2024 will do for the communities they represent,” says executive director Annie Ellison, “who for too long have been left out of Portland’s biggest decisions.”