november 2024 general election

Written By Marissa Yang Bertucci

PDX, OR 


If you’re a longtime reader, you’ll notice that this is a sparse guide compared to seasons past. I just don’t have my usual shit-eating grin for writing details. I’m grieving (cw: mama stuff) and quite chronically ill. I look forward to a time of greater capacity and breadth. I hope this can be just one small resource that feels helpful as you make your choices. xo! 


It’s unseasonably warm and I can’t decide whether to turn on the air conditioning. The October sun is cooking me. I pull down my car’s visor and stretch my spine in in my seat so that my eyes actually meet the shade. My short kings feel me. 

I crawl along the 205 after work. I think about our city’s infrastructure every time I’m stuck in traffic alone in my car surrounded by other people alone in their cars. Like always, I’m the problem too. I long to carpool or to zone out on a subway like I did as a teenager. I want to teleport home. My shoulders hurt. I do my weird car stretches and feel like an ostrich.

I approach the Market Street overpass just south of Mall 205 and catch some commotion. I start to smile before I can fully process what’s going on.

Two graceless women are struggling to unroll a huge banner to display above the packed freeway, about as tall as them — it’s navy blue, edged in red. The end of it reads “24.COM.” It nearly tips onto them. Next to them, two men press “TR*MP VANCE 2024” lawn signs into the chain link fence and stare down at their phones. They make no moves to help the struggling women. The women do not look beseechingly at the men. They make no indication that they would ever expect the men to help with anything. I think to myself the following cringe millennial gay girl sentence: “Are the straights okay?” 

I start to laugh and look around conspiratorially, connecting with no one. 

It’s not really that funny, except that it is. Things are so bad. The cutting cruelty of this economy, the murderous military industrial complex, racism and housing instability, the wildfire transphobic panic trickling down into the horrible things children say to each other at school, addiction and illness and sadness. The despair in 2024 could knock your socks off and often does. We despair because the the suffering is so immense and so deliberately constructed. 

We plod onward to inconvenience these grotesque machineries. We have to believe — I do, anyway — that our efforts are not just symbolically getting us closer to liberation for all. I think we’re literally going to get there — wherever there is. The organizers to come will know more. I trust them. I hope they can look back at the work we’re doing now and trust us too. The proof of progress is in the small moments of truly feeling free, of being loved and seen and cared for by each other. 

In this strained moment, I have another little voter guide to share with you. I must tell you that I am one of the dumbest and saddest bitches alive. My mom died this summer and I will carry the heartbreak of missing her with honor for the rest of my life. I am not a political organizer. I am not an expert on anything except perhaps making a wonderful vinaigrette. I’ll share what I can, and I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I have been reading the articles and the city council minutes and paying attention to which kinds of houses display which yard signs whilst on my meandering dog walks. I have admired and followed the careers of some of this election’s candidates for years. I have held grudges against other candidates for as many years. I can promise you that I referenced and cross-referenced the endorsements of organizations, unions, and people whom I trust and admire. I present this compendium of my best guesses and hopes.   

My scope is always informed and limited by my positionality and experiences. I’m a queer, femme-ish, nonbinary, Korean/white mental health worker in the public education system. I grew up in a low income immigrant family with my single mama and siblings. I have experienced a lot of upward mobility privileges, like higher education, a middle-class school gig, stable housing.

I was incredibly politically influenced, starting in early childhood, by the extent to which my mother experienced racism, classism, housing instability, abuse, medical discrimination, and many more indignities. She was not a simple victim. She was incredibly sharp and strategic. She was my best friend and most favorite person. Her body bore the burdens of a litany of harms, and when she needed medical care because of these, the limitations of Social Security, Medicaid, and medical discrimination directly produced the conditions that accelerated her death. There are many people and systems I will never forgive. 

It should not be so difficult to survive, and so easy to let die.

I will never stop wanting a better world with fewer harms and more protections. I dedicate every effort to her.

Our love for community and for each other must go far beyond voting. But I will not lift my foot off the neck of public policy. Public policy is what made my mother’s OHP insurance (one of the best state insurances in the country, to boot) too cheap to pay for more than one PET scan a year, even though her oncologist ordered a second one as her symptoms started changing. We went to the appointment only to be told that the insurance had rejected the claim, overruling her doctor’s orders and his numerous appeals. The nurse who had already administered a dose of radioactive sugar was distraught for us. We couldn’t pay $7000, and no one expected us to in this godless country where insurance companies alone dictate who deserves frequent screenings and who doesn’t. We went home. By the time we caught the wild spread of cancer last spring, the surgeon who performed the endoscopy came alongside us in bed, hung her head, and apologized. For the rest of my life, I will wonder what would have happened if she’d gotten the PET scan that her doctor ordered. 

I’m wondering, quite literally, is this the best we can do? 

Public policy regulates or doesn’t regulate the insurance companies. Public policy taxes or does not tax corporations. Public policy builds or does not build affordable housing. Public policy pays or does not pay for the bombs killing children in Palestine. Public policy builds or doesn’t build the sidewalks and the crosswalks, impacting which neighborhoods do or don’t regularly have to sprout roadside altars mourning the pedestrian dead. Public policy chooses to arrest or house our homeless neighbors. 

There are some very bad actors on the ballot in Portland. Very close races and very bad actors. 

I always think: At least let us not yield one more inch to the bad actors who hope we won’t vote. Most of them know that they won’t convince us to vote for them. They just hope we won’t vote at all. 

We don’t have to know the exact path forward. We don’t have to agree on each point on the platform. It’s enough for me if a candidate feels even just a hair more agreeable to me on just one issue that matters. That is part of the project of yielding not one more inch to the consolidation of power on the right. The far right is ORGANIZED and they’re WINNING MANY LOCAL RACES all over the country. We’ve seen so many school boards and city councils go to hell all over Oregon. 

I understand not voting at all. I get it, babe. I understand voting for state and local races and not voting for any presidential candidate. We need so much to change, and there are many valid paths toward liberation. I just try to look down from time to time and make sure that I’m on one I can be proud of. 

Ranked Choice Voting ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧


Portland passed Measure 26-228 in 2022, establishing a greatly expanded, geographically districted, policy-focused city council, a new city administrator role to be hired by and join the next mayor in running city shit, and ranked-choice voting. If you’ve seen your graph paper-ass ballot, you’ll know that it’s here. 

This means you can rank candidates in preferential order, one through six. This is GREAT because many of us have felt trapped by binary-obsessed systems which favor moderate candidates. With ranked choice voting, we can ~vote with our hearts~ without feeling like we’re throwing our votes away to the far right. Over time, I believe this can make us braver, high-risk-high-reward voters. I look forward to trying to pass ranked choice voting statewide (Measure 117) so we can see leftist candidates make more inroads in state and federal primaries. 

BUT WE MUST BE CAREFUL. You might make some spiritual concessions and rank someone you don’t love because you want to ensure that your second or third choice could triumph over your least favorite DO NOT RANKs. 

This is a delicate balance because we don’t want to accidentally platform people who are better than the worst evils but still awful. Yet we need to rank people who are big enough contenders that they’ll stay in the running against the worst players. A ranked list of only obscure leftist candidates who don’t make it to the final round ends up feeling a lot like throwaway votes. 

If your vote is not counted in the final tally because none of your candidates made it to the final round, we call this an “exhausted ballot.” She’s wheezing. She’s sitting down. She’s having a sip of Poland Springs water. The ballot is EXHAUSTED, we should have let her REST!!!!!! Ranked choice voting works best when your ballot is NOT exhausted. Revive her. Give her a good night’s sleep before Election Day. Throw a candidate who has a chance to win on there. Anywhere. Even slot six. 

We can look to what happened in New York City with Mayor Eric Adams, who went on to be a corrupt shithead. In the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary race, a full 15% of the vote was not included in the final tally because those exhausted ballots didn’t include either of the biggest candidates. In the end, Adams won the primary because he garnered 43% of the vote over Kathryn Garcia’s 42%. That’s gonna go ahead and be a 1% margin, babe!!!!

We can learn from this: Rank your favorites. Don’t rank anyone you’d hate to see in office. But make sure you have a horse in the race who is big enough to win it, just in case your favorites don’t make it to the end. 

Ranking candidates in all six slots does not detract from your first choice. All first-choice votes will be counted. If your first-choice candidate gets eliminated, your subsequent rankings will be counted. We will elect our Mayor this way. And each new city council district will elect three non-partisan candidates this way.

The Do Not Rank list explains succinctly: 

To win the mayoral race, a candidate needs more than half the votes citywide. 

To win city council seats, candidates need 25% of the votes in their district + 1 vote. If winners are not clear in a first round, votes for the least popular candidates are reallocated according to the rankings of people who voted for them. Once a candidate wins a seat, any votes above the threshold they needed to win are reallocated according to the rankings of people who voted for them. Rounds continue until each of the four city council districts has three winning candidates. 

Housekeeping ~ ꕤ*.ﾟ

  • Election Day is Tuesday, November 5th. Polls close at 8pm. Find your nearest ballot drop-box here. You can also drop your ballot back into your mailbox or any USPS drop-box all the way until the last pickup of the day on November 5th without a stamp. Your public library is a drop-site, and they will give you an “I Voted” sticker that you can put on your pet’s nose (tag me if you do this pls). 

  • If you need a replacement ballot, order one here. You can pick up a replacement ballot at the county Elections Office all the way until 8pm.

  • You can track your ballot here. It’s worth it to double-check in case there are any weird reasons your ballot may have been rejected. 

    • EDIT: 10/28/24 - People are setting ballot boxes on fire. Fascist toaster oven vibes. This is what desperate assholes do when they know they’re losing power. It reminds me of domestic violence abuser tactics. One box burned in Vancouver and one in PDX so far.


      If you dropped your ballot off on SE Morrison and 11th next to the county Elections Office between 3:30 p.m. Saturday Oct. 26, and Monday at 3 a.m, double check. At this time, the Elections Office thinks no ballots were lost. Track your ballot at the link above and see if it was marked Accepted or Rejected in the next few days.

  • Your Voters’ Pamphlet is one of the most psychotic canonical texts in existence. The Old Testament found dead in a ditch!!! It contains your run-of-the-mill handy overviews of all the races and ballot measures, and because people furnish their own opinions and write ups, it also contains droves of the strangest typos, the most outlandish generalizations, the weakest straw man arguments, the most presumptuous bullshit. Incredible stuff. It’s also a great way to see, in brief, who is being endorsed by whom. I love to see where labor unions, lefty organizations, teachers, and QT/BIPOC coalitions lay down their feathers.
    You can access the pamphlet in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian, Korean, and Chinese, large print, recorded audio, and more.  

  • If you are having some kind of ballot emergency that you can’t solve by yourself, DM me. I am so dead serious. I love to do it. I will help you find an answer to your obscure question, or a way to get a replacement ballot, or get your ballot picked up. I’ll get it myself, or one of my hot friends in your neighborhood will do it. Believe in life after love, babe. 


I WANT TO HEAVILY UPLIFT AND HIGHLIGHT THE FOLLOWING RESOURCES 
(✿✪‿✪｡)

These considerations and endorsements come from folks whose voices I weighed very heavily. I trust their values, even if I didn’t come to agree with every point (usually because I feared for those ol’ exhausted ballots and bad actors taking the lead).

I also consulted these and found them very, very useful. Below you can find elections news coverage, links to candidate questionnaires, and more progressive voter guides. I used them as beneficent points of comparison and lore-gathering. 


Okay, ballot out? Favorite pen? Cup of tea? 

✿

Candidates *ੈ✩·

City of Portland

  • Mayor

  1. Carmen Rubio: My first pick because she could really win it. She’s the top reasonable choice who would be cooperative with the progressive bloc of city council. I’ve been watching her commissioner Instagram following slowly grow over the last year and some staffer is really having our girl pose with people at every single event. There she is in a herringbone blazer at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a restaurant that specializes in serving made-to-order fruit and veggie bowls. Love to see her in the community tbh. Endorsed by Portland Street Response, Portland Association of Teachers, APANO PAC, the Merc, Basic Rights Oregon, SEIU, Working Families Party, Latino Network Action Fund, the Sierra Club, etc.

    I am very compelled by the glowing recommendation of Portland Neighbors Welcome, who say:


    “As an elected city councilor for four years, Commissioner Rubio has an almost unbroken record of supporting housing in contested votes—or else in helping win over all her peers. She most recently supervised the city’s planning and housing bureaus, during which she led efforts to fully fund Portland’s inclusionary zoning program and to simplify zoning rules that had made new apartment buildings more expensive. She took on the difficult task of consolidating Portland’s slow and complicated permitting process, overcoming opposition on the council. In our questionnaire, she also pledged to lead the effort to bring a new affordable housing bond before city voters.” 

    She has some support from real estate developers BOO HISS!! The unpaid parking ticket scandal, which some call snobby or elitist or something, to me is giving ~parking in 2-hour spots Downtown with signs and symptoms of ADHD~ LOL. Let it go. That scandal is so fucking benign compared to the truly sinister ministrations of one Rene Flop Gonzalez.  

  2. Liv Østhus 

  3. Keith Wilson 

  4. Durrell Kinsey Bey

    DO NOT RANK: Rene Gonzalez

    Gonzalez is an incredibly bad actor. He has only pathetic or outright malicious accomplishments from his time on city council. I get the sense that he wishes we could k*ll all homeless people. He’s sketchy, a bad listener, and smarmy about it. He is beholden to cops and real estate interest groups who flatter him into thinking that he is A Powerful Boy instead of their little puppet. It’s embarrassing. I can’t believe that he got away with misusing tax funds to hire a company called White Hat Wiki to edit his Wikipedia page to be more favorable to him. After spending some time on that website, I can only conclude that the company got their name from none other than Shonda Rhimes’ hit mid-aughts show Scandal. I AM LAUGHING TYPING THIS. I am accessing deeply buried memories of 2012 and watching a quivering-lipped Olivia Pope talk about donning a white hat to clean up the reputations of whoever the fuck, using loopholes, technicalities, hijinx, and sometimes torture to control spin. SEEMS LEGIT!!!!!!!

    The auditor’s office said that Gonzalez’ office demonstrated “a pattern of obstruction and interference” during the course of the investigation. Rene, you stay SUSPICIOUS. Your smarmy ass defended the misuse of public funds by saying that you wanted your staffers to learn “best practices” for “cleaning up misinformation” online???? So this was a benevolent learning opportunity for your staffers? WHAT???

    But that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. This fabulous timeline from the Merc called “Rene’s Receipts” lists many a foible. This is a great article to share widely.

    Please follow @dontrankrene on Instagram and share the news clips and infographics to your social media and talk to your coworkers, family members, and neighbors about this. He’s made lots of inroads with people who also have contempt for our houseless neighbors but who have no good ideas for keeping people housed, or for people who are pissed that camper vans keep parking in their neighborhoods. Point them to literally…anyone else. 

A real hope of mine is that Mingus Mapps (another rather annoying man called difficult to work with by his peers) will help splinter the Rene Gonzalez votes. 

  • City Auditor: Simone Rede 


City Council

The city council races are CROWDED. It makes the head spin a bit. They are crowded not just with clear DO NOT RANKs or random thrill-seekers, but with earnest and often very experienced contenders. There were many good candidates — especially candidates with great values but whose campaigns I didn’t think had a chance of reaching the 25+% needed to snag a spot — whom I couldn’t squish into a true top six. There were some candidates who had overall good experience and priorities but who chose to receive endorsements from unsavory characters like the Portland Police Association.

The top three I’ve listed in each district are my true top wishes for the new city council: they’re candidates who have run kick-ass campaigns and whose experience and priorities make me optimistic for what Portland can grow into. Many races are very high quality all down the six I’ve listed, and I arrived at a splitting hairs place where I thought it most fair to include a few extra for your consideration. In the fight against people we’d hate to see in City Hall, it is advantageous to rank all six, so I suggest that you do. If you need some help deciding your last ranks, I think it’s always fair enough to see what they say about themselves in the Voters Pamphlet and follow your gut.  


Portland City Council, District 1: 

  1. Candace Avalos

  2. Timur Ender

  3. Steph Routh

  4. Jamie Dunphy

  5. Cayle Tern

  6. David Linn

Portland City Council, District 2: 

  1. Marnie Glickman

  2. Sameer Kanal

  3. Nat West 

  4. Jonathan Tasini 

  5. Elana Pirtle-Guinea

  6. Michelle DePass, Jennifer Park, or Debbie Kitchin 

DO NOT RANK: Bob Simril, Mariah Hudson  


Portland City Council, District 3: 

  1. Angelita Morillo

  2. Tiffany Koyama Lane 

  3. Ahlam Osman

  4. Chris Flanary 

  5. Steve Novick 

  6. Luke Zak or Rex Burkholder  


    EDIT: 10/28/24 - Jesse Cornett lost a slot sharing rank 6 because I learned that he asked Portland Association of Teachers prez Angela Bonilla to remove lessons on Palestine from the union website. He also whined that the phrase “From the River to the Sea” called for the “extermination of Jews,” an insipid Zionist straw man argument in the face of the real-time extermination of Palestinian people we are witnessing. For this, I demote Cornett to the DO NOT RANK list. Don’t tell teachers what they can teach, and fucking Free Palestine.

DO NOT RANK: Kezia Warner, Daniel Demelo, Harrison Kass, Jesse Cornett


Portland City Council, District 4:  

  1. Mitch Green

  2. Lisa Freeman

  3. Chad Lykins

  4. Andra Vltavín

  5. Sarah Silkie

  6. Mike DiNapoli or Moses Ross

DO NOT RANK: Eric Zimmerman, Brandon Farley  


Federal and State Races

Let me say this about the statewide partisan races. I recognize that there are some further leftist folks running at the state and federal levels, but the idea of a split vote letting Republicans take these posts makes me want to throw up into a boot and then put that boot on and I’m then walk somewhere. I’m risk averse because I hate their asses. I truly look forward to how statewide ranked voting (Measure 117) can let us uplift more progressive candidates at the primary level to go head-to-head with Republicans in general elections.  

  • President: I don’t care. Continue to torture these bar-is-on-the-floor Dems who would clap for Kamala Harris turning on a light switch. 

The election hasn’t happened yet. We’re still negotiating and strategizing to get Kamala Harris to call for an arms embargo to Israel and a definitive, lasting Ceasefire in Gaza, Lebanon, and the entire region. Telling her campaign that we’re withholding our votes until she changes her stance is leverage. WHY WOULD WE GIVE UP OUR LEVERAGE NOW? WHY WOULD WE BACK DOWN NOW WHEN WE’RE SO CLOSE TO A BREAKING POINT? 

I give ALL RESPECT to voters in swing states like Michigan who are still saying that they’re not voting for Harris unless she changes her tune. Many disillusioned voters may truly not vote, or even vote for Trump, even though Trump would gleefully accelerate Israel’s colonial project. I CANNOT BLAME THEM. 

I look at the polls in these swing states and I see the trickle of mainstream news headlines knitting together that a change in policy could result in states swinging blue. This is what I like to see. Holding the line. 

So, Biden penned a ~strongly worded~ letter to Israel on October 15th saying that they need to improve humanitarian conditions within 30 days or face restrictions to military aid, conveniently placing the deadline after the November 5th election? That don’t impressa me much.   

With this lens, the infighting between Dems who are hyperventilating and calling people traitors for “giving their votes to Trump” because we stand ten toes down on hating taxpayer-funded genocide…is actually helping the cause by drumming up hysteria to the Harris camp. This is not to pardon the kinds of blame-shifting, base, racist, ignorant vitriol these Dems are using against Arab-Americans who are rightfully turning their backs on Harris.

Declining to outwardly support Harris unless she makes a real turn toward an arms embargo and brokering a Ceasefire deal is an incredibly fair and useful line to hold. 

And if in the secret of our bedrooms or the polling booths some of us do vote for Harris because we don’t want Trump to win, so be it. We’re in Oregon, which is going to go blue either way. Personally, I don’t see myself enthusiastically filling in the bubble for Kamala Harris. I do know that many of my trusted and respected friends will do so just to be very sure that Tr*mp doesn’t win, especially if they live in swing states. But don’t let these Democrats think they can win our votes so easily. Keep pushing. We don’t have what we want yet. Don’t let up yet. FREE PALESTINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

EDIT: 11/4/5 - I keep DM’ing people this information, so just wanted to put it here. Swap Your Vote is a nice tool for this mindfuck conundrum. Since Oregon is a “safe state,” you can vote for a third party candidate as someone’s “protest vote” if they’re in a swing state, feel trapped into voting for Harris/Walz, but really don’t want to. SYV matches one swing state vote to two safe state votes to incentivize it a little more for conflicted swing state voters. This lets us encourage a defeated-feeling swing state voter where it might actually make a big difference, and also might be a way to safely accrue third party votes and increase legitimacy for third parties like the Green Party or Working Families party, for whom a lot more opportunity opens up when they can secure 5% of the vote. If you’re hating this hullaballoo, I highly recommend voting YES on Measure 117 Statewide Ranked Choice Voting, which is our BEST, SAFEST, MOST EFFECTIVE PATHWAY toward platforming and legitimizing third party candidates without “throwing away” votes to Republicans.

  • US Representative, 5th District: Maxine Dexter

    She beat my pick, Susheela Jayapal, in the primaries with millions in outside funding, much of which was AIPAC-affiliated, which we hate. But I do feel we have to vote blue on this one. 🙃

  • US Representative, 5th District: Janelle Bynum 

This is a toss-up district and makes my skin itch with unease. This is a race to text your friends and family members about if they live in SE Portland. Bynum is running against Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-Deremer, whom I truly loathe. I hate leaving her office Ceasefire voicemails because I know that she truly does not give a fuck. She has voted against Social Security many-a-time. She endorsed Tr*mp, a man who does not know that she exists and does not think she deserves rights, which is one of the saddest, most embarrassing things a woman can do. I fear that this is going to be an incredibly close race.

Bynum is a fourth term Oregon state representative who is fairly centrist in the Dem camp — she’s plugged along on clean energy initiatives without quite going as far as supporting strong taxation or other strong limits on Oregon’s huge corportations; her angle for reducing the suffering of homelessness is increasing mental health support and expanding shelter beds without quite going as far as supporting true renter’s bill of rights type policies. She’s probably had to be a bit centrist because of the increased scrutiny and skepticism that befall Black women who must be “palatable” and “electable,” but this is an assumption. I would certainly love to see her pushing for clean energy and protecting Social Security and Medicaid in the US House of Reps. I would LOVE to see her unseat Chavez-Deremer. I will gleefully vote for Bynum with this in mind.      

  • Secretary of State: Tobias Read

     

  • State Treasurer: Elizabeth Steiner

  • Attorney General: Dan Rayfield

  • State Senator, 22nd District: Lew Frederick

  • State Senator, 23rd District: Khanh Pham

  • State Representative, 33rd District: Shannon Jones

  • State Representative, 34th District: Lisa Reynolds

  • State Representative, 41st District: Mark F Gamba

  • State Representative, 43rd District: Tawna Sanchez

  • State Representative, 44th District: Travis Nelson

  • State Representative, 45th District: Thuy Tran

  • State Representative, 46th District: Willy

     

  • State Representative, 48th District: Hoa H Nguyen

     

  • State Representative, 49th District: Zach Hudson

  • State Representative, 50th District: Ricki Ruiz

  • Judge of the Circuit Court, 4th District, Position 38: back to Rachel Philips

    EDIT: 10/28/24 - If you had told me two days ago that the circuit court judge position would be the one I flip flopped the most about, I would have said, “Omg, what do you know, girl?”

    Girl, here’s what we know now. I do not fuck with the way Myrick goes about things. This gave me enough of a pause to switch back to the still progressive and overall much more credible Philips.

    Thank you, as always, to the Bitchtucci whisper network for sharing information that is virtually impossible to find through conventional public means. Whether you’ve already cast your ballot for Philips or Myrick, the “establishment” candidate Auxier is likely to dominate the category either way, so fair enough to have voted for any of his competitors.

    If you’ve already filled out your ballot but still have it handy and want to change it, you can simply cross out your old bubble and bubble in the new vote. Just make sure it looks clear for the election worker to interpret.

  • Judge of the Circuit Court, 4th District, Position 21: Rima Ghandour

     

  • East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District, Director, At-Large, Position 1: Ramona DeNiles

     

  • Multnomah County Commissioner, District 1: Meghan Moyer

     

  • Multnomah County Commissioner, District 2: Shannon Singleton

    F*CK SAM ADAMS!!!!!!!! This is a psychotically close race, text everyone you know!
    Portland For All’s writeup supporting Singleton based on her accomplishments and denouncing Adams for his wild behavior is a great article to peruse and send to…everyone you know.

  • Urban Flood Safety and Water Quality District, Position 2 Director: Ariana Johnson

  • Urban Flood Safety and Water Quality District, Position 3 Director: Kayla Drozd Calkins 

  • Urban Flood Safety and Water Quality District, Position 4 Director: Nic Lane 

  • Urban Flood Safety and Water Quality District, Position 5 Director: Erich Mueller

Ballot Measures ༺


  • Measure 115: Amends Constitution: Authorizes impeachment of statewide elected official by Oregon Legislature with two-thirds vote by each house; establishes process: YES 

Impeach them all!!!! or yeah.

  • Measure 116: Amends Constitution: Establishes "Independent Public Service Compensation Commission" to determine salaries for specified officials; eliminates legislative authority to set such salaries: YES 

  • Measure 117: Gives voters option to rank candidates in order of preference; candidate receiving majority of votes in final round wins: YES 

  • Measure 118: Increases highest corporate minimum taxes; distributes revenue to eligible individuals; state replaces reduced federal benefits: YES TO BOTHER CORPORATIONS

This is a proposed 3% tax on business revenue beyond their first $25 million in revenue. So your first $25 million is still not taxed by this ballot measure, don’t worry! LMAO!!!

Oregon has an incredibly hard time passing corporate taxes compared to states as “blue” as us — corporations and interest groups nationally zero in on Oregon elections to block attempt after attempt to tax corporations their fair share in our state, whether it’s to benefit climate change policy, fund crucial infrastructure, or in this case, redistribute money to Oregon families. They fund incredibly misleading mailers and ads year after year that trick even moderate or progressive Oregonians into being conservative with taxes. The No on 118 camp has manipulatively implied that this is a sales tax through the logic that if the businesses and corporations identified were to be taxed, they’d pass the costs onto consumers, resulting in a de-facto “sales tax.” 

Really, I’d like to see a big corporate tax on huge profits like this come from the federal government and include some regulations about inflation and passing costs to consumers. Corporations need to pay taxes and eat the costs. I think making it countrywide would reduce the amount of bullshit that would follow, like price gouging or businesses closing up shop and choosing to move to states with more lenient taxes. Let’s all collectively inhale and exhale a deep sigh. I dream of this being possible!

I’ve seen the argument that there are farmers who would fall under the scope of Measure 118, but whose operations margins are so tenuous and thin that they might have to increase costs of product to offset the tax. These farmers operating on thin margins are not the majority of those who would be taxed.

The prevailing theme I see in cost of living and inflation is that corporations are flagrantly marking up the costs of everything just because they fucking can, and they’re doing it whether they’re taxed or not, so we should tax them anyway. We’ve even invented a new, ugly portmanteau for this new generation of corporate profiteering: greedflation. Feels bad in the mouth! Economists of centrist or conservative universities and publications scramble to write thinkpieces “debunking” greedflation, and yet. Here we are. Look around you. Kroger’s digital price tags show us that we are far, far, far down the bad, late-stage capitalism timeline. Kroger’s official response to journalists and government officials who are investigating this? “Nooo, don’t worry about it, we’re not using this cleverly designed price gouging tool to price gouge.” They say this with a straight face while fucking military technology surveilling your average neighborhood Fred Meyer. 

So we come to Measure 118, a brave attempt to tax corporations. The No On 118 campaign has received over $12 million from corporations who don’t want their profits above $25 million to be taxed. Frankly, it’s highly unlikely to pass. So then the question becomes — should we vote for it anyway?

Measure 118 has drawn some more reasonable criticism beyond the unhinged attack ads. A blanket UBI-style check to Oregonians, including wealthy Oregonians? The Merc said that they like the idea of redistributing corporate taxes to regular people, but don’t think it makes sense to give millionaire Oregonians like Phil Knight this kind of UBI check. But proponents say that it’s worth it because UBI is a way to truly catch all low-income Oregonians who might fall through the cracks if identified in other ways.

MANY progressive folks have been concerned that these checks could create problems for low-income families receiving state assistance like SNAP/EBT, TANF, and OHP, because when people apply for these benefits, they have to sign condescending Releases of Information granting the government to check in on their bank accounts at any time and verify that they stay poor. This is called the benefits cliff, wherein if you ever have more than the designated cash limit in your bank account, you can be kicked out of your assistance program, ensuring that you can never attempt to save with any sort of social safety net!!!! You fall off the cliff!!! Draconian!!!!! Foucaultian!!! Evil!!! My mom used to keep a tattered envelope of cash on her bedside table because of this worry. It was an incredibly unsafe, humiliating way for her to have to manage her small Disability income.

The designers of the bill have accounted for the benefits cliff with a safety net called a “hold harmless provision” that gets its money through the revenue that this tax would create. This really helpful episode Policy for the People podcast explains more:

This hold-harmless provision says that if Oregonians lose public benefits as a result of the measure 118 cash rebates, then the state will reimburse those Oregonians the amount they lost to hold them harmless.

There are a couple of problems with this attempted fix, however. First, the reimbursements, the hold-harmless payments, would arrive well after families have lost their benefits. In other words, after the harm has been done. And second, the hold-harmless payments themselves could count as income. If you get a hold-harmless payment to address the $200 you lost in SNAP benefits and you get another $200 from the state, the next time you file and you submit your eligibility and recertify for SNAP, you could get even less SNAP benefits.

So it could be a hole that kind of keeps digging itself.

That’s quite a fucking rigmarole for already stressed low income folks baked right into the ballot measure.

On the one hand, there are enough problems that supporting the ballot measure could potentially use the political capital we need to pass a more nuanced corporate tax that could benefit families, or critical infrastructure, or whatever. But this is giving scarcity and the assumption of finite energy a large seat at the table. We could also interpret a YES vote as giving legitimacy to pathways for taxing corporations and for normalizing the idea of Universal Basic Income into the minds of everyday people.

It’s going to be a battle every time we try to tax corporations, whether the ballot proposals are perfect or not. At some point, we need to stop wringing our hands about this — doing so has repeatedly benefited corporations in their quest to evade doing any public good with the wildly exploitative profits they make with our labor and spending. I’d love to see regular shmegular Oregonians get that $1,600 per person check. It is so fucking hard out here. It could change the lives of a family of four to get $6400 no strings attached. When you’re broke, $1000 here or there helps, but it really takes a few thousand dollars at once to substantively change your life in our time and place. Saving a few thousand dollars to move apartments is usually a brutal Sisyphean endeavor. 

I really hate to see the No on 118 campaign have any sort of victory, so I’m voting for it IF ONLY just to show that there are numbers of people who are willing to tax corporations in this state. I want taxing corporations as a vibe to gain traction. I am on my KNEES BEGGING Oregonians to get really informed about misinformation campaigns and build some coalitional willpower toward taxing corporations their fair share in the future.    

  • Measure 119: Cannabis retailers/processors must remain neutral regarding communications to their employees from labor organizations; penalties: YES 

This supports unionization of cannabis workers. We are pro-union in this house.

  • Portland Measure 26-249: Amends Charter: Deletes outdated, redundant requirements to approve utility franchises: YES

  • Portland Measure 26-250: Amends Charter: Adds Independent Portland Elections Commission: YES

  • Portland Measure 26-251: Amends Charter: Updates authority to manage parks, sewers and stormwaters: YES 

  • Portland Measure 25-252: Amends Charter: Deletes vague, archaic and inconsistent language: YES

  • Portland Measure 26-253: Amends Charter: Removes citywide vote requirement for mandatory building weatherization: YES 

  • Parkrose School District Measure 26-254: Parkrose School District Levy to Maintain Teachers and Classroom Support: YES for GOD’S SAKE 


✿

Thank you for reading, sweet one.

Operation Olive Branch is a very nice, continually updating spreadsheet that highlights important mutual aid fundraisers for our comrades in Palestine, and elsewhere. 

Here are two active fundraisers for families trying to escape Gaza: 


If you’ve had a chance to share resources with folks in need and you’d like to treat me to a little coffee or something, I’m @marissayangbertucci on venmo, cash app, and paypal. 


I’m wishing you very, very well, wherever you are. I wish you rest and the feeling of being very close to yourself sometimes. On we plod. 


xoxo,

bitchtucci * ੈ♡‧₊˚

Marissa Yang Bertucci