A new poll shows one in three Portland voters don’t know whether they’ll vote for incumbent Mayor Ted Wheeler or challenger Sarah Iannarone in November if they vote at all.
The poll, paid for by Iannarone’s campaign and conducted by North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling last week, found that 35% of 992 Portlanders were up in the air. The remaining voters were split with 33% saying they would vote for Wheeler and 32% for Iannarone. The margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points.
The poll provides a first look at what could be a close mayor’s race and shows that Wheeler and Iannarone both have plenty of people to win over to sway their race their way. The general election is Nov. 3.
The pair faced off for the second time to be Portland mayor during the May 19 primary, with Iannarone finishing second after a third-place finish against Wheeler four years earlier. In a field of 19 candidates on the ballot, Wheeler received 49% of the vote and Iannarone received 24%, leading to the November runoff.
John Horvick, political director for Portland-based DHM Research, who played no role in the mayoral poll, said the high proportion of undecided voters it found isn’t unusual five months before a city or statewide election. Lower undecided percentages, around 10%, are typically more common in presidential races, he said.
He noted in October 2014, in a poll for OPB just weeks before the general election, his firm asked 516 likely voters to name the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor and U.S. Senate. He said 62% correctly identified then-incumbent Governor John Kitzhaber, 34% named then-gubernatorial challenger Dennis Richardson, 46% identified incumbent Sen. Jeff Merkley and 42% could name senatorial challenger Monica Wehby.
“All of which is to say that 35% undecided in the mayor’s race today isn’t surprising,” Horvick said.
He did call it “a real surprise” if support for Wheeler really did drop from 49% at the time of the May primary to 33% in mid-June, when the poll was taken. Only 51% of eligible Multnomah County voters cast ballots in the May primary, whereas the poll sampled the whole pool of registered voters, many of whom sat out the primary and may not vote in the fall.
“Do I think he lost that much support in a month? It’s possible, major events have happened,” Horvick said. “If that 33% number is real and indicative of the population as a whole, that is something for sure.”
Katherine Patterson of Public Policy Polling said in a memo about the poll that the high percentages of undecided voters and those without a strong opinion of Iannarone provided the mayoral challenger with an “opportunity to grow support further as her name recognition improves.”
Iannarone’s campaign also noted she has far out-fundraised Wheeler in the weeks since the primary.
“This election is not just about who should lead us through our COVID recovery but who’s got the tools to help us realize the future Portlanders want,” Iannarone said in a statement, reflecting Wheeler’s pre-primary appeals to vote for steady leadership in the face of the pandemic. “We deserve visionary leadership that believes in us, with the life experience to understand what we’re going through, and with workable solutions for the problems my opponent has failed to solve.”
Amy Rathfelder, Wheeler’s campaign manager, said the mayor is focused the city’s coronavirus recovery and addressing racial justice in the city and that his leadership on those issues are “critical to building the kind of inclusive, safe and equitable community we all deserve.”
“We emerged from the primary in a very strong position and will continue to pursue forthright conversations with voters, rooted in action, through the November election,” Rathfelder said in a statement.
The poll also found that 41% said they disapproved of Wheeler’s job performance as mayor, 61% said they weren’t sure if they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Iannarone and 63% said they generally supported reallocating funding from the police bureau budget to investments for Portland’s communities of color. It found 22% opposed to the idea and 15% who said they weren’t sure.
The majority of participants, 66%, said they were most concerned about the city’s recovery from coronavirus (24%), police issues (22%) and housing and homelessness (20%)
The poll was conducted June 17 and 18. The majority of the interviews, 60%, were conducted via text and the rest by phone; 53% of the respondents identified as women; 64% of participants were between the ages of 30 to 65; and 64% said they were registered Democrats.
Participants between 18 to 29 made up 14% of those polled and people older than 65 made up 22%. Of those surveyed, 74% identified as white, 7% as Hispanic or Latino, 7% as Asian, 5% as African-American and 8% as a race other than the options listed.
Meanwhile some have called for a write-in mayoral campaign for the third-place finisher in the May primary, community organizer Teressa Raiford, who received 8.5% of the vote.
Raiford, whose nonprofit organization Don’t Shoot Portland is among those who’ve recently sued the city over police use of tear gas and other tactics during downtown demonstrations, has said on social media that she isn’t part of the write-in campaign but applauded the effort.
-- Everton Bailey Jr; ebailey@oregonian.com | 503-221-8343 | @EvertonBailey
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