by Jim Scheppke 

With just a couple weeks to go until the election, most of the money has been contributed and spent by all ten candidates for mayor and city council. So it’s a good time to see what that looks like. Fortunately we require all major candidates to post their contributions and expenses to the ORESTAR database run by the Oregon Secretary of State, so it’s not too difficult to see what has been going on.

As of May 1st here is the big picture for our five Progressive candidates and the five conservative candidates supported by Marion+Polk First, a Republican-aligned group that has become a big player in both School Board and City Council elections in recent years.

Not surprisingly, our candidates are being outspent by more than 2:1. That has always been true for Progressive Salem ever since we began a decade ago. That’s why our strategy has always been “organized people beat organized money,” and it’s nearly always worked for us. Here is how things look going down to the individual candidate level.

Same story. Where it gets really interesting is when you look at where the money is coming from. Our candidates get a nice balance of small donations, medium-sized donations and large donations. 

It’s quite a contrast when you look at donation sizes for the Marion+Polk First candidates.

Only 4% of the money contributed to our opposition comes from small donors and a whopping 83% comes from over-$1,000 donors! They are donors like developer Larry Tokarski and his company ($57,000), our firefighters union ($14,500), the Oregon Realtors ($12,000) and retired auto dealer Dick Withnell ($10,639). The Marion+Polk First political action committee contributed $102,839 to their candidates, but $100,000 of that came from a shadowy new group called Businesses for Community who can launder their money by giving it to Marion+Polk First.

Of course all this is possible because until now Oregon has had no campaign finance limits. That is supposed to change next year with some new limits passed by the Legislature. So let’s hope this might be the last year that we have to do battle with really big spenders!