PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Democrat Janelle Bynum has flipped Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, becoming the state’s first Black congresswoman.
Bynum, a state representative backed and funded by national Democrats, ousted freshman Republican Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Republicans lost a seat they turned red in the 2022 midterm elections for the first time in about 25 years.
“It is not lost on me that I am one generation removed from segregation. It is not lost on me that we are making history. And I am proud to be the first, but not the last, black member of Congress in Oregon,” Bynum said at a press conference last Friday. “But we all had to work together to turn this chair around, and we delivered a win for Oregon. We believed in a vision and didn’t take our feet off the gas until we achieved our goals.”
The contest was viewed by the Cook Political Report as a GOP toss, meaning both sides had a good chance of winning.
Bynum had previously defeated Chavez-DeRemer when they faced off in legislative elections.
Chavez-DeRemer narrowly won the seat in 2022, the first election held in the district after its boundaries were significantly redrawn following the 2020 census.
The district now encompasses diverse regions spanning metropolitan Portland and its wealthy, working-class suburbs, as well as rural farming and mountain communities and the fast-growing central Oregon city of Bend on the other side of the Cascade Range. The number of registered Democratic voters in the district exceeds Republicans by about 25,000, but unaffiliated voters represent the largest constituency.
A small portion of the precinct is in Multnomah County, where about a week before the election, a ballot box just outside the county elections office in Portland was set on fire by an incendiary device, damaging three ballots. Authorities said enough material from the incendiary device was recovered to show that the Portland fire was also linked to two other ballot box fires in neighboring Vancouver, Washington, one of which occurred on the same day as the fire in Portland and damaged hundreds of ballots. .
