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Blog Post 10: Oregon's 4th Congressional District
Introduction
This semester, we’ve been asked to follow a congressional race in a district of our choosing. While not my home district, I’ve been following Oregon’s 4th Congressional District (OR-4) because longtime incumbent Peter DeFazio (D) is retiring from his position in the House of Representatives, leading to the first open election in OR-4 since 1986.
OR-4 covers the counties in the southern portion of Oregon’s coast and contains the state’s two college towns of Eugene and Corvallis. The district has a population of 825,543 people, about half of which live near Eugene in Lane County. According to Ballotpedia’s summary, the district is 84.6% white, 7.3% hispanic, 2.3% asian, and 0.9% black, with the remaining 4.9% being mixed or other.
The state’s congressional boundaries were redistricted this cycle, generally for the benefit of Oregon’s Democrats. This was met with fairly significant protest from Republican lawmakers in Oregon, but legal challenges ultimately failed to rollback this cycle’s redistricting. Below is a screenshot of Ballotpedia’s map comparing the old boundaries with the redistricted ones. OR-4 is highlighted in red:
Oregon Congressional Districts
As mentioned earlier, Peter DeFazio (D) has held OR-4’s seat for the past 35 years or 18 election cycles. A Democrat has held the seat since 1975, so it is safe to say that OR-4 historically leans Democrat.
2022 Candidates
Alek Skarlatos (R)
The Republican challenger for OR-4 has had a somewhat high-profile career outside of politics before trying his hand at running for office. Skarlatos is a former member of the Army National Guard who stopped an armed gunman on a train for Paris with the help of a team of five others in 2015. After receiving military honors from both President Obama and the French government, Skarlatos competed on season 21 of Dancing with the Stars, placing third overall. In Oregon’s 2018 midterm elections, Skarlatos ran for Douglas County Commissioner and lost to frontrunner Tom Kress by a couple percentage points. Impressively, Skarlatos was able to make such a close election despite only fundraising half of what Kress was able to. Skarlatos ran for OR-4 in 2020 and was able to secure 46.2% of the vote, with the incumbent Peter DeFazio securing 51.5% of the vote. This was a significant change from previous trends where Republicans typically secured only 35% - 40% of the vote. As a candidate, Skarlatos has proven himself as someone who can mobilize a district in his favor that has historically opposed his party, likely through his quality as a former servicemember and charismatic individual.
Val Hoyle (D)
Unlike her Republican counterpart who has had a high-profile career outside of politics, Val Hoyle has been a longtime participant in Oregon politics. She is a former member of the Oregon House of Representatives, having served from 2009 to 2017, and represented municipalities in OR-4 in the state legislature. She ran for Oregon secretary of state in 2016 and narrowly lost in the Democratic primary for the position. Since 2019, Hoyle has served as Oregon’s Labor Commissioner, a non-partisan position that she won with 52% of the vote. She has also been involved in various community advocacy programs and small business ventures in Lane County.
Forecast
Given this year’s race in OR-4 was an open one, and given Skarlatos’ ability to mobilize Republicans that other candidates had not previously been able to, I expected the election to be closer than in previous years but ultimately end with a Democratic victory-perhaps something to the effect of 51.0% - 48.0%. In 2020, Democrats won 51.5% - 46.2%. This year, they won 51.0% - 43.0%. Looking further down ballot, it seems like third-party candidates took a lot of the votes this year that went to Skarlatos in 2020. While the Democrats ended up winning, the vote margin unexpectedly widened with Skarlatos securing 3.2% less voteshare than in 2020.
Campaign Summary
As a candidate for the House of Representatives, Skarlatos has been a very successful fundraiser. In 2020 and 2022, he managed to beat both Peter DeFazio and Val Hoyle in terms of fundraising. On the other hand, Hoyle received much of her financial support from labor unions and Democratic PACs. In 2020, Skarlatos ran more of a Trump-style campaign, using his personal experiences as a former servicemember to position himself as an outsider who took the concerns of everyday people to heart. According to the Oregon Capital Chronicle, Skarlatos has publicly expressed doubts about the reality of climate change, shown disapproval for business masking requirements during the pandemic, and downplayed the events of January 6th. This year, Skarlatos focused on cleaning up his image and focused heavily on the economy and tried to distance himself from the Trump brand of Republicanism. On the other hand, Hoyle campaigned primarily on her track record as a longtime Oregon politician and labor commissioner.
Speculations
Why did Skarlatos lose out on the support he had in 2020? W know that incumbency is incredibly powerful in House elections, and while the incumbent candidate is retiring this year, the Democratic Party is still the incumbent party in OR-4. We also know that many Trump-style and Trump-endorsed Republicans did worse than many might have expected. Perhaps Skarlatos was simply unable to successfully distance himself from Trump between 2020 and now. Perhaps redistricting also played a role in making the district favor Democrats a little more than previous years. Regardless, I’d like to take a look at one way we can analyze the campaigns of Skarlatos and Hoyle that exists beyond pure speculation.
We recently discussed Lynn Vavreck’s 2009 book that presents a framework for campaigns that political candidates should follow if they want to win. Essentially, incumbents benefit from running in a good economy, and challengers benefit from running in a bad economy. If the economy favors a candidate, that candidate should talk about the economy more than anything else. Otherwise, the candidate should talk about some other relevant issue where they have a popular stance and their opponent does not. In this election, I would argue that the economy performed poorly from the perspective of the average voter. While GDP is performing quite well, there is still a lot of uncertainty and fear surrounding inflation, supply chain issues, and rising healthcare costs. According to Vavreck, this means Skarlatos should focus on the economy and Hoyle should focus on anything but the economy.
Looking at the websites of Skarlatos and Hoyle, how did they structure their campaign messaging? Looking at their about pages and issues pages, we can see that both candidates broke from Vavreck’s framework, but Skarlatos broke much more from the framework than Hoyle. Skarlatos spends the entirety of his about page talking not about the economy but about his role in the Army National Guard, including his work with Clint Eastwood who directed a film about him stopping the aforementioned gunman on a train to Paris. On his issues page, his top issues have to do with rising healthcare costs, inflation, and energy costs, but he also talks about law enforcement, education, and veterans’ affairs. On the other hand, Hoyle talks exclusively about her track record in her about page. On her issues page, reproductive health is at the top of the list. While inflation and cost of living are placed third on the list, Hoyle talks a lot more about non-economic issues than economic ones.
Based on Vavreck’s framework, Hoyle seemed to benefit more as a candidate from the state of the economy than Skarlatos did, since she has a long history of working in Oregon’s state government on a variety of issues while Skarlatos has no economic background besides political fundraising. This could have led to the outcome we saw where Skarlatos did worse this election than last time, although I am unsure if 2020 should be included in Vavreck’s framework given its anomalous status as an incredibly tumultuous year. Regardless, I think Vavreck has a very powerful framework for distinguishing strong campaigns from weak ones, so it is validating to see her predictions align with candidate performance in OR-4.