When I ran for city council last year, the odds should have been in my favor. I was the policy advisor to a frontrunner in the mayor’s race. The city’s wealthiest donors were raising money on my behalf. I had police-union support. On paper, I looked every inch the establishment candidate.
But I wasn’t running just anywhere; I was running in Portland, Oregon. And the moment I entered the race, the real establishment reacted. Suddenly I was the outsider, the rogue candidate—a strange role for someone with a City Hall job and cops and developers in his corner. But that’s Portland, where the far Left is the establishment.
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The New York Times, however, has a different story: that Portland’s socialists are courageous outsiders taking on elite power. In October, the Times parachuted one of its reporters into Portland to file a dispatch about the city’s “socialist revolution.” The piece links Portland’s new DSA-backed council bloc to Zohran Mamdani’s rise in New York, framing our city as the vanguard of an ascendant movement.
In the Times’s telling, the Portland socialists are courageous “outsiders” battling entrenched wealth and “mainstream politicians.” They are presented as the underdogs—besieged by big business, dismissed by moderates, and nobly struggling to govern while facing establishment resistance.
This narrative is fiction. In Portland, the far Left holds the votes, the money, and the bureaucracy. Its campaign coffers overflow with union dollars and out-of-state donations. It coordinates as a caucus, mocks its colleagues in group chats, and moves as a bloc. Even the Times echoes its talking points.
The Times’s coverage suggests that the socialists represent a national popular movement. One socialist councilor is quoted claiming that he and his comrades are “building a movement, from coast to coast.” But the socialists’ ascent wasn’t the result of a popularity surge.
When Portlanders voted for “charter reform” in 2022, they thought they were modernizing one of the country’s last surviving commission governments. But left-wing nonprofits had quietly designed the reform measure. They shaped the 12-member council, the ranked-choice voting system, and even the new district maps—and then ran their own candidates under the new rules. They cemented their influence by staffing the “independent” commissions created to build out the new government. It’s local politics—not a “coast-to-coast movement”—that gave Portland a socialist city council.
The Times reporter missed all of this. He cherrypicked a few quotes from critics to satisfy the ritual of balance, but the article is ultimately reverent, and, to those of us who actually live here, offensively naïve.
We’re living with the consequences of the city’s ideology. We’ve seen what far-left governance looks like in practice: sprawling homeless camps, rising gun violence, housing shortages, open-air drug markets, 20-minute emergency response times, and a downtown still half-empty five years after the pandemic. As taxpayers flee, city services degrade even further.
The Times claims that Portland’s new socialist leaders “promise sweeping changes aimed at improving the lives of everyday residents.” Yet, since capturing office, they have been (mercifully) unproductive. Why? In the Times’s telling, these councilors are simply being deliberate and methodical, taking time to study policy.
That’s charitable. In truth, the new officeholders are neophytes who have accomplished little beyond internal squabbling and process meetings. Their tangible achievements amount to diverting police funding and quadrupling a reparations package for black Portlanders displaced by decades-old highway construction—a measure so costly that the city has imposed a hiring freeze for the rest of the fiscal year.
Things have improved in some areas, thanks mostly to modest course corrections. The city is not in nearly as dire a condition as President Trump’s caricature. But Portlanders know what far-left governance looks like in practice, and we’re disturbed to see the Times repackage our city as a model to be exported elsewhere.
November 2024 was a political bloodbath. I lost my race. My boss lost his. Our moderate allies lost theirs. The machine held. We learned what it feels like to run against the establishment.
Portland’s socialist takeover shows what happens when the powerful posture as rebels. The Times, instead of questioning those in power, reveres them—and ignores the plight of ordinary Portlanders.
Top Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images