Janelle Bynum wins race for Congress, flipping U.S. House seat from GOP to Democratic control

Four-term Democratic state lawmaker Janelle Bynum won a seat in Congress and will be Oregon’s first Black representative.

Bynum defeated Republican Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer in the highly contested 5th Congressional District race. Vote tallies made public by Thursday evening showed no viable path for the incumbent to overcome Bynum’s lead.

Bynum leads Chavez-DeRemer 48% to 45% in current tallies.

The Oregonian/OregonLive analysis shows Bynum has won the seat because she already has a substantial lead — and far more votes remain to be tallied in the places where she’s drawn a substantial or overwhelming edge than from the strongholds where Chavez-DeRemer drew a nearly 2-to-1 edge.

“I am beyond honored,” Bynum said in a written statement on Friday. “My work has always been a love letter to Oregon’s children. I ran for office to make their futures brighter and I’ll do just that in Washington — for their education, for their reproductive freedoms, for their job opportunities and so much more.”

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Bynum’s win allows Democrats to reclaim the district, which Chavez-DeRemer, the former Happy Valley mayor, flipped to Republican control in 2022 after it was redrawn in the wake of the 2020 Census. The race was considered one of a few dozen “tossups” by national election watchers, with experts saying its outcome could be influential in deciding which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives.

Bynum currently holds an 8,575 vote edge over Chavez-DeRemer across the district, which covers all or portions of six counties. Bynum built her edge by winning far more votes over her Republican rival in Multnomah (14,400 vote edge) and Clackamas (nearly 9,000 votes) counties, as well as in Deschutes County (8,700).

Both Clackamas and Multnomah counties still have a lot of ballots yet to tally in District 5 — at least 30,000 in Clackamas and 5,000 in Multnomah.

Chavez-DeRemer, for her part, built up a substantial edge in her two stronghold counties — Marion and Linn. Together, the two gave her more than 23,000 votes more than her Democratic challenger, nearly 17,200 from Linn and 6,350 in Marion, by choosing her about 60% to 32% over Bynum.

But those counties don’t have many 5th District ballots left to tally. Elections officials in the two jurisdictions said Linn has about 3,500 ballots left to count, while Marion has about 7,500 left to tally in the 5th District race. There is no plausible path for those 11,000 outstanding votes to overcome Bynum’s current 8,575 vote edge plus the additional votes she will receive from Clackamas and Multnomah counties.

Chavez-DeRemer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Republicans took control of both the presidency and one chamber of Congress this week as former President Donald Trump emerged victorious and Republicans reclaimed control of the Senate.

The balance of power in the U.S. House has yet to be determined. Democrats needed to flip four seats to take control of that chamber. As of Friday morning, Republicans needed to win seven more seats for control and Democrats needed 17. Competitive races throughout the country had yet to be called.

Ben Gaskins, an associate professor of political science at Lewis & Clark College, said Wednesday that Republicans looked narrowly favored to keep control of the House.

“It’s definitely going to come down to the wire,” Gaskins said.

However, competitive races in Oregon and just north in Southwest Washington have fallen in Democrats’ favor. In Oregon’s 4th and 6th congressional districts, incumbent Democratic Reps. Val Hoyle and Andrea Salinas held off challengers, despite national Republicans highlighting those candidates and dropping nearly $400,000 to attack Hoyle on behalf of her opponent, Monique DeSpain.

And in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, also seen as key for House Democrats, first-term Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez held onto her seat, despite national groups spending $7.6 million to help Republican challenger Joe Kent. Democratic groups spent $12.4 million to help Gluesenkamp Perez.

“The Pacific Northwest was kind of anomalous with the rest of the country. Democrats performed pretty well. Their performance is, in a sense, meeting expectation,” said Chandler James, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Oregon. “For Democrats elsewhere and at the top of the ticket, it was a story of missing expectations by pretty big numbers.”

Bynum, an engineer, business owner and mother of four, ran on a message of combatting Republican extremism, standing up for women’s reproductive rights and building a prosperous economy for future generations of Oregonians.

Her bid was bolstered by huge outside support, including a deluge of funds from the national Democratic party, which spent millions on her behalf and helped bolster support for her campaign across the country. Bynum posted an enormous $3.4 million fundraising haul in the last quarter before the election, which her team said set a state record. And her canvassing crew included Democratic voters from other states who traveled to Oregon to help Democrats win the pivotal congressional seat.

Washington U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, congratulated Bynum in a statement Friday, calling her the “right leader for this moment.” The committee works to elect Democrats to the House and devoted staff and millions of dollars to support Bynum’s bid.

“As a working mom of four, a businesswoman, and a longtime champion for Oregon families in the state House, Janelle has spent years standing up and fighting for her constituents,” DelBene said in a statement. “As the first Black member of Congress in Oregon’s history, Janelle will keep blazing the trail forward and bring home the federal resources her neighbors deserve.”

It wasn’t an easy win. Chavez-DeRemer, who boasts a bipartisan track record in Congress, garnered support from trade unions and law enforcement, and the Republican Party came out swinging on her behalf. The top Republican House leader, Speaker Mike Johnson, called Chavez-DeRemer one of the hardest workers in the party and at least twice visited Oregon to campaign for her.

Outside interest groups and national political parties poured more than $25 million into the race, making it one of the most expensive in the House this cycle, according to Open Secrets, which monitors money in politics.

The majority of that money went to attack ads, including commercials paid for by the Republican-backing Congressional Leadership Fund that alleged Bynum covered up the sexual assault of a minor. The commercials referred to an unproven complaint that Bynum failed to report that a member of her campaign staff had sexually assaulted a minor campaign worker. The Oregonian/OregonLive has found no evidence to support that claim.

Judy Stiegler, a former Oregon Democratic lawmaker and political science professor at Oregon State University, said the attack campaign likely had mixed results. Negative ads can pull in some votes, she said, but can also turn others away.

“They really tried to pump that up big time, but it didn’t seem to have the reaction that I think they were hoping it would have,” she said.

Gaskins said the composition of the district meant that Bynum was always going to be the favorite. Oregon Democrats drew the state’s congressional map to give the party an edge in five of the six House districts, with the exception of eastern Oregon’s District 2, Gaskins said.

Chavez-DeRemer managed to win the district in 2022 in a midterm election, when the sitting president’s party typically faces a disadvantage, he said. She beat Democrat Jamie McLeod-Skinner by 7,300 votes.

But in a presidential election year, in a district that Vice President Kamala Harris was expected to carry, “Chavez-DeRemer was always going to be at a disadvantage,” Gaskins said. Voters don’t often split the ticket between the presidential nominee and members of Congress, he said.

“It’s pretty simple,” Gaskins said. “People vote their party ID, by and large, and that gives a pretty solid advantage to the Democrat in this district.”

However, James, the University of Oregon professor, said it’s a disservice to Bynum to suggest Oregon’s 5th District was in the bag. Both parties poured millions into a district they saw as a real prize – and while Democrats underperformed elsewhere in the country, the party had the tools and infrastructure in Oregon to galvanize turnout for Bynum, he said.

“This was definitely contested and a tough year for Democrats and Bynum was able to pull it out,” he said.

Steigler, who is a voter in the Bend area, thinks Bynum’s campaign was more visible in central Oregon. Bynum also had the advantage of taking on a one-term incumbent and a politician she’d faced before, Stiegler said. First-term incumbents are always vulnerable, Stiegler said, because they lack a depth of experience in the role and a long history with the district, but have established a record that voters and opponents will hold them accountable for.

The 5th District spans more than 5,000 square miles across both urban and rural areas. It starts in the southern outskirts of Portland, stretches south along the I-5 corridor to nearly Eugene and east across rural areas, tacking on a tail that captures urban Redmond and Bend.

On the campaign trail, Bynum touted her work in the state Legislature, including success passing the Oregon CHIPS Act, a quarter-million dollar investment in the state semiconductor industry that’s predicted to bring thousands of jobs to the state, and allocating $80 million to hire more behavioral health providers of color.

In Congress, Bynum says she will fight to establish a national right to abortion, expand infrastructure so America can build more housing and build on her Oregon record of creating job opportunities.

If the Republicans hold control of the U.S. House, however, Bynum and the rest of Oregon’s predominantly Democratic lawmakers will have little power to push their agenda.

The majority party gets to control the agenda, while members in the minority are “just kind of taking what you can get,” said James, who previously worked as a staff assistant to Indiana Republican Todd Young in the U.S. House. James expects Oregon’s Democrats would work together to try to protect the interests of Oregonians, collaborating with Republicans where that makes sense and trying to stymie their efforts when they run contrary to what Oregonians want.

“They’ve got to do their job still,” he said. “It’s just that their job is a lot less glamorous when you’re in the minority.”

Sami Edge covers higher education and politics for The Oregonian. You can reach her at sedge@oregonian.com or (503) 260-3430.