Control of Congress could hinge on Portland-to-Bend district race
Oregon's newly drawn 5th Congressional District, stretching from Portland's suburbs over the Cascades to Bend, emerged as one of the nation's most competitive House races with the smallest partisan gap of the state's six districts.
Oregon's newly drawn 5th Congressional District emerged as a race that could help decide which party controls the U.S. House, according to reporting carried by the Bend Bulletin and Oregon Capital Insider. The district's boundaries scatter 521,813 voters across a stretch running from Portland in Multnomah County, through Clackamas, Marion and Linn counties, then over the Cascades along U.S. Highway 20 into the northern part of Deschutes County.
The district was reported to have the smallest partisan registration gap of any of Oregon's six congressional districts, with 169,844 registered Democrats and 144,776 registered Republicans. Using results from past elections in the precincts that make up the newly redrawn district, the Center for Politics was cited as rating it a Democratic advantage of just 3 percentage points.
The reporting reviewed for this restoration does not specify the exact date the district lines were finalized during Oregon's post-2020 census redistricting process, nor does it name every candidate who filed to run in the district's first election under the new boundaries. Those specifics were outside what the retrieved sources established.
A district built to be close
The competitiveness of the seat was not incidental to how it was drawn, according to the coverage: combining Portland-area suburbs with central Oregon's more conservative electorate produced a district without a dominant partisan lean. The reporting frames the race as one that could be decided by a relatively small number of swing voters concentrated in Portland's suburbs, the Santiam Canyon, or central Oregon.
The margin that followed
Later coverage of the district, reviewed for context, noted that Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer won the seat in 2022 by fewer than 7,000 votes, illustrating just how tight the race the original reporting anticipated turned out to be. That later coverage falls outside the contemporaneous 2022 sourcing for this restoration and is noted here only as corroborating context, not as part of the original story's own reporting.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by the Bend Bulletin and Oregon Capital Insider. It restores a story originally published on this site in 2022; figures are as reported at the time.