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Chloe Eudaly, the upstart candidate vying to unseat Portland Commissioner Steve Novick, will use paid canvassers to deliver copies of her eight-page Joe Sacco comic on Portland's rent crisis.
The decision to use paid canvassers is unusual for city candidates. It was perhaps most famously made by the campaign of Jesse Cornett, who in 2010 qualified for public-campaign financing to try to unseat Commissioner Dan Saltzman. Cornett came in third with just 8 percent of the vote, after receiving $145,000 in taxpayer money.
Marshall Runkel, Eudaly's campaign manager, says the campaign wants to deliver 50,000 copies of the comic by Election Day and that paying people to do it is no different than paying for postage or opting instead to pay for television commercials.
About one-third of the comics will be delivered by volunteers, Runkel says. Paying $15 an hour to canvassers is cheaper than postage on the remaining 33,000 comics, he adds. Also, the campaign hopes to hire residents of the Hazelnut Grove homeless camp or other marginalized Portlanders.
Up to this point, Eudaly has had one paid staffer: Runkel.
"We're essentially expanding paid staff for the last couple of weeks of the campaign," he says.
The first-time candidate has raised $84,000 since January—a small fraction of Novick's nearly $600,000. Disclosure reports show Novick has five political consultants on his staff.
Willamette Week