The bruising election battle between state Rep. Mark Meek (D-Gladstone) and incumbent Sen. Bill Kennemer (R-Oregon City) in Senate District 20 has broken the previous spending record in Oregon legislative races and will soon eclipse $4 million.
(The previous record for a Senate race, according to Followthemoney.org, was $2.86 million, set in 2020 in Salem’s Senate District 10. Also in 2020, candidates for House District 32 on the North Coast spent a combined $2.78 million.)
As of Nov. 6, Meek, a real estate agent and property manager who has represented House District 40 for the past three sessions and is trying to move up to the Senate, has spent $2.04 million.
Kennemer, a retired psychologist and one of the state’s longest-serving elected officials (he first won election to the Legislature in 1986), retired from politics in 2018 but returned in 2021, winning appointment to the state Senate seat vacated by Alan Olsen (R-Canby), who retired early. Kennemer has spent $1.92 million in Senate District 20, for a total of $3.96 million in that race.
Democrats currently hold an 18-11 supermajority in the Senate (Sen. Brian Boquist, an independent from Dallas, no longer caucuses with Republicans). The GOP is targeting Democratic incumbents in Ashland, Salem and Hillsboro for possible pickups, while the Democrats’ best chance to gain a seat currently held by a Republican is probably Kennemer’s District 20 seat. (The Salem-area Senate contest between incumbent Sen. Deb Patterson, D-Salem, and the challenger, state Rep. Raquel Moore-Green, R-Salem, is just as expensive as the Kennemer-Meek race, with total spending also at $3.96 million.)
Democrats have long coveted Kennemer’s seat, one of the few remaining GOP strongholds in the metro area.
His newly drawn district includes Gladstone, Happy Valley and parts of Oregon City and shows a 10-point Democratic voter registration advantage. That’s a big change from 2018, the last time this seat was up for grabs. Then, Democrats held just a 1.8-point registration advantage.
Ordinarily, a 10-point Democratic registration advantage should translate into an easy victory for the Democratic candidate, and Meek has both served part of the Senate district for the past six years and earned a reputation as a tireless campaigner. But Kennemer’s nearly four decades of political experience, which included more than a decade as a Clackamas County commissioner, means he has considerable name recognition with voters.
Hence, the big spending in this race: Republicans are highly motivated to keep Kennemer in place, and Democrats want to consolidate control in the metro area.