Multnomah County Election Turnout in Line With Past Primaries

With one day remaining for Oregonians to drop off their ballots, voter turnout in Multnomah County sits at 19.72%.

That’s within a percentage point of the Monday turnout in the last two primary elections in gubernatorial years, 2018 and 2022. Both those years had Monday turnout figures slightly above 19%. After Election Day, those years finished with turnout of 30% and 33%, respectively.

“We’ll see what comes in tomorrow, but it seems pretty ho-hum,” says pollster John Horvick of the Portland firm DHM Research. “This doesn’t seem like an extreme outlier one way or another.”

Horvick sees two notable takeaways from the consistent figures. The first is that, for all the heartburn surrounding Democratic lawmakers maneuvering a gas tax repeal to the May ballot rather than accepting it as a millstone to their prospects in November, the ballot measure doesn’t appear to have driven people to vote.

“I think the story is that people vote for exciting, top of the ticket races, not ballot measures,” Horvick tells WW. “The idea that a repeal was really going to drive turnout? A lot of the angst was unnecessary.”

The other question Horvick had going into the election season was whether the lack of primaries for city and county seats would depress turnout. (Both the city of Portland and Multnomah County have shifted to ranked-choice elections in November, eliminating May primaries.) But that didn’t happen, either: The numbers remained steady.

Horvick says supporters of ranked-choice voting could argue that the historically higher turnout in November means the single election is more democratic, since a larger share of voters weigh in. “I’m agnostic on that question,” he says.

One challenge to democracy that has not appeared to impact voting patterns is President Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict the counting of ballots received in the mail after election day. If Portlanders were worried about their ballots being received, it’s not reflected in how early they voted.

Statewide, Republican turnout is running five percentage points ahead of Democrats, 30% to 25%. That number reflects that GOP voters are deciding a competitive three-way race to nominate a challenger to Gov. Tina Kotek. The governor has eight opponents in the Democratic primary but none are running a campaign serious enough to file a Voter’s Pamphlet statement.

The deadline to drop off ballots is 8 pm Tuesday, May 19. WW’s endorsements can be found here.