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State Sen. Janeen Sollman (D-Hillsboro) is one of just a handful of Democratic incumbents facing a serious challenger in the May 19 primary. Sollman, who chairs the Senate Interim Committee on Energy and Environment and co-chairs the Joint Ways and Means Subcommittee on Education, first won a House seat in 2016 and won appointment to the Senate in 2022.
Her challenger, Myrna Muñoz, is running a campaign backed by some of Sollman’s former supporters: prominent labor unions including Service Employees International Union Local 503, the Oregon Education Association, and the Oregon AFL-CIO.
Those unions hope to unseat Sollman in May after clashing with her over expanding the urban growth boundary in Hillsboro, education funding, and her vote against Senate Bill 916, the controversial bill that now allows striking workers to collect unemployment pay.
In an April 2 endorsement interview, WW’s editorial board asked Sollman why she thought those unions had chosen to try and unseat her with Muñoz in the primary. Sollman said she’s noticed a shifting culture around the Capitol over the last decade, where people are less open to facilitating conversations and groups push agendas that are “my way or the highway.”
One example, which Sollman described as “unsettling,” came as she was deciding how to vote on SB 916. (Sollman was ultimately one of two Democratic senators who voted against the bill.) She says SEIU members met with her staff and had a productive conversation, but in the last minutes of the meeting, SEIU members told her staff that they were actively looking for someone to challenge Sollman in the May primary.
Sollman says representatives with AFL-CIO also threatened her and three other Democratic state senators as SB 916 made its way through the session, telling them that if they did not vote yes, the legislators would face primary challenges. (Sollman did not share the names of the other three senators, but four Democrats had originally cast no votes against the bill.)
Neither SEIU nor AFL-CIO immediately responded to WW’s requests for comment.
In the video below, Sollman compared the unions’ actions to abuse.
“I am an adult survivor of domestic violence in my childhood. I know what bullying and intimidation is, I’ve experienced it,” Sollman said. “If you think that intimidates me, it doesn’t. I take the voices of my community. I will place that vote how I see fit with those voices.”
Muñoz, for her part, said she did not see the comments as bullying, given the power differential between union members and a sitting state senator. (She also said she was the member of SEIU who had told Sollman’s staff that the union was looking for candidates to primary her, though it was unclear if the two were referring to the same incident.)
“We’re in a democracy. I don’t think that’s bullying to come in and say ‘Hey, I don’t like what you’re doing with this Senate seat, and if it can’t change and represent me, too, because we supported you in this, then we’re going to primary you,” Muñoz said. “That’s what you do in a democracy. That’s not bullying.”
Sollman said she had spoken to some of her colleagues about the interactions and that they, too, had told her it was part of the business. She then compared her experience to that of a bad workplace.
“It’s a bad business model,” she said. “[I’ve asked unions], if your boss came to you and said, ”If you don’t do this, you’re going to get weekend shifts from 12 pm to 9 pm…the threatening and intimidation, that’s something that shouldn’t be OK in a workplace.”
Watch the video of the exchange below. WW will publish endorsements on April 29.
