A poll came out this week showing Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler in a dead heat with his challenger. Sarah Iannarone, who forced a runoff in the May primary, has declared herself “the antifa candidate” for mayor.
Hot Air reported earlier this month:
Longtime Portland community organizer Sarah Iannarone has made no secret of her political sympathies. She declared last year that “I am Antifa” and wryly embraced the “Antifa mayor” label. She and her campaign manager, Gregory McKelvey, were featured in a December article in Playboy with the headline “Antifa in Focus.”
“I am antifa,” she tweeted in September. “I stand proudly beside the good people of this city organizing in countless ways every day to oppose hate in its myriad forms.”
Two months later, she tweeted, “If they’re going to call me ‘Antifa Mayor,’ then I might as well fight fascism.”
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The Iannarrone campaign paid for the poll, so take it with a grain of salt. However, Ted Wheeler has been widely panned for his tepid campaign. Wheeler should have run away with the election in the primary, but under Oregon rules for non-partisan elections, if nobody gets over 50% in the primary, the top two finishers move to a runoff held at the same time as the general election in November.
A new poll shows one in three Portland voters don’t know whether they’ll vote for incumbent Mayor Ted Wheeler or challenger Sarah Iannarone in November if they vote at all.
The poll, paid for by Iannarone’s campaign and conducted by North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling last week, found that 35% of 992 Portlanders were up in the air. The remaining voters were split with 33% saying they would vote for Wheeler and 32% for Iannarone. The margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points.
The poll provides a first look at what could be a close mayor’s race and shows that Wheeler and Iannarone both have plenty of people to win over to sway their race their way. The general election is Nov. 3.
More than one-third of Portland voters surveyed have no idea who they’ll vote for in November. That gives Iannarone, and her rioting buddies in antifa, plenty of time to give Portland a clear picture of what they’d get with her as mayor.
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Another indicator that Ted Wheeler could be in trouble: Iannarone has exceeded his fundraising by a fair bit. The poll has a few other tidbits, again from OregonLive:
The poll also found that 41% said they disapproved of Wheeler’s job performance as mayor, 61% said they weren’t sure if they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Iannarone and 63% said they generally supported reallocating funding from the police bureau budget to investments for Portland’s communities of color. It found 22% opposed to the idea and 15% who said they weren’t sure.
The question remains: does Portland want more antifa, or less? Does Portland want antifa to have access to the halls of city government? Previous elections indicate it’s possible. The last two city councilors elected, Jo Ann Hardesty and Chloe Eudaly, are radical progressive activists and community organizers. Hardesty has worked against the Portland Police Bureau for years, and Eudaly is an anti-landlord activist.
Jeff Reynolds is the author of the book, “Behind the Curtain: Inside the Network of Progressive Billionaires and Their Campaign to Undermine Democracy,” available at www.WhoOwnsTheDems.com. Jeff hosts a podcast at anchor.fm/BehindTheCurtain. You can follow him on Twitter @ChargerJeff.
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