In 2019, it looked like Oregon lawmakers might finally commit to ending the state’s outlier status on campaign finance.
I had just written an investigative series for The Oregonian/OregonLivemy previous write-up, revealing how Oregon’s lack of campaign donation limits allowed corporate America to give more to lawmakers, per capita, than anywhere else in the country and led to some of the weakest environmental protections on the West Coast. The state Supreme Court had allowed this to happen by holding that campaign donations were protected by free speech under the Oregon Constitution.
Lawmakers in Oregon, one of five states without any limits, seemed willing to do something about what we revealed. They asked Oregonians to amend the constitution and explicitly allow contribution limits, something lawmakers had tried repeatedly and failed to do before. In the 2020 ballot, 78% of voters said yes, one of the widest margins for a ballot measure in decades. All lawmakers had to do was write legislation limiting donations.
But for the next four years, no limits were adopted. When lawmakers finally set caps in 2024, individual donations were limited to $3,300 per election, well below the $1,000 to $2,000 caps that good-government groups had previously sought. Lawmakers left other opportunities for donors to give their time and money. They allowed the continuation of corporate donations, which many states prohibit. They made sure the limits wouldn’t go into effect until 2027, after the current gubernatorial race is over.
And now, lawmakers have voted to turn on the spigot further — and perhaps, campaign reform advocates say, all the way.
On March 5, Oregon’s Democratic-controlled Legislature approved a bill that its supporters described as containing little more than technical fixes to what they wrote two years ago.
Groups seeking to limit the influence of money in politics have said the changes are far more serious than administrative matters. They said the new bill introduces loopholes that, among other things, will allow companies to circumvent the limits by donating through affiliates.
Dan Meek, a lawyer who for years has been at the center of efforts to cut money in Oregon politics, called it “a bill aimed at destroying campaign finance reform in Oregon.”
Oregon elections have not imposed contribution limits since a brief period in the 1990s. Phil Keisling, a former secretary of state who argued for such caps before seeing them overturned in court, described the Legislature’s campaign finance record as “one of the most profound public policy failures” in recent Oregon history.
“Limits should have been put in place decades ago,” he said. “The fundamental problem is that there are powerful forces within both political parties that prefer the system as it is. »
Legislative leaders defended their work.
In a speech, House Majority Leader Ben Bowman described the contribution limits adopted by Parliament as allowing “elections where the voices of ordinary people are not drowned out by rich and powerful interests making unlimited political contributions.” He described the changes made this year as necessary for the new system to work properly.
The investigation I worked on seven years ago found that campaign donations in Oregon did more than just help politicians get elected.
They sometimes spent their campaign money in ways that benefited them, including on luxury hotel rooms, dry cleaning, car washes — and even footing the bill on dozens of visits to sports bars. One congresswoman used her campaign money to buy a new computer three weeks before leaving office; another spent it on an Amazon Prime subscription, 11 days before quitting.
Money has shaped public policy. As a reporter covering Oregon’s environment, I watched the Legislature weaken or block efforts on climate change, logging practices, industrial air pollution, herbicide spraying, oil spill preparedness and other issues for a decade. A retired regulator told me it was enough to just one phone call from a well-connected lobbyist to kill a clean air initiative.
What has happened since my investigation was published reveals how difficult it can be to eliminate this type of influence when the people meant to curb donations are the ones whose campaigns have long benefited from them.
After Oregonians voted overwhelmingly to give lawmakers the power to regulate election money in 2020, lawmakers failed to put restrictions in place in 2020, 2021, 2022 And 2023.
Tired of waiting, supporters of tight constraints on campaign funds gathered tens of thousands of signatures to put a measure limiting donations on the ballot in 2024. Unions, a major source of donations for Democrats, responded by threatening to introduce their own competing initiative. A supporter of the union measure said recently that it would have encouraged grassroots participation through small donor committees and included public funding for candidates.
Meek, the campaign reform advocate, described the union measure as an effort to create much looser limits, with less disclosure and major loopholes.
Lawmakers stepped in, negotiating a deal that was hailed as a historic breakthrough. Unions, election reform advocates and big business produced a bill that Meek described as at least a starting point for controlling Oregon’s political money — albeit with fewer constraints and higher monetary limits than he and others wanted.
Kate Titus, Oregon director of Common Cause, an advocacy group involved in the negotiations alongside Meek, said everyone agreed that some technical corrections to the bill’s language would be necessary before the system takes effect in 2027. But she said the group, which included House Speaker Julie Fahey, agreed that no substantive changes would be made without everyone’s agreement.
Then came this year’s short, month-long legislative session — and a surprise.
Titus described seeing Fahey in a hallway at the state Capitol in early February and asking him if there were any planned campaign finance bills. Fahey’s expression changed to what Titus described as “pure panic.”
“I can’t talk,” Titus told him, before hurrying away.
(Fahey spokeswoman Jill Bakken said the speaker was traveling from a room session to a meeting and didn’t have time for an impromptu hallway chat, telling Titus she could schedule time with her staff.)
A few hours later, Titus said: an 85-page invoice was presented with Fahey’s name and a public hearing scheduled for early the next morning.
That would push back from 2028 to 2032 the deadline set by the 2024 legislation for launching a new website to track campaign money.
The bill would impose the $5,000 limit on donations to any type of political committee per year, not per two-year election cycle – effectively doubling the amount allowed. A Fahey spokesperson called the 2024 provision a “typo” that needed to be corrected because it was inconsistent with limits on other types of donations.
The 2024 law prohibited multiple companies controlled by the same person from each giving as much as the law allows. The 2026 bill would allow this as long as the companies are not created solely to circumvent the limits, a change that Fahey’s spokesperson said was necessary to avoid a “chilling effect on community organization participation in elections.” The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group based in Washington, D.C., called it a loophole that makes Oregon’s contribution limits “illusory.”
On top of all that, the bill would remove a long-standing provision of state law that money spent in coordination with a candidate is a campaign contribution. A spokesperson for Secretary of State Tobias Read said the provision was “redundant” because the law also states that “anything of value” beyond money is a campaign contribution. But the Campaign Legal Center said the change could leave Oregon functionally without “any contribution limits.”
A representative from the League of Women Voters of Oregon, which participated in the 2024 negotiations, called the bill a “total betrayal.”
Bakken, Fahey’s spokesperson, told ProPublica that groups, including the league, “have been part of this conversation for many years” and will have an opportunity to provide input as lawmakers consider future changes.
As for why the Legislature hasn’t done more to stem the flow of money into the system, Bakken said restricting donors too sharply could push them to divert money from campaign donations to ads and mailers supporting candidates, something candidates legally can’t control. These “independent expenses” have no monetary limit under federal law.
Even though Meek and others were unhappy with the proposal, there was little they could do. They threatened to return to elections, but without the signatures they had gathered to do so in 2024, they had lost their influence. The bill passed the Oregon House by a vote of 39-19 and the Senate by a vote of 20-9.
Sen. Jeff Golden, a southern Oregon Democrat who opposed the bill, called its passage the biggest surprise of his eight-year term. Given the potentially huge gaps, he said in an interview: “I thought my colleagues wouldn’t adopt it. And I was wrong.”
The measure is on the desk of Gov. Tina Kotek, a Portland Democrat. She has until April 17 to make a decision.