Voters in Oregon were on the brink Wednesday of ousting progressive Portland DA Mike Schmidt and replacing him with one of his deputies who was once a Republican and has vowed to crack down on rampant crime and drug abuse.
As of Wednesday morning, with about 63% of the vote counted, Schmidt was trailing Nathan Vasquez by 11.9 percentage points — a difference of more than 117,000 votes, according to the latest tally.
“I am committed to fulfilling those campaign promises. I’m committed to ending the open-air drug use, to ending the open-air drug dealing that we have suffered from as a community,” Vasquez told his supporters Tuesday night.
“I am also committed to restoring that idea that it is OK to hold people accountable and doing it in a compassionate manner.”
Schmidt was elected district attorney of Multnomah County in May 2020 and took office following an explosion of anti-law enforcement feeling over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
Vasquez has been a prosecutor in the Multnomah DA’s office for more than two decades and had been a registered Republican until after former President Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017.
Multnomah County has not backed a Republican presidential contender since 1960, and Portland is famously a bastion of hipsters and liberal-leaning politics.
But voters appeared to sour on Schmidt’s soft-touch policies.
Early in Schmidt’s tenure, amid the upheaval over Floyd’s death, the new DA declared that he wouldn’t prosecute protesters who engaged in disorderly conduct or interfered with police officers.
He also established a unit charged with evaluating wrongful convictions and prison sentences and at one point championed the Measure 110 state ballot measure to decriminalize possession of small quantities of drugs.
Oregon has since moved to roll back that drug decriminalization push following a surge in overdose fatalities.
Meanwhile, Portland — a city of around 635,000 — suffered a record 95 homicides in 2022, according to data from the Portland Police Bureau.
Across the country, left-wing prosecutors have been facing backlash over their soft-on-crime-stances. In 2022, San Francisco voters recalled liberal prosecutor Chesa Boudin.
The previous year, Seattle voters backed Republican Ann Davison for city attorney over Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, who had pushed for getting rid of both jails and the city’s police department.
