Capital Chatter: Oregonians expect access to their representatives

Published 7:17 pm Thursday, July 31, 2025

Keith Reynolds was blunt with Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden: Oregonians haven’t elected a Republican governor since the state went heavily into vote-by-mail. Did Wyden see a correlation?

Wyden was in Gilliam County on Saturday afternoon for his 1,127th town hall since taking office in 1996.

“I’m the first United States senator elected by mail in the country. I’m a Democrat,” he responded. A few months after Wyden’s election, Republican Gordon Smith, of Pendleton, became the second U.S. senator elected via mail balloting.

“He and I worked together incredibly well,” Wyden said. “We did a lot of the town hall meetings just like this.”

Reynolds was not mollified. He initially favored vote-by-mail because of its convenience but was having second thoughts.

“Something is amiss,” he said. “I would just like to see one time a vote by in-person voting so I can compare the accuracy of that to what we’re getting by mail-in-voting.”

Gilliam County, like most of Oregon’s east side, is decidedly Republican. Yet Wyden won the county when seeking re-election in 1998, 2004, 2010 and 2016. 

In 2022, Republican Jo Rae Perkins won, getting 626 votes to Wyden’s 339. Still, he fared better than Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris did last year. President Donald Trump won the county, 805 votes to 291.

Gilliam is part of the sprawling 2nd Congressional District, which covers about two-thirds of the state. U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz, the lone Republican in Oregon’s congressional delegation, has held four town halls this year – at Baker City, La Grande, Pendleton and the Port of Morrow – drawing up to 550 people.

“These meetings were well attended, but it became clear that many in attendance were there not to exchange thoughts, ideas and information but instead to threaten, harass, and put on a show for social media purposes,” Bentz wrote in his constituent newsletter this week.

In May, Bentz switched to telephone town halls.

Wyden has done 27 in-person town halls this year, reflecting his campaign promise to hold one in each county every year. 

Such access to a high-profile politician is remarkable, but it’s what Oregonians expect. State Senate Republican Leader Ted Ferrioli, of John Day, used to say that if you’re not on a first-name basis with your U.S. senators, it’s only because you haven’t been introduced to them.

Last weekend, Wyden was in Sherman, Wheeler, Gilliam, Morrow and Wallowa counties. I attended the town halls in Condon and Boardman. Each lasted about an hour. Afterward, Wyden stuck around to chat with anyone who hadn’t had the opportunity to speak.

Participants raised such rural issues as wheat prices, federal support for wind and solar projects, health care, affordable housing, wildfires, local infrastructure, mail delivery, veterans’ care and the economy. They also talked about tariffs, immigration, Social Security, Medicaid, term limits, presidential power and the future of the Democratic Party.

Wyden told me that town halls are one way he tries – by getting Oregonians to talk with one another – to chip away at the political polarization gripping America.

In Boardman, the crowd was decidedly Democratic, applauding Wyden from the moment he walked into the SAGE Center meeting room.

In Condon, the crowd was smaller but seemingly more politically diverse. The folks gathered in the Veterans Memorial Hall ranged in age from 5 months to seniors. 

Wyden told the audience that no question was off-limits. “We’re going to make this a filibuster-free zone,” he said. “I don’t have all the answers, but I do know the Founding Fathers wanted us to talk this way.”

First to speak had been a young woman who questioned Wyden’s stance on transgender athletes competing in high school sports.

Wyden acknowledged differences of opinion, saying, “I learn from the kinds of things you’re saying.”

With about 2,000 residents, Gilliam is Oregon’s third-smallest county. Having 25 people attend the Condon town hall would be the rough equivalent of drawing 10,000 people in Multnomah County.

The five counties Wyden visited last weekend have a combined population of about 25,000. If you put everyone into the University of Oregon’s Autzen Stadium, that would still leave nearly 30,000 seats unfilled.

About 80 people attended the final town hall on Sunday afternoon in Enterprise. From there, Wyden headed to Pasco, Washington, to catch a predawn flight Monday to Seattle and then on to Washington, D.C.

He arrived in time for the U.S. Senate to unanimously pass his legislation on telephone network security.