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1) CARMEN RUBIO

The next mayor of Portland will be crucial in helping steer the city in a new, promising direction. Under the city’s charter changes, the mayor is no longer part of City Council and will instead serve in a more administrative role, helping oversee and guide daily city operations while making sure legislation passed by council gets implemented.

This means the next mayor needs to have a combination of the right vision, temperament, and experience. Portland needs a leader who can unite a city fractured by overlapping crises. But we also need someone who recognizes the rich culture, communal nature, and independent spirit that shaped our city and continues to define it.

Currently, very few people on the ballot have the qualifications or political will to make that happen, which is why the Mercury is only endorsing three candidates in this race. (For more, see What’s at Stake In the Mayor’s Race.)

Throughout the majority of Carmen Rubio’s time as city commissioner and, more recently, mayoral candidate, she’s (mostly) managed to avoid rocking the boat. But the past month or so has been tough for Rubio. After an initial article in the Oregonian exposed her years of driving and parking misdeeds, which involved racking up six driver’s license suspensions for failing to pay tickets, Rubio hit a parked car—and walked away from the scene—right when she should’ve been on her best behavior. 

The public backlash to news of Rubio’s gaffes was swift and harsh. Well, we’d characterize some of it as harsh but fair, considering just how outrageous the commissioner’s driver record was. But other reactions were over-the-top, especially from Portlanders who’ve never been sticklers about parking laws until now. Ultimately, upon a holistic review of the candidates, we decided that despite her personal flaws, we’re sticking with Rubio as our number one pick to be Portland’s next mayor. However, our support comes with the hope that she’ll change her policy approach on a few issues that have been weaknesses during her time in City Council so far. (Ahem, Zenith Energy.) 

Among her colleagues on the current Portland City Council, Rubio has easily been the most productive. She and her team were tasked with some of the city’s most wonky bureaus, and have managed to make big strides on issues that have seemed insurmountable. While many city leaders talked abstractly about solutions to the city’s housing crisis, Rubio took action, developing Portland’s first-ever Housing Production Strategy after a state mandate. The strategy details concrete steps for building more housing in Portland, including some major changes to zoning code requirements, which Rubio also helped deliver earlier this year. Throughout this process, we were impressed with Rubio’s willingness to listen to subject experts and her ability to stay balanced in the face of pressure from wealthy developers. 

Rubio also headed an overhaul of the city’s clean energy fund, one of the most promising local environmental policies in the country that initially faltered due to organizational struggles. Rubio’s refocused the program with a series of complex code changes, and it has transformed into a well-oiled machine, with a clear strategy for climate action. 

These are just a couple of examples of Rubio’s policy accomplishments, but they’re big ones, indicating the commissioner’s collaborative skills and drive to use her position to make change—not just talk about it. 

As we alluded to earlier, one of Rubio’s biggest missteps during her time in office has been her handling of the permit for oil transporting company Zenith Energy, which has a highly-contested facility in Northwest Portland’s Critical Energy Infrastructure hub. Before taking over the Bureau of Development Services (BDS) in early 2023, Rubio was already getting friendly with Zenith staff, accompanying her colleague Dan Ryan on a site tour that flouted city lobbying rules. Once she took over BDS, advocates felt Rubio—who has long maintained her commitment to environmentalism—could’ve done more to challenge Zenith, but she maintained the city’s decision to grant the company a Land Use Compatibility Statement. 

Zenith has said the company will transition to exclusively using renewable fuels at its Portland site within a matter of years, and Rubio’s office has pointed to this as a reason they should be allowed to operate in the city. But Zenith critics doubt their commitment to making the switch, and say even renewable fuels could cause devastating environmental damage in the case of an earthquake. Many candidates running for City Council have expressed their disapproval of the way the city has handled Zenith, and we hope Rubio will be willing to accept a different strategy if she’s elected mayor. 

Rubio’s accomplishments, relationships, and temperament show she will be an adept guide for Portland’s new City Council during the government transition, which could come with some bumps. She has some flaws, but so does every politician (see “Rene’s Receipts," or every Portland mayor elected from 1851 to the present). We should not hand this important and delicate job over to a blustering, argumentative narcissist, so we’re ridin’ with Rubio. Well…maybe not in the passenger seat of her car, but in a broader, more important sense. You know what we mean. 

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2) KEITH WILSON

Keith Wilson, a lifelong Portlander, has spent most of his career running the show at Titan Freight Systems, a regional transportation company known for championing renewable fuel and electric trucks. 

But Wilson, who founded and is currently the CEO of the nonprofit Shelter Portland, has made housing and homelessness central to his mayoral campaign. Notably, he has ambitious plans for ending unsheltered homelessness within his first year in office. He promises to dramatically increase walk-in overnight shelters and leans on this plan heavily as the solution to ending the debacle over tents and tarps, discontinuing homeless camp sweeps, and never having to fine or jail someone for living outside. The plan sounds great on paper, and Wilson’s commitment to seeing it through–complete with data and expertise–is commendable. But the reality is we may never convince every unhoused Portlander to utilize a congregate shelter, and it’s no small task to transport thousands of people to a facility nightly, even with public transit. 

We also haven’t heard any talk about a housing-first model, which is often more cost effective and leads to better outcomes. We’d also like to hear Wilson firmly acknowledge the rapid rise in housing costs that contributed to Portland’s sharp increase in unhoused residents over the past eight years. Establishing shelters is important, but preventing homelessness needs equal attention.

And while he touts his newcomer-to-politics status as a plus, we were left to wonder: Are we about to get saddled with a potentially very green City Council and a mayor who doesn’t know how to navigate City Hall? 

With all that said, we still think Wilson is capable, competent, and brings a collaborative leadership style that will be essential for Portland’s next mayor. His dedication to climate goals and understanding of correlating funding streams gives us hope.

Wilson’s path from relative obscurity as a business owner and nonprofit leader with no prior government experience to a leading candidate for mayor shows his tenacity and hustle. It also proves his ideas resonate with the public. If elected, we’d love for him to quash our skepticism by eliminating unsheltered homelessness and removing any doubt about what’s possible with the right vision and leadership.

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3) LIV ØSTHUS

Liv Østhus, AKA Viva Las Vegas, is an obvious political outlier. Her background as a stripper, bartender, writer, and artist is far from the laundry list of City Hall staffers-turned candidates, or nonprofit executives eager to make a political splash.

That’s part of what makes Østhus both intriguing and surprising. She entered the mayor’s race with a vision of bolstering Portland’s art scene. She’s talked about the power of arts and music as an oft-unsung economic engine, driver of tourism, and city revitalization—and we think she’s right. 

She advocates for the city to create “cheap and abundant art spaces, while retooling existing downtown infrastructure to boost the city’s low-income housing supply.”

Østhus acknowledges her lack of government experience, but says under Portland’s new government structure, that’s not as important as it once was.

She envisions the new mayor’s role as “more of a figurehead and a cheerleader” who can listen to and connect with Portlanders while bringing “enlightened and charismatic leadership.”

In her personal life, she’s raising a young daughter and previously battled breast cancer. Her cancer diagnosis ultimately led to a double mastectomy. 

Unlike most of the other political newcomers in the mayor’s race, Østhus ran a serious campaign, raking in enough individual donations to qualify for more than $85,000 in public financing through the city’s Small Donor Elections program. She’s also in tune with what’s happening at the local government level, from homelessness policy to tax increment financing (TIF) districts that will bring groundbreaking redevelopment projects to many neighborhoods.

She’s firm in her support of downtown revitalization efforts. As a longtime dancer at Mary’s Club, she’s seen the transformation of downtown and the hit it took during the pandemic. But she doesn’t think the city needs to displace or put more burden on its unhoused population to achieve that.

Make no mistake: Electing Østhus would be a bit of a gamble. Many doubt her political acumen and question her lack of experience. It’s a fair criticism. And while we applaud her focus on revitalizing the city’s arts offerings, we’d like to see her emphasize solutions to the housing and homelessness crises a little more heavily in her campaign. 

But we also think many voters have been too quick to count her out. What if she’s the next Bud Clark? Clark, a local tavern owner, was elected mayor in the mid-‘80s with no prior political experience, yet managed to accomplish a lot, while producing the somewhat-iconic (at least around PDX) Expose Yourself to Art poster. 

Østhus knows she’d be at a bit of a disadvantage, but she also knows when to seek guidance from policy experts and talented city staff. 

She’s funny, candid, and unabashedly authentic. We can’t think of another candidate who exemplifies Portland more than her. Even if she doesn’t win this election, we’d like to see her stay involved in local politics, either by lending her voice to a committee or commission, or mounting another run for public office. 

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The Mercury Election Strike Force is news editor Courtney Vaughn, reporter Taylor Griggs, arts & culture editor Suzette Smith, and editor-in-chief Wm. Steven Humphrey.