On a warm early evening at Red Sunset Park in Gresham earlier this month, the Multnomah County Democratic Party gathered for its annual picnic with a number of aspiring political candidates in attendance. 

At the beginning of the event, county party chair Salomé Chimuku read out the names of the candidates present. One got a particularly frosty reception. 

When Commissioner Rene Gonzalez was introduced, a number of people in the audience booed. Chris Olson, a candidate for Portland City Council in District 2, said the enmity for Gonzalez from a segment of the picknickers was “not shocking.” 

“The fact that he showed his face at the Multnomah Dems picnic was just shocking to me,” Olson said of Gonzalez, who is running for mayor. “It was like, what are you doing? No one likes you here.”

Gonzalez did have supporters in the crowd—including a handful of city council candidates who share his positions on issues like policing and homelessness—but the reception he received speaks to broader issues that may decide the fate of his mayoral candidacy. 

In some respects, Gonzalez’s campaign is going quite well: the first-term commissioner has led the mayoral field in fundraising since launching his candidacy last year, and has a strong base of support that includes a number of the city’s most well-heeled business leaders. 

But in a ranked-choice voting system in which appealing to a wide swath of voters may be critical, the animosity Gonzalez is drawing from some Democrats may be an issue in a city in which Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly five to one. 

To that end, a number of political observers have taken note of Gonzalez’s attempts to position himself within the mainstream of Portland Democratic politics in recent weeks—attending Pride events and releasing a statement endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president. 

In a statement to the Mercury, Gonzalez emphasized his support for the party and its candidates.  

“As a lifelong Democrat, I’m enthusiastically supporting Kamala Harris and Oregon Democrats in this election,” Gonzalez wrote. “I hope the Multnomah County Democrats’ tent is big enough for diverse views, and I believe we have a common motivation for a better Portland for everybody. The mayor’s office is non-partisan, and I’m running to be the mayor of all Portlanders who know the city needs a new direction.”

But critics of Gonzalez have their own view of the commissioner’s motivation for his recent declarations of support for progressive candidates and Democratic causes. 

“I read it like someone who recognizes that right-of-center and conservative politics are not durable and popular in Portland,” Mitch Green, a candidate for City Council in District 4, said. “So if you can kind of create the appearance that you are aligned with our consensus values in a way that detracts from your actual record, that can be an expedient political move.” 

At the same time, Gonzalez also issued a tweet last week praising far right provocateur Andy Ngo—drawing fierce condemnation from a range of progressive organizations. 

“He’s a guy that is trying to speak out of both sides of his mouth so he can get as many voters as possible,” Olson said. “He’s going to retweet Andy Ngo and rail on Antifa or whatnot, and then he’ll go to the Pride Parade and supposedly support Kamala Harris—and he had to make sure in that message that he said he was a Democrat. He had to specifically mention that.”

Chimuku said that during her tenure as county party chair, she couldn’t recall Gonzalez attending a single county party event until the picnic. 

“People may feel as though in the party that Rene doesn’t show up unless it's campaign season, and he doesn’t talk about being a Democrat unless it’s campaign season,” she said. 

Gonzalez’s first major incursion into Oregon politics came during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he helped launch an organization called ED 300 that lobbied then-Gov. Kate Brown to re-open public schools and endorsed anti-LGBTQ+ school board candidates who supported their position. 

ED 300 was just the beginning of Gonzalez’s friction with Democratic Party activists and core constituencies. Gonzalez has also spent much of his time in office attempting to undercut Portland Street Response, pushing to ban unsanctioned public camping, and relaying that he feels “politically homeless” in the overwhelmingly Democratic city. 

Green, a progressive endorsed by the Working Families Party, said he doesn’t believe Gonzalez should be welcome at Democratic Party events in Multnomah County. 

“I would suspect you wouldn’t want someone like that at your gathering,” Green said. 

In fact, Gonzalez has faced pushback from some segments of the county party since even before he was elected to City Council two years ago. During his race against then-Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, Britton Taylor, the county party’s communications director, penned an op-ed arguing that Gonzalez “does not align with the Multnomah County Democrats’ platform.”

The Multnomah County Democratic Party does not endorse candidates in races in which multiple Democrats are running, and Chimuku said she doesn’t want any Democratic candidate to feel unwelcome attending party events or using the party’s platform to talk to voters. 

Instead, Chimuku said she wants the party to be able to provide a platform to help voters distinguish between candidates who do identify as Democrats—particularly during an election season in which Democrats with very different ideas about a number of issues are running against each other in local races. 

To her, those contrasts can be a positive thing for the city. 

“People are getting more used to disagreeing,” Chimuku said. “There used to be this sense in Portland where it’s like, ‘consensus, consensus, consensus,’ and now it’s turning more into, we don't have to strive for pure consensus. There will be disagreements.” 

Olson agreed that the scene at the picnic suggests the campaign may become more heated as it continues—with candidates to the left of Gonzalez and city council candidates aligned with his platform trying to draw the kinds of clear distinctions that some feel those center-right candidates are trying to obfuscate. 

“I think it’s going to be as divisive as this presidential election,” Olson said. “Will we be able to get together as progressives, center-left people and push back against the Rene Gonzalezs and Dan Ryans and... Mariah Hudsons and Eli Arnolds, people who are more centrist, center-right who are trying to disguise themselves as progressives?”

In the meantime, Gonzalez may continue trying to signal his alignment with all kinds of different Portland voters. 

“He’s just trying to hope that the right messages hit the right people,” Olson said.