At the request of a campaign volunteer, mayoral candidate Sho
Dozono peeled off his sweater to show off the gray Grant High School
shirt underneath, a keepsake from his days teaching and coaching
wrestling at the school in the ’70s. “I can still wear the T-shirt,”
Dozono says proudly.
Reinforcing the high school reunion atmosphere in Grant’s basement
cafeteria on Saturday morning, January 19—where Dozono and his
campaign are camped out, collecting contributions toward his bid for
public financing—a former student races up to give him a hug.
“We love you!” she tells him, clutching a pink receipt for her $5
campaign contribution—one of the 1,500 Dozono needs by January 31
to qualify for $200,000 in city funds. Likewise, Grant’s former
football coach, Joe Simpson, and shop teacher Tom Rowe stop in to
contribute.
Dozono’s campaign staff is hyper organized: There are tables for new
contributors to sit down and fill out a form, tables for people to stop
in and correct information on a form (there’s no room for error in the
city’s public financing program), and a table for volunteers to pick up
forms they can fan out across the city on Dozono’s behalf.
Dozono—who just jumped into the race on January 7—was
reportedly nearing the 1,500 mark by the end of the Grant event. “We’ll
get it done,” he says on Saturday morning, adding that his team plans
to pull in more than the required 1,500 contributions—every $5
contribution they collect is $5 the city doesn’t hand over from
taxpayer funds.
Dozono’s stream of support for his mayoral bid has “poured in the
door,” says campaign treasurer Vicki Tagliafico—despite the fact
that the candidate, who owns Azumano Travel, hasn’t outlined a specific
platform (he’s focused on the January 31 fundraising deadline, he
explains, and will get specific on issues after that). Most of his
supporters are backing Dozono based on his long record of service in
the community, from organizing relief trips to New Orleans and New York
City in the wake of disasters, to his advocacy for education, and say
Dozono would be a “visionary” mayor whom “people would want to work
for.”
Dozono’s wife, Loen, says his campaign is also about strengthening
the voice of minority voters—a block that political consultants
had told them didn’t really count for much in Portland. That shocked
the Dozonos. “If I could just increase the minority vote so they do
count,” the candidate says, he’ll be thrilled. Part of his campaign is
about “increasing voter registration in communities of color,” he
adds.
Others at Grant simply seemed happy that Dozono’s candidacy means
that the mayor’s race won’t be “a coronation,” as one man explained at
the Grant event, for City Commissioner Sam Adams.
Dozono, for his part, doesn’t seem concerned about his
competition—he’s focused on regular Portlanders, especially those
who haven’t had a voice in the city’s future. He hopes his run for
mayor “inspires people who have been disenfranchised in the past, to
say ‘I can do that.'”