Oregon voters have ousted the progressive district attorney of Multnomah county, who had pledged to reform the criminal justice system, in favor of a centrist challenger endorsed by several police groups.
Mike Schmidt conceded the election on Wednesday afternoon in a phone call to challenger Nathan Vasquez, one of his deputies. Vasquez, who has worked as a prosecutor in Multnomah county, where Portland is located, since 2001, had campaigned on promises to improve the office’s relationship with police, address the city’s drug crisis and seek more prosecutions. He won Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary election after returns showed him receiving more than 50% of the vote.
“The voters have made it clear that they are ready to take our county in a new and safer direction,” Vasquez said on Facebook.
“I am committed to ending open air drug dealing and drug use while helping connect individuals to treatment, to rebuilding the broken relationships between the DA’s office and the community, and to ensuring that victims are the number one priority of my office,” he added.
Vasquez’s victory comes amid political upheaval in Oregon as the state grapples with worsening homelessness, a fentanyl crisis and growing public drug use. In April, Oregon effectively ended the state’s groundbreaking three-year decriminalization experiment and reintroduced criminal penalties for the possession of hard drugs. Meanwhile, Portland has shifted its handling of homelessness, moving from a hands-off approach to clearing street camps.
As frustrations over public safety and homelessness grow in cities across the west coast, progressive DAs and candidates in liberal bastions ranging from the San Francisco Bay area to Seattle are facing challenges. San Francisco voters in 2022 moved to recall Chesa Boudin, the progressive district attorney who had promised to tackle mass incarceration. A similar effort to oust the DA in Los Angeles that year failed.
Schmidt was elected in 2020 as social justice protests unfolded in Portland and across the nation. The Trump administration sent federal agents in to the city to forcibly stop the demonstrations, despite opposition from local officials, and even the city’s mayor was teargassed.
Schmidt campaigned on reforming the criminal justice system, and while in office, he launched initiatives to review wrongful convictions and prison sentences and focus prosecutions on violent crime rather than low-level offenses.
During the campaign, Vasquez denounced some of Schmidt’s policies, such as his decision not to prosecute protesters arrested during the 2020 demonstrations for low-level, non-violent offenses, and his past support of Measure 110, a ballot measure approved by voters in 2020 that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs.
Amid one of the nation’s largest spikes in overdose fatalities, state lawmakers this year ended up rolling back the first-in-the-nation law and restoring criminal penalties for so-called “personal use” possession. Schmidt supported reinstating the penalties.
Before taking office, Schmidt led the Oregon criminal justice commission, a state agency tasked with improving the legitimacy and effectiveness of the criminal justice system. Prior to that, he had served as a deputy district attorney for Multnomah county.
Schmidt will serve until his term ends in December.
