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Michael Dunne: I’m Michael Dunne. Blue wave, blue tsunami, blue tidal wave. I think I even heard “blue Cascadia subduction zone.” Any way you slice it, Democrats, both in Oregon and nationally, had a very big night. Today on the show, we’ll bring you local, statewide and national reporting and reaction to the 2026 midterm elections. We’ll talk with our news team at KLCC, who spent the night covering the big races in our community, including the 4th Congressional District, the Clean Energy Initiative in Eugene and key county races. Then we’ll talk with a political science professor at OSU about the big statewide races and get some context for the tectonic shift in the U.S. Congress and what the next two years of governing might look like. It’s a blue wave Wednesday, and it’s next on Oregon on the Record.
Well, last night turned into a historic night for Democrats, who captured both houses of Congress. Today on the show, we recap what happened and how the results will impact governing here in Oregon and nationwide. You’re about to hear a sound bite from Congresswoman Val Hoyle from last night, and you can hear her enthusiasm for the Democratic majority.
Val Hoyle: We better not be meek. We better not be mild. We better deliver. I have never been in the majority. Peter DeFazio was in the majority. He said it’s way better.
Dunne: Now let’s chat with our news team about what they saw last night. The KLCC news team is in studio: Rebecca Hansen-White, Nathan Wilk and Zac Ziegler. They’re a bit bleary-eyed from being up all night covering the midterm elections. Rebecca, we’re going to start with you. Talk about the coverage and what happened in CD4, a repeat of Val Hoyle versus Monique DeSpain. What were some of the sights, sounds and insights you got covering that election, especially last night?
Rebecca Hansen-White: Yeah, I was at the Democratic Party’s election night event near the University of Oregon campus in Eugene, where Val Hoyle was. There were quite a few other Democratic candidates there, and the energy was very excited. I think the word I used when I called in last night was jubilation. Lots of cheering, dancing and singing at the party. Val Hoyle declared victory last night. She felt pretty confident, and I think she was also celebrating. I gave you some tape from her speech last night because since she was elected to Congress in 2022, she’s been in the minority. She’s proposed a lot of bills, but a lot of them haven’t gotten as far as she’s hoped in the minority. I have this photo, and I’m just going to describe it to you. It’s her looking at retired Rep. Peter DeFazio, because he was there last night as well, and her face is just smiling and ecstatic. She wasn’t necessarily looking at her own results, but I think she was looking at the national results in the context of likely going back to Congress herself, and she’s hoping to make progress on rolling back the health care cuts and other things she’s been very focused on during the campaign.
Dunne: Yeah, and I can imagine, since she’s been in the minority, proposing legislation is often kind of a no-win situation when you can’t get anything passed. Now she, as well as so many other Democrats, has a real shot at getting the things that are so important to them passed. Of course, there’s still the presidential veto, but it’s real progress, isn’t it?
Hansen-White: Yeah. I pulled her aside for a one-on-one, and what she told me is, “I don’t take these results for granted. I understand that this is voters telling me they want work done on these issues, and we need to work as soon as possible on bringing resources directly back to help people who are struggling to afford the basics and health care.” Those are things I think really motivated people to come out and vote this time around. To circle back to Monique DeSpain really quick, another reporter, Tiffany Eckert, was at the DeSpain party, and that was a little more somber last night. She was not ready to ... what’s the word I’m looking for? Concede. She was not ready to concede. But what she said specifically was, “Whatever happens, I’m at peace with the results. I felt good about the campaign I ran.” I do think it was a little bit of a different energy at that party last night.
Dunne: Yeah. You also covered a very competitive race in Lane County for commissioner. Talk about that as well.
Hansen-White: Yeah, it was Heather Buch versus Jake Pelroy for East Lane County. It’s the only commissioner race still on the ballot. The other two were resolved during the primary. I talked to Heather Buch at Val Hoyle’s party, and I called Jake Pelroy, and both of them said they were cautiously optimistic because it’s still so close. When I asked Heather Buch, “What do you think is reflected in your results tonight?” she said years of building relationships, following up with people when they ask her questions, visiting rural communities, helping with wildfire relief and trying to bring health care out to the outlying areas. When I talked to Jake Pelroy, one thing he pointed out that he believes may have affected this race is that he’s more conservative, and conservatives did not necessarily do super well last night. It’s a nonpartisan race, but he said he was focused on local county commissioner issues, and there’s a lot of other stuff in the atmosphere right now. More people are turning out, and it has had down-ballot effects in a lot of races.
Dunne: Yeah, I can imagine. I’m going to switch to Nathan Wilk, because one of the big races you covered didn’t pit individuals against each other. It was an initiative. Remind folks about the Eugene Clean Energy Fund and what it was all about.
Nathan Wilk: Right. Essentially, this ballot initiative would charge an annual licensing fee to billion-dollar retail companies, basically a percentage of their gross profits for some items, and then use that money to fund green energy and green jobs programs, retrofitting homes, things like that. There was a big campaign. A lot of money was spent, especially by proponents, a coalition of environmental groups. Last night they got the results they wanted, and they declared victory shortly after the first returns came in.
Dunne: Yeah, I’m curious what those proponents were saying about what this could do to the economy of Eugene.
Wilk: Sure. One of the things they talked about was the broader context of the country, with the federal government stepping back on some environmental funding and environmental support. Joel Eboa, one of the co-chief petitioners, told the crowd on stage last night, “Nobody else is going to save us. The feds aren’t going to save us. We’re going to save us.” The idea is that this will help the average Eugenean live a dignified life as climate change increases temperatures in the coming decades, and it could raise millions or even billions of dollars over time.
Dunne: Did you get a chance to talk to those against the initiative about what they’re feeling? OK, it passed. What happens now?
Wilk: Right. They are concerned, and they say they continue to be concerned, that this could be passed down to consumers: that the fee on these billion-dollar corporations could end up being something customers buying goods pay. So they’re worried about affordability, and they’re really turning to the city of Eugene as it implements this, saying they hope the city takes those concerns seriously as it looks at how this fee is actually adopted and what it looks like on the ground. Starting in 2029, large retail companies will be required to pay the fee.
Dunne: All right, Zac Ziegler, I’m going to bring you in here because you had sort of a dual role. You covered a race, and you were also our man behind the curtain for how this all got done last night. Let’s start with the city council race you covered. Talk about that.
Zac Ziegler: Yeah, in that one we saw Athena Aguiar defeat longtime incumbent Mike Clark. Clark was first elected in ’06, so it’s a bit of a change coming to the Eugene City Council.
Dunne: Yeah, absolutely. Well, let’s switch to this, because you guys did so much work. Talk about how you built this platform to receive all of these data points and sound bites from our intrepid reporters out in the field. Talk about how you built this airplane while it was basically in the air.
Ziegler: It’s always fun on election night as a reporter. You’re ready to just roll with whatever’s going on. As far as what we saw, it was a really interesting night. We had basically prewritten some stories: if so-and-so wins, if the other person is ahead, if the race is too close to call. We had prewritten stories for all of them. We were feeding sound bites back in, with reporters basically holding their phones up like they’re talking on them and sending in voice memos on Slack so we could air those. We also had a system I built using things like Google Docs that fed into our website and allowed the numbers to update. That’s actually something I’m still regularly doing today: checking those numbers. We don’t quite have the slick setup larger stations have, where these things are just automatically imported. So when the numbers update, it’s me or our news director, Chris Lehman, someone typing in the numbers manually.
Dunne: Well, you guys did a great job. I’d love to paint the picture for our audience of y’all clutching your coffee cups and trying to wake up, because it was a busy night. You did a phenomenal job. KLCC’s news team: Nathan Wilk, Rebecca Hansen-White and Zac Ziegler. Thank you all so much for the work you did, and thanks for coming in.
All: Thank you, Michael. Sure thing.
Dunne: Let’s now bring in Oregon State University professor Christopher Stout to get the national and statewide perspective. Stout, who studies public policy and political science, is also an expert in public opinion polling and voter behavior. Chris, it’s been a while, but thanks so much for coming on and chatting with us.
Christopher Stout: Michael, it’s great to talk to you again. Thanks for having me on.
Dunne: Yeah. Why don’t you give us some context from your point of view? How historic, and perhaps even surprising, were the election results last night?
Stout: Certainly surprising to me. I expected I would wake up this morning and we would still be trying to decide the winner of the Oregon gubernatorial election, but that was decided really quickly. If I thought it was going to be a good night for Democrats, I thought they would win in places like Kansas and Texas. I never thought they would win in places like Iowa or South Carolina, and I certainly wouldn’t have expected that we’d be talking about Mississippi this morning. So it was a really good night for Democrats. In the House, most people at the upper bounds thought Democrats would get 230 seats. Instead, they may get 250. They have 252 so far with the AP projections, and possibly as high as 260. It was just a night I didn’t expect.
Dunne: Yeah, and to that point, a lot of polls seemed to suggest, as is historically the case for the party out of power in a midterm, that Democrats would do well. Certainly the polling said it looked like they were going to have a good night. But do you think the polls might have underestimated Democratic gains up and down the board?
Stout: Oh, certainly. I think we can look race by race. If you looked at Texas, for example, people expected Talarico to win, but most polls showed Abbott was going to win that race pretty handily. Even in North Carolina, where Roy Cooper was expected to beat Whatley, that race was usually within the single digits. He won by double digits. That was true in Texas as well, in the Senate race there. So I think a lot of the polls were maybe a little worried about what happened in 2024, and they kind of overcorrected. There was a narrative that pollsters were not able to get enough Republican respondents to answer the polls, and to fix that, a lot of them weighted their polls to overestimate Republicans, and they may have done a little too much. Finding the right balance, I think, is going to continue to be a challenge for pollsters. But they certainly underestimated how well Democrats would do last night.
Dunne: Yeah. And just to expand on that, how do you see polling maybe changing?
Stout: Pollsters are in a state of flux right now, where they’re trying to figure out what secret sauce works best. How does the number of people who respond to a survey compare to who is actually going to turn out on Election Day? I think it’s a really difficult thing to do. It’s an imprecise science, in part because humans are so unpredictable. We knew Democrats were going to do well, as you mentioned. The historical pattern suggests that the party not in power in the White House wins during a midterm election, and even more so in the second term, and this is Trump’s second term. But trying to figure out how big the blue wave was going to be was really difficult, with shifting attitudes, things shifting even in the last few days before the election, and not knowing what turnout was going to be. I don’t think people predicted turnout would be as high as it was in South Carolina, which I think broke records.
Dunne: Boy, it seems like Republican efforts to gerrymander, especially to the detriment of Black voters, didn’t actually work. What did you see?
Stout: Oh, yeah, this is something I am really interested in. There was some concern after the Callais decision that districts would be redrawn in a way that would really disadvantage Black and even Latino voters. If we look at Alabama’s 2nd District, that was a district drawn to basically get rid of Shomari Figures, the Black representative there, and Shomari Figures still won. Some people have argued that these challenges to voting rights have mobilized Black voters and led to what some people have called the Black backlash, and that certainly showed yesterday, as Democrats way outperformed expectations in the South, in places like South Carolina, Texas and Mississippi.
Dunne: Yeah. Obviously, a lot of people are saying, “It was affordability, stupid,” to borrow a James Carville phrase, to a degree. But do you see other issues that were at least as important for people who voted for a Republican last time and changed their vote? Or is it just, “Hey, we’re a nation that cares deeply about affordability and income inequality,” and that really showed? Or were there things the Trump administration was doing that made people say, “No, I’m going to punish you for those things”?
Stout: Yeah, I can think of one specific example, and that’s the ICE raids. We can see this making a big difference in heavily Latino communities. I think most political scientists and political pundits were really surprised by how much the Latino vote shifted toward the Republican Party in 2024. But after Trump took office, with these ICE raids, a lot of people had family members, friends or friends of friends who were deported, and they felt the Trump administration did not keep its promise. We can see signs of this in some of the early exit polls, which show that Latino voters kind of swung back, and we see Democrats doing really well in border towns in Texas that had swung so far to the right in 2024. So I think that was an issue a lot of people thought about. And of course, there’s the Iran war. Trump promised never to get into any more wars. This was one of the strengths of his candidacy, particularly in 2016, when he tried to create a juxtaposition between himself and Hillary Clinton and her support for some of the earlier wars in the Middle East. For some of his supporters, getting into that war felt like a broken promise. Even if they didn’t vote for the Democratic Party, this may have dampened enthusiasm and made them less likely to turn out to vote.
Dunne: Yeah. What do you think the next two years are going to look like in terms of governance? Obviously, even though his party lost big, President Trump ain’t going anywhere. He still has two more years in his term. What do you think it’s going to be like in D.C., and how is that going to reverberate to places like here in western Oregon?
Stout: OK, I think a couple of things. On the Democratic side, I think they’re going to push for bills tied to affordability, and I anticipate those will be centered on health care, particularly addressing some of the policies tied to the Big Beautiful Bill. One of those is the Medicaid cuts, which will affect a lot of rural hospitals, including a lot of rural hospitals here in Oregon. I think one of the things Democrats are going to try to do is rescind some of those Medicaid cuts, and that will have an effect on access to health care in our state and across the nation as well. The other thing I think is going to happen is that Democrats will probably engage in more investigations around ICE and around some of Trump’s and his family’s dealings, and that will also have implications for how people feel about government and the levels of trust we have in government. And finally, I think there are some areas for bipartisanship, where Democrats and Republicans may work together. I see discussions around data centers, and that will have an impact here in Oregon as well, and discussions around artificial intelligence. And I think there’s a growing backlash from both Democrats and Republicans to members of Congress trading stocks and betting on online betting sites like Kalshi or Polymarket, so I see some legislation passing there.
Dunne: Speaking of which, you brought up data centers, and that bodes well for my next question about the governor’s race here in Oregon. Both candidates spent a good deal of time saying they would prohibit or put a moratorium on data centers, or that they don’t support them. It became this singular issue. They were polling pretty closely, and then it seemed like Kotek pulled away. Did the governor’s race here in Oregon stay true to form? Again, it was a rematch from last time. Did you expect it to happen the way it did?
Stout: If you had told me at the beginning of the election cycle that Kotek would win handily, I would have thought, “Oh, yeah, that’s probably going to be the case,” just because I thought it was going to be a good year for Democrats, and she won in 2022, which was not a good year for Democrats. But as the race got closer and the polling started coming out, I expected a much closer race. I think Christine Drazan positioned herself as someone who is not seen as extreme, someone who argued she could work across the aisle, and I thought maybe that could help. But it’s also hard to push against national trends, and the trends were moving so much toward the Democratic Party that it was going to be an uphill battle for Christine Drazan.
Dunne: Talk about how last night’s election impacts our local congresswoman, Val Hoyle.
Stout: Certainly. I believe, and maybe I’m wrong, that this is Val Hoyle’s first time being in the majority. So that changes the game. Now her legislation, the stuff she puts forth, isn’t just purely symbolic, where it’s unlikely the other side is going to give it a vote or a hearing or anything like that. Now the things she presses for can have a large impact.
Dunne: He is Oregon State University political science professor Christopher Stout. Chris, I always appreciate your insights. Thanks so much.
Stout: Thanks for having me on.
Dunne: That’s the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show, we’ll talk to a reporter at the Oregon Capital Chronicle about a disturbing report showing the Pacific Northwest has been losing its glaciers at an alarming rate, and we’ll also get a Texas perspective on the historic results from the Lone Star State. I’m Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
