Election Day is less than seven weeks away, and one of the most consequential races on your ballot is for a job most Portlanders couldn’t describe: Multnomah County Chair. The incumbent isn’t running again, so no matter who wins, the county is getting a new leader and a new direction.

To help make sense of it, I sat down with someone who knows the job better than just about anyone. Deborah Kafoury spent 14 years on the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners, eight of them as chair. She guided the county through the COVID-19 pandemic, heat domes, wildfires, and more than 200 nights of protest. Before that, she served in the Oregon House, including as Democratic leader. She’s now chief of staff at Portland Public Schools.

Deborah and I worked side by side through some of the hardest stretches in this community’s recent history. We had a candid, funny, and useful conversation about what the chair actually does and what voters should be asking the people who want the job.

In this episode:

* What the county chair actually does. Deborah’s shorthand for the difference between the two governments: the city builds physical infrastructure, and the county builds human infrastructure. She also explains why the chair acts as both a governor and a legislator.

* Why management experience matters. Every county employee, all 7,000 of them, ultimately works for the chair. Deborah explains why voters should ask whether candidates have run a team before, and whether they did it well.

* Her father’s rule for surviving public life: hire people smarter than you.

* What’s waiting on the next chair’s desk: homelessness, affordability, and projected budget cuts. She also explains why she sees the budget as a moral document.

* Working across the aisle. She tells how Republican partners made the Sellwood Bridge and the new county courthouse possible, and why the Republican House speaker threw her a baby shower.

* The questions to ask at a house party. Deborah’s advice: ask about trade-offs, and ask candidates who they’ll spend their time listening to.

* The red flags to watch for. Be wary of promises to end homelessness on a deadline, guilt-by-association attacks, and the idea that asking hard questions counts as getting things done.

* Her new role at Portland Public Schools, and some good news: test scores are up.

Plus, In the News: Our trash news correspondent Elinor Jones turns her attention to a group that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: men. She covers robots that can’t walk downstairs, Mitch McConnell’s return to the Senate, and Pete Hegseth’s testosterone plan for the military. Find more from Elinor in the Portland Mercury’s Trash Report.

Your homework: Attend a house party, knock some doors, talk to your neighbors, make sure you’re registered, and get your ballot in.

Season 3 of SchmidtShow PDX runs through Election Day. If you like what we’re doing, subscribe, share this episode with a friend, and leave us a review.

This episode is brought to you by Corbett Hill Wellness Center, offering chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, naturopathic medicine, and more. Interested in sponsoring the show? Reach out. We’d love to have you.

Schmidt Show PDX is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It’s back to school season, which means it’s also back to the annual drama over Portland Public Schools — superintendent contracts, building closures, classroom consolidations. But this week, Mike zooms out to the bigger issue hiding underneath all of it: Oregon currently ranks 50th in the nation in fourth-grade reading proficiency.

To talk about it, Mike welcomes a guest who’s impossible to ignore — quite literally dressed as a two-foot pencil. J. Schuberth is the creator behind “Pencil for Governor,” a write-in campaign designed to force Oregon’s literacy crisis into the spotlight. Jay walks through how a joke among friends turned into a real campaign, what it’s actually like knocking on doors in a pencil costume, and why it took a mascot to get people talking about something this serious

Together, they dig into what states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee did differently to turn their reading rankings around — and lay out a five-step pledge for what Oregon could actually do about it. It’s part satire, part policy deep-dive, and a reminder that sometimes it takes something absurd to make people pay attention to something urgent.

Plus: Elinor Jones returns for a back-to-school edition of “In the News,” covering celebrity balloon arches, Meghan Markle’s UK school controversy, and JD Vance’s stay-at-home parent stipend proposal.

In this episode:

* Oregon’s 50th-in-the-nation ranking in 4th grade reading proficiency

* The origin story behind the “Pencil for Governor” campaign

* What Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee did to improve reading outcomes

* The five-step pledge for fixing literacy in Oregon

* Pencil’s picks for governor-for-a-day: policy, press conferences, and photo ops

* In the News: back-to-school culture wars, royal school drama, and the politics of parenting

Thanks to our sponsor, Corbett Hill Wellness, for supporting this episode. If you or your business would like to sponsor SchmidtShow PDX, reach out — your support keeps this project going.

Links:

* You can read Elinor Jones at the Mercury Trash Report

* You can learn more about Pencil’s run for Governor

* Sign the Petition to build support for fixing Oregon’s reading outcomes!

Schmidt Show PDX is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley joins Mike for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of the Senate, institutional trust, and what comes next — plus the debut of a new segment, “In the News,” with first-ever Schmidt Show correspondent Elinor Jones!

In the News with Elinor JonesA look back at three cultural giants lost this week — Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, and Peter Cullen (the voice of Optimus Prime) — including the surprisingly dark origin story of Dollywood, a brief history of celebrity theme parks, and a case for reviving the Rocky Horror midnight-screening tradition as an afternoon one.

Senator Jeff Merkley

* His old nickname, “Smash,” and how he unwinds back home in Oregon

* Favorite hidden-gem spots in Oregon, including the Oregon Treasure Quest

* The Senate then and now: from a 30% approval rating in 2009 to a historic 10% low today

* Ringing the alarm bells to recognize and fight the rise of fascism

* Growing inequality, being locked out of power across all three branches, and the case for “fighting fire with fire”

* The real mechanics of restoring trust: insider stock trading on Capitol Hill, Supreme Court ethics, and the influence of Citizens United

* ICE and the record-setting 50,000+ arrests in July

* Advice for the next generation of leaders following in the footsteps of Edith Green, Mark Hatfield, and Jeff Merkley himself

Lightning RoundFavorite Dolly Parton song, whether there’s a blue wave coming in November, election security, Mitch McConnell’s status, gardening, Reagan-era tax rates, and more — straight from listener-submitted questions.

Links mentioned

* Ring the Alarm Bells: The Ten Rules of Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook

* Oregon Treasure Quest

* Crystal Crane Hot Springs (Burns, OR)

* Carnivorous bog boardwalk (Florence, OR)

* Elinor Jones’ “Trash Report” at the Portland Mercury

Schmidt Show PDX is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Mike sits down with sitting Oregon Supreme Court Justice Bronson James — public defender and private practice lawyer turned Circuit Court, Court of Appeals, and now the state’s highest bench — for a rare, wide-ranging conversation with a sitting Justice. They start with comic-book tattoos and an actual ongoing Oregon Supreme Court Dungeons & Dragons campaign, then dig into the real stuff: what privacy even means in a world of data brokers and license plate readers, why Oregon’s 1859 constitution offers stronger protections than the federal floor, the “laboratories of democracy” under strain from federal preemption, and the perfect questions to ask judicial candidates this fall in your backyard gatherings. They close on judicial courage, Brown v. Board, and what it actually looks like when a judge is doing the job to improve the lives of the people they serve.

Topics Covered

* Comic-book tattoos and an actual ongoing Oregon Supreme Court Dungeons & Dragons campaign

* His path to the bench: Reed College, the dot-com boom, PhD guilt, and why he ended up in law school “not for any particular reason”

* What surprised him at each level of the job — trial court, Court of Appeals, and now the Supreme Court

* A plain-language tour of Oregon’s court system for non-lawyers

* What privacy actually means today, and why the law struggles to keep pace with technology

* Oregon’s constitution vs. the federal constitution — how Article I, Section 9 differs from the Fourth Amendment, and Hans Linde’s legacy building Oregon’s independent constitutional tradition

* Contested judicial elections in Multnomah County this November, and the real mechanics of how judicial campaigns work

* The information gap between lawyers (who can read a judicial candidate’s philosophy easily) and voters (who mostly can’t)

* Why “just calling balls and strikes” is a myth, and what actually reveals a judge’s character

* Judicial courage, Brown v. Board of Education, and MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail

* Closing advice: why headlines rarely tell the full story, and how listeners can become better-informed voters on judicial races

About Our Guest

Justice Bronson James sits on the Oregon Supreme Court, appointed by Governor Kate Brown in 2022 and elected to the seat in his own right in 2024. He previously served on the Multnomah County Circuit Court and the Oregon Court of Appeals, and worked as a public defender and in private practice before that. He teaches Oregon constitutional law at Lewis & Clark Law School.

Schmidt Show PDX is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Guest: Annie Naranjo Rivera, State Director, Oregon Working Families Party

Episode Summary

44% of registered Oregon voters — 1.4 million people — aren’t registered with either major party. This spring, the Working Families Party (WFP) went on a run in Democratic primaries, unseating a sitting state senator for the first time since 2018 and winning 37 of its 49 endorsed races. Mike sits down with Oregon WFP State Director Annie Naranjo Rivera to unpack what the party actually stands for, how fusion voting works in Oregon, and whether a party built to primary Democrats can also speak to the huge bloc of voters who’ve walked away from both parties entirely.

The WFP has five planks —

* a home you can afford,

* healthcare you can rely on,

* a good job to support your family,

* childcare when and where you need it, and

* time to spend with your family.

Sound good? This might be the political party for you.

In This Episode

* The state of the electorate in Oregon — only 26% think the state is headed in the right direction; 85% say cost of living is worsening; 77% say housing is worsening

* Annie’s origin story — daughter of a Cuban refugee, grew up in poverty, why lived experience belongs in decision-making spaces

* What WFP actually is — not a Green Party-style third party; a “non-delusional third party” built on fusion voting

* Fusion voting, explained — how Oregon’s version differs from New York’s (Zohran Mamdani’s WFP ballot line), and how candidates like Labor Commissioner Christina Stevenson appear cross-nominated as Democrat/WFP/Independent

* The Governor’s Prosperity Council — why WFP opposes its recommendations, and a pointer back to the S3 episode with Juan Carlos Ordoñez (Oregon Center for Public Policy) for the counter-perspective

* Myrna Munoz vs. Janeen Sollman — the primary upset Annie calls the most significant Oregon race in two decades, and the coalition (including first-time primary voters) that powered it

* Why WFP didn’t endorse Gov. Kotek in the primary — first of all - she didn’t apply, however there are legitimate concerns coming out of her handling of preschool-for-all and the Prosperity Council. Ultimately its up to the members - what the Governor’s appearance at WFP’s August convention signals

* Data centers — WFP’s position (not opposed outright, opposed to subsidies without community process, and to costs landing on ratepayers, farmland, and water)

* Immigration enforcement and ICE activity — the economic and community impact in Washington County and Hillsboro

* Healthcare — Medicaid/OHP access gaps in Tillamook County, hospital closures (Seaside Providence’s maternity ward), and the case for universal healthcare

Get Involved

* WFP Nominating Convention - Sign UP!

* Saturday 8/15 | 8am-3pm - Workshops and panels

* Saturday 8/15 | 6pm-8pm - Convention Weekend Dinner & Celebration

* Sunday 8/16 | 9am-12pm - Nominating Convention

* Join WFP — text MEMBER to 30403

* Learn more at their website: Oregon WFP

Related Episodes

* S03 E01 — Curtis Robinhold on the Oregon Prosperity Council

* S03 E04 — Juan Carlos Ordoñez (Oregon Center for Public Policy) on the Prosperity Council, from the other side

Schmidt Show PDX is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.