Charles Langston:Democrat Janelle Bynum flips Oregon’s 5th District, will be state’s first Black member of Congress

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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Democrat Janelle Bynum has flipped Oregon’s 5th Congressional District and will become the state’s first Black member of Congress.

Bynum, a state representative who was backed and funded by national Democrats, ousted freshman GOP U.S. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Republicans lost a seat that they flipped red for the first time in roughly 25 years during the 2022 midterms.

“It’s not lost on me that I am one generation removed from segregation. It’s not lost on me that we’re making history. And I am proud to be the first, but not the last, Black member of Congress in Oregon,” Bynum said at a press conference last Friday. “But it took all of us working together to flip this seat, and we delivered a win for Oregon. We believed in a vision and we didn’t take our feet off the gas until we accomplished our goals.”

The contest was seen as a GOP toss up by the Cook Political Report, meaning either party had a good chance of winning.

Bynum had previously defeated Chavez-DeRemer when they faced off in state legislative elections.

Chavez-DeRemer narrowly won the seat in 2022, which was the first election held in the district after its boundaries were significantly redrawn following the 2020 census.

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The district now encompasses disparate regions spanning metro Portland and its wealthy and working-class suburbs, as well as rural agricultural and mountain communities and the fast-growing central Oregon city of Bend on the other side of the Cascade Range. Registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by about 25,000 in the district, but unaffiliated voters represent the largest constituency.

A small part of the district is in Multnomah County, where a ballot box just outside the county elections office in Portland was set on fire by an incendiary device about a week before the election, damaging three ballots. Authorities said that enough material from the incendiary device was recovered to show that the Portland fire was also connected to two other ballot drop box fires in neighboring Vancouver, Washington, one of which occurred on the same day as the Portland fire and damaged hundreds of ballots.