Much of their outside support runs through one pipe: the United for Portland Action Fund, the Chamber's PAC. Realtors' and developers' money goes in. It comes out as the Coalition for Portland's Future and as billboard committees with neighborhood-sounding names.
A complaint filed Oct 5 says the billboard setup hid where the money came from. That's an allegation; no one has ruled on it.
We checked every itemized individual donor to ten candidates against up to 20 years of contributors to 18 Republican campaigns and three other Portland conservatives (Gonzalez, Vasquez, Mozyrsky). A gift counts only when its own street address (same street, quadrant and city or ZIP), or ZIP code and employer, matches the donor's. Some matches were confirmed by hand from filing records instead: 12 of the 125 people with Republican gifts, including 11 of Torres's 31.
It isn't old history. 54 of the 125 have given to a Republican since 2024, and 39 gave to Christine Drazan.
56 of them gave to more than one of the six. Separate campaigns, shared donors.
Same city, same ballot, different donors. Run the same test on the four progressive candidates (Morillo, Koyama Lane, Green, Singleton) and the count is zero.
On the council record, Novick hasn't drifted right. But the people who gave to him for the first time in 2025–26 were more than three times as likely to have backed Republicans or Portland conservatives as the people who first gave in his 2023–24 campaign. We can't say why: 2025–26 is also when the Chamber's committees and Go Portland Go endorsed him.
Not a move to the right. 2025 had few split votes, so read the drop with care.
About triple. A jump this big is very unlikely to be random.
Portland uses ranked-choice voting. Anyone you rank can end up with your vote, so only rank candidates you'd want to win.