09/14/2008

By JULIA SILVERMAN  / Associated Press

As Rep. John Huffman of The Dalles swings his red Prius into a downtown parking spot, an elderly, rail-thin constituent hails him from across the street.

"I understand you're out walking the streets again — good boy!" the man calls out amicably.

And so it goes with Huffman in Wasco County and beyond. After 22 years as a radio station owner and manager, he not only knows everyone in town, he's probably served on a committee with them.

And in a normal year, the Republican would win his House seat in a walk.

His Eastern Oregon district also spans Sherman, Wheeler, Grant, Gilliam and parts of Deschutes and Jefferson counties, prime territory for Republicans.

But 2008 is no normal year. Buoyed by surging voter registration and presidential nominee Barack Obama's popularity in Oregon, Democrats are on the march in territory like Huffman's district that they might have ceded in years past.

Huffman's opponent is blunt-spoken Jefferson County Commissioner Mike Ahern, as well known in his hometown of Madras as Huffman is in The Dalles.

Ahern is the kind of Democrat who was tickled when the parade announcer in John Day introduced him as "your family values candidate," the kind who says he'll probably do his share of head-butting with environmentalists should he make it to Salem and would have to pick and choose if asked to vote for an assortment of tax increases.

But he's got a commitment to issues like transportation funding and smartly planned growth, and a long history of winning elections as a Democrat in Republican country. So he was recruited by House Majority Leader Dave Hunt, D-Clackamas, a savvy, business-friendly caucus leader. Gov. Ted Kulongoski has already been in the district to raise money for him.

"I think it's important for the Democrats to get a foothold out here (east of the Cascades)," Ahern said, at a recent interview at the Wasco County Democratic headquarters. "And look, the Republicans are marginalized. I can be very effective."

Marginalized is a strong word — after all, the split in the Oregon House during the 2007 session was just 31-29 in favor of the Democrats. But there's a big difference in what the two parties are shooting for in the November elections.

House Minority Leader Bruce Hanna, R-Roseburg, talks about a 30-30 tie, while some Democrats openly speculate about picking up as many as 10 new seats, giving them an impenetrable 41-19 edge.

Hunt is homing in on 36. That's the magic number that would give Democrats a two-thirds majority in the chamber, enough to pass most legislation, including tax increases, without having to pick off any Republican votes. That would fit the Democrats' commanding majority in the Senate, 18-12, which isn't expected to change much.

If House Democrats had had 36 in their caucus in 2007, Hunt and company likely could have avoided the session's signature battle, the debate over whether to increase cigarette taxes to pay for a broad expansion of children's health care.

They wouldn't have had Ahern aboard, though, demonstrating that even a 36-member majority isn't a lock. Ahern says he would have voted no on the cigarette tax, deeming it too big of an increase.

The Dalles and surrounding areas aren't the only unlikely territory Democrats are venturing into.

Based on a surge in Democratic numbers, the party thinks it can pick off incumbent Rep. Chuck Burley in Bend, and perhaps even Rep. Andy Olsen of Albany, both holding long-standing Republican seats.

And thanks to a host of Republican retirements, the electoral map in the Portland metro area looks competitive, even in exurbs with more-conservative-than-not reputations, like Canby, West Linn and Wilsonville.

Democrats hope to take back a handful of seats they regard as rightfully theirs. Two examples are in Fairview, where they hold an edge in voter registrations of 3,000 but have been unable to pry voters away from Republican Rep. John Lim, and in Gresham, a seat long held by former House Speaker Karen Minnis, who is not running for re-election, where the Democratic registration edge is even bigger, 4,500.

So far, it's also been a year of plot twists and turns in legislative races.

Republicans had a promising candidate in Hillsboro, who had to drop out after the secretary of state's office found that he lived just feet outside the district's boundaries.

In Wilsonville, Hanna was placed in the odd position of having to embrace new Rep. Matt Wingard, R-Wilsonville, whom he had once denounced, after news surfaced that Wingard was convicted on a misdemeanor charge of striking his own son in 2002. When the district's incumbent resigned this summer, Wingard was appointed to fill the spot on an interim basis.

And the GOP's candidate in Tigard went on a truth-telling spree last spring, issuing a letter to potential constituents in which he spilled personal details like his former bankruptcies and divorces.

The Huffman-Ahern race, in House District 59, promises to be one of the fall's most closely watched. In 2006, Huffman's predecessor, Rep. John Dallum, held onto the seat by just 280 votes, without state Democrats doing much of anything to help out his opponent.

The district has been changing. Its farflung outposts, like John Day or Prairie City, might be solidly conservative, but its population center, The Dalles, is still home to plenty of union voters, who used to work at a now-closed aluminum plant. Other new residents work at the Google facility fronting the Columbia River.

Jefferson County and outer Deschutes County have been catching spillover from the Bend boom, and those who are priced out of spendy Hood River are migrating to The Dalles, where the downtown now boasts a French patisserie and an herbed goat cheese salad for $8.95.

Despite such urban trappings in his home base, Huffman has centered his campaign on the promise that he'll be a voice for rural Oregon, a slogan that's plastered on his billboard and lawn signs.

In one way or another, he has been involved in much of the city's economic development projects, like the new buildings on the campus of Columbia Gorge Community College, known for training wind turbine technicians, or in-the-works plans to build a Scottish-style public golf course near the city's airport.

But the region's roots are in timber and agriculture, and Huffman emphasizes the point, calling for a revival of the logging economy, with an emphasis on thinning overgrown timber he sees as wildfire bait.

Huffman says he finds plenty of points of agreement with the area's conservative Democrats. He and Ahern both decry a decision by Democrats to remove funding for a statewide Office of Rural Policy; both are anti-abortion and devotees of great local control for municipalities and counties. The two have also agreed to run a "clean" campaign — no mudslinging, personal mailers, no sneaky insinuations in radio advertising.

Ahern calls his opponent a gentleman but isn't shying away from taking him on either, warning: "If he thinks he will wrestle flag and faith out of my hands, he will have a fight."

He can go toe-to-toe with Huffman as an economic development proponent, Ahern argues, and says he sees the Democrats as the "party of fiscal responsibility," given the ballooning national debt under the Bush administration.

And while he agrees with Huffman's assessment that local loggers "have not been able to harvest a fair amount of timber," he says those are jobs of the past, not likely to be resuscitated. The region should focus on its growing wind energy industry, he said.

Neither is taking the race lightly.

"This is one of the top three or four races in the state," Huffman said. "They think this might be a place they can pick off. It makes sense to throw your ammunition out here this time around."