Oregon’s junior U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, will seek a fourth term in Congress.
By Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle
U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, 68, announced Thursday he’d run again for the Senate seat he’s held for more than 16 years. He’s represented Oregon in the U.S. Senate since 2009, alongside Oregon’s senior U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, also a Democrat. Merkley was last elected to his seat by Oregon voters in 2020. No Republican challenger has so far announced their intention to run against him.
“I’m running for reelection because we have to save our republic,” Merkley said at a news conference Thursday. If you’d asked him or his wife Mary Sorteberg four months ago, he said, they might have given you a different answer.
“But the magnitude of the darkness and danger that Trump is presenting, is so dark and so dangerous that I am calling on everyone to be off the couch, to hold their electeds accountable, and to do so fiercely,” Merkley said. “Just as I’m calling on others to do everything they can to stop this vision of families lose and billionaires win, to stop the strong man state, then Mary and I felt that we had to be in the battle as well.”
Merkley spends most weeks in Washington D.C., coming back to Oregon each weekend. He also holds a town hall every year in each of Oregon’s 36 counties, and has held more than 500 since joining the Senate.
He is currently the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, and chairs several subcommittees of the Senate Appropriations Committee and Environment and Public Works Committee. He is a member of the Senate Rules Committee, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and is co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
Merkley has introduced and supported policies over the years addressing the catastrophic impacts of climate change and reducing the U.S.’s greenhouse gas emissions, bank and health insurance corruption, equity for LGBTQ+ Americans and protecting civil liberties, and has been outspoken against President Donald Trump in his first and second term, describing Trump as an authoritarian.
“We’re in an extraordinary time in which Trump is pursuing the creation of a strong man state,” Merkley said. “We’ve seen this happen all around the world — where you have a subservient Congress, and a deferential court, and an aggressive, authoritarian elected president try to capture all the power, rather than it being split between the judiciary, the executive and the legislative branches.”
Merkley and Sorteberg, a retired nurse, today live in the same east Multnomah County neighborhood where Merkley was raised in a “blue-collar Oregon family.” Merkley is a first-generation college student who earned degrees from Stanford and Princeton universities before he went to work as a nuclear policy analyst for the Pentagon and the Congressional Budget Office. He eventually moved back to Oregon, where he became executive director for the Portland-area office of nonprofit Habitat for Humanity.
He served in the Oregon House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009, becoming House Speaker in 2007, before he joined the U.S. Senate.
Alex Baumhardt has been a national radio producer focusing on education for American Public Media since 2017. She has reported from the Arctic to the Antarctic for national and international media, and from Minnesota and Oregon for The Washington Post. This story first appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.
