Salinas over Erickson for 6th District Congress

This year’s race is a re-run of the inaugural 6th District congressional race two years ago, and only one element has changed for us: While we came down emphatically for Democratic legislator Andrea Salinas in 2022, with two years of commendable service at her back, we feel even more strongly that she’s the right choice.

There are two main factors in our thinking:

Salinas proved a tireless networker who collaborated closely with cities, counties, companies, agencies, individuals and interest groups in the district to deliver for them in Congress. She put her priority squarely on seeing Oregon’s needs met and Oregon’s issues addressed, not on sounding one lone voice out of 435 on the partisan hot-button issues dominating national web and tabloid headlines.

Congress has more than enough flamboyant grandstanders as it is. It needs honest, dedicated, locally focused, behind-the-scenes members setting their sights on the needs of their constituents back home rather on earning air time through outrageous conduct and outlandish comments.

Repeat opponent Mike Erickson, a multi-millionaire Republican businessman who likes to bury opponents in a flood of his own money, seems to fit the latter mold much better than the former.

His campaign seems to largely promise four things — sealing our leaky southern border, cracking down on crime, vanquishing inflation and continuing to pursue a bitter personal grievance over the way Salinas portrayed his 2016 drunken driving case in her 2022 campaign.

The problem is:

- The Biden-Harris administration has already developed a comprehensive border-sealing plan with broad bipartisan support. It would already have been implemented had Donald Trump not bullied House Republicans into pulling the plug so he could continue to campaign on the issue. And it appears headed for immediate revival regardless of who wins the presidency, let alone who wins a single congressional seat out in Oregon.

- Both the national crime and murder rates have been declining steadily under the Biden-Harris administration, and things have been improving markedly even in Portland. Once again, how much influence would a freshman congressman have in any event?

- The incumbent White House team has also managed over its four years to largely tame inflation, while simultaneously whipping unemployment and fostering a doubling of the Dow Industrial Average. So we don’t see much role for a green freshman there either.

- The Salinas campaign did mis-portray the drug element in the criminal case against Erickson, who stumbled from a Portland bar and took off in a pickup with one and a half times the legal limit of alcohol on board. He had a lone hydrocodone in his wallet, a potential felony, but said he was holding it for his wife and was never charged over it. But he can continue pursuing redress in court whether serving in Congress or not.

A compelling case simply can’t be made for replacement of an effective, hard-working congressional representative with someone promising to become little more than yet another ideological back-bencher. We’re backing Salinas for a second term.