Update: 11:10pm

The Oregonian has called the mayor's race for Ted Wheeler. 

Update: 10:28pm

If the city were only the west side, Ted Wheeler would already have been declared the winner, with more than 60 percent of the vote. But on the east side he and Iannarone are virtually tied, with Wheeler ahead only in a chunk of precincts around the Concordia, Beaumont-Wilshire, and Mount Tabor neighborhoods, as well as smaller precincts at the city's eastern edge. Iannarone is ahead elsewhere, including in all North Portland precincts and most of Southeast.

Update: 8:30 pm

Retired consultant and teacher Garritt Rosenthal was ahead in his race with 53 percent of the vote, while former state rep Mary Nolan Nolan was ahead with 63 percent for Metro's District 5 seat. 

Update: 8:24pm

Mingus Mapps looks poised to become the fourth African American ever to win a seat on Portland City Council, currently leading his opponent, incumbent Chloe Eudaly, with 56.03 percent of the vote to 43.07 percent.  Mapps had a slight edge in most voting precincts, with striking margins of victory on the west side and in Alameda and Beaumont-Wilshire.

Update: 8:22pm

With just over 311,000 votes counted, Wheeler holds a lead with 47 percent of the vote far, to Iannaraone's 40.5 percent. Write-ins, many of them presumably for Raiford, account for 12.4 percent. The last time there was a runoff for Portland mayor, in 2012 between Charlie Hales and Jefferson Smith, both of whom had troubled campaigns, write-ins accounted for only 7.5 percent.

Update: 8:13pm

With more than 288,000 votes counted, Mingus Mapps had taken 56.03 percent of the vote, with Eudaly trailing at 43.07 percent.

Sure, the presidential race might be a cliffhanger. But for pure drama, it's hard to beat the Portland mayor's race, which pits a beleaguered incumbent against a surging upstart—and throws in a wildcard write-in candidate for good measure.

After becoming the first mayor since Vera Katz even to seek a second term, Ted Wheeler just missed the 50 percent threshold in May’s primary that would have avoided a runoff. But still, he had double the votes of anyone else and probably wasn’t sweating too much about second-place finisher Sarah Iannarone, an urban planning consultant prone to tweeting about the shortcomings of neoliberalism, who had also run in 2016. Less than a week later, a Black man named George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, while other officers looked on and did nothing. The ensuing protests in Portland and elsewhere against persistent, institutionalized, racist police brutality have changed everything, including the fight to run this midsize city.

Wheeler, who assigned himself to be the police commissioner (assigning who’s in charge of bureaus is one of the only things that differentiates the mayor from the other four members of the city council), has faced criticism from both protesters and pro-“law and order” voters who want the protests to stop. Critiques have also come from his council colleague Jo Ann Hardesty, a longtime police reform advocate (who, after the council punted a vote on police funding last week, issued an endorsement for Iannarone), and from an opposite pole: President Donald Trump, who took to picking on Wheeler as a “weak” liberal mayor of an out-of-control city. (Wheeler, generally considered a moderate, was a registered Republican through his 30s.) Iannarone has associated herself with the marchers, and while she declined to give the “I am antifa” sound bite she kept being asked for in debates she proudly calls herself an “everyday antifascist and has a progressive agenda focused on services for unhoused Portlanders, police reform, and support for small businesses (she’s a former small-business owner). She also promises to hand the police bureau to Hardesty.  

After she finished third in the May primary, with 8.5 percent of the vote, supporters of Teressa Raiford launched a write-in campaign for the general election. Raiford is a multigenerational Oregonian like Wheeler, but with a very different Oregon experience. (Pretty sure the Wheelers’ family lore doesn’t include a chapter about police harassing anyone’s business with possum corpses.) Founder of the nonprofit Don’t Shoot PDX, Raiford is known as a longtime police reform activist and was once the subject of a write-in campaign for county sheriff, though her campaign is often low on details when it comes to other issues.  

Meanwhile, another hard-fought race over a seat on the Portland City Council is also in the spotlight. Incumbent Chloe Eudaly, formerly the owner of the erstwhile North Portland indie bookstore Reading Frenzy, surprised Steve Novick four years ago when she ousted him from his seat, running on a platform centered on tenants rights and affordable housing. Once in office, she championed an ordinance requiring landlords to pay moving costs in no-cause evictions, and has been vocal on renter protections during the pandemic. More recently, she made waves when she pushed for a $50 million cut in the police budget—a figure championed by many of those protesting for racial justice—voting against a proposed $15 million supported by the rest of the council because it was “low hanging fruit.”

Her opponent, Mingus Mapps, a political science professor, also spent time at city hall, managing the city’s crime prevention program at the Office of Community and Civic Life, which Eudaly oversees, before he was fired for what he says was a refusal to discipline an employee. He lists houselessness and charter reform as priorities—he has mooted moving towards neighborhood-based electoral districts, and more seats on the council—and while he has committed to police reform, his opponent has made much of his endorsement by the Portland Police Bureau’s union. Mapps also has the support of the neighborhood associations, groups Eudaly fell afoul of when she took them on last year in a failed attempt to alter their structure. Mapps has pitted himself as the consensus-builder, contrasting his pragmatic style with her bridge-burning approach. If elected, he'll be only the fourth African American to win a seat on Portland City Council. 

Three of the six district seats on the Metro Council were up for election this year. Incumbent Bob Stacey handily won his Southeast Portland seat in the May primary, while the races for the two open seats went to runoffs, each pitting a candidate who says they can bring people together against one banking experience with environmental or transit issues. In Metro’s District 3, running from Beaverton and Tigard south to Wilsonville, real estate agent Tom Anderson has a huge funding advantage over retired consultant and teacher Garritt Rosenthal. Anderson has endorsements from many suburban mayors, while Rosenthal’s supporters include unions and numerous Democratic state representatives.

The candidates for District 5, covering downtown and the Forest Park area on the west side plus all of North Portland and much of Northeast, don’t have much differentiation on issues facing the regional government and have focused instead on how they’ll get things done: former state rep Mary Nolan as a practical convener and Chris Smith as a motivated activist. Both are New England–educated and have previously run unsuccessfully for Portland City Council, each beaten by Amanda Fritz. This time, one of them will win.