Fourth Term or First Since 2002: Oregon's Senate Choice

Oregon's Senate race presents the voters with a study in contrasts. Jeff Merkley, the Democrat seeking a fourth term, has held the seat since 2009 — the former state House speaker who built a Senate identity on financial regulation, housing, and filibuster reform. His challenger, David Brock Smith, is a Republican state senator from Port Orford on the southern coast, attempting to become the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Oregon since 2002.

The geography is the race's argument. Oregon's population piles into the Willamette Valley, whose politics Merkley has represented for two decades in Salem and Washington. Smith's base is the other Oregon — the timber, fishing, and ranching counties of the south and east, where the state's resource economy collided hardest with federal land policy and where Republican margins are structural. A Republican path to a Senate win runs through turning out that Oregon in full while shaving the valley's margins; a Democratic path runs through holding the metro counties at their customary rates.

The office at stake is one of the state's two votes in a Senate that has been closely divided for a decade, where committee assignments and single votes on confirmations and appropriations carry the weight this race's advertising claims for them. Merkley's seniority carries Oregon's interests into rooms a freshman does not enter; Smith's case is that Oregon's interests have been misread by the incumbent party for a generation.

Senate races in Oregon rarely lack for national attention, and this one has drawn its share — an incumbent of nearly two decades against the strongest profile his opposition's bench could field from outside the valley.

Results will break the state's habit in one respect: with mail ballots postmarked Tuesday still arriving for a week, a close Senate race may outlast Election Night. Oregon counts the way it votes — deliberately, on paper, and at its own speed.