State Rep. Cyrus Javadi holds a significant fundraising advantage over Astoria City Councilor Andy Davis in the state House District 32 race.

Javadi, a Tillamook Republican in his first reelection campaign, had raised nearly $700,000 as of Oct. 24, state campaign finance reports show. Davis, the Democratic challenger, had collected just over $100,000.

One likely factor for the gap is that Davis was nominated by Democrats this summer to replace Logan Laity, who withdrew for work-related reasons after the May primary. But Laity also trailed Javadi in fundraising during the state House election in 2022, a lack of investment that suggests Oregon Democrats do not view the North Coast seat as particularly competitive despite the majority party’s edge in voter registration.

Democrats and Republicans invested heavily in House District 32 in the 2020 election, when Suzanne Weber defeated Astoria Democrat Debbie Boothe-Schmidt to become the first Republican to win the seat in nearly two decades. Weber, a Tillamook Republican, was elected to the state Senate in 2022.

About half of Javadi’s funding comes from Bring Balance to Salem, a political action committee funded in large part by Nike co-founder Phil Knight and other major business interests.

“These are all Oregon people with interests in Oregon, people who run businesses that pay tax dollars to the state of Oregon,” Javadi, a dentist, said of the political action committee. “They employ thousands of people in Oregon and give billions of dollars, like I said, in tax revenue. I think that to the extent that they want to support leadership in Oregon that’s going to be fair, balanced, reasonable, thoughtful — I think they have every right to.”

Other donors to Javadi’s campaign include several prominent regional businesses, such as the Pacific Seafood Group political action committee, Hampton Lumber and Koch Industries, which owns the Georgia-Pacific Wauna Mill.

Javadi has been critical of the amount of money pouring into state legislative races, as well as what he views as a lack of transparency among Democratic donors. He noted that such funding is necessary, however, to make candidates known to voters in a district that covers Clatsop and Tillamook counties and Clatskanie in Columbia County.

“The matter of the fact is, with 65,000 voters, if you want that message in front of them, it’s going to take multiple ways of getting the message in front of them, and that all costs money,” he said.

Javadi has come under some criticism for the stark nature of his campaign mailers and television ads, many of which portray Davis as a “tax and spend liberal” and a left-wing partisan, though he noted that some messaging is paid for by other interests and out of his control.

“You start messaging on that contrast (between candidates), and people — sometimes they don’t like it because it just sounds like you’re saying something negative about your opponent, when really, I’ve told the team, ‘Whatever we do, keep it on the issues,’” Javadi said. “If he’s raised taxes, if he’s aligned himself with some group that’s highly partisan, that’s fine with me. But don’t take things out of context. Don’t exaggerate his words. And so to the extent that I’ve had any control over it, I’ve been pretty careful about making sure that we stuck to that.”

Some of the largest donations to Davis have come from Citizen Action for Political Education, the political action committee for the Service Employees International Union, of which Davis is a member, and the Working Families Party.

“I think that I ultimately want to be able to make the decisions that I think are right at the Legislature, and not be hampered by feeling like I owe too many people too many things,” Davis, an analyst for the Oregon Health Authority, said. “So for me, there was a decision early on to just not take — or pursue, really — corporate money, corporate PAC money, things like that. Because I want to be able to make decisions that reflect my desire for our government to serve the people of the state, rather than just the businesses of the state.”

The Davis campaign has received contributions from Democratic Party interests like Future PAC, the funding arm of Oregon House Democrats, but the party has funneled much more funding into other races around the state, largely aimed at protecting Democratic incumbents.

“I wouldn’t say that they don’t think it’s a seat worth targeting,” he said. “I think that in this particular race, they look at it as relatively lower on their priority list.”

Davis was the chairman of Clatsop County Democrats during the Weber and Boothe-Schmidt race in 2020 and was critical of the amount of money that flooded into the campaigns, telling The Astorian at the time, “I think people in Clatsop County, or people in Oregon generally, should really not want this to be the situation.”

Davis noted that, having come into his campaign late, fundraising was always going to be an uphill battle.

“All things considered, we did pretty well to this stage in the race, I think,” he said. “We raised pretty much what our target was — around $100,000 — and we’ve made that. That’s what we were looking at for being able to make a competitive media buy, put out some mailers, get coverage on social media, things like that, so that we could at least advertise the fact that there is a competitor in the race. And we’ve done that, anyway.”