On a sunny Sunday last month, Cyrus Javadi was not having much success introducing voters to the newly rebranded Cyrus Javadi.

Few people in Tillamook were answering their doors to Javadi’s knock. Those who did rarely showed much curiosity about the two-term state representative.

Then, past a driveway crowded with pickup trucks and a fishing boat, Tammy Jacobs came to the door and quickly epitomized a brand of voter Javadi is relying on.

“I’m a Democrat. Big-time liberal,” Jacobs, 58, told Javadi.

“So you’re probably happy I switched parties,” the lawmaker replied.

“Yeah, I mean it pissed a lot of people off,” Jacobs said. “But I love that.”

Javadi’s bid for reelection may be the biggest curiosity in state politics this year. The lawmaker has won his coastal district — stretching from Astoria down to Neskowin — twice. But he did so as a Republican.

Then last year Javadi shocked the GOP with two moves in quick succession.

First, he provided the crucial vote to pass a package of transportation tax and fee hikes introduced by Gov. Tina Kotek, including a highly unpopular 6-cent gas tax increase. In a lengthy blog post and speeches on the House floor, Javadi said he’d concluded that, without a new infusion of money, no help was coming to his district’s wind- and rain-lashed roads.

Then, perhaps recognizing Republicans would never reward such apostasy with reelection, Javadi switched his party affiliation to Democrat.

The question in the Nov. 3 election is how voters in his coastal swing district respond.

“We’re going to win,” Javadi, 49, said in an interview at the Tillamook dental practice he shares with four other dentists. “People see that we’re trying to get stuff done. I care more about what the community needs than what may work out for me politically, and that matters to the bulk of our voters.”

There are around 2,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Javadi’s district, House District 32. But that hasn’t mattered in recent elections. Republicans flipped the seat in 2020 after it spent 16 years in Democratic control.

This year, the GOP is motivated by more than run-of-the-mill partisanship to beat Javadi. Lisa Lamping, the chair of the Clatsop County Republicans, cast the candidate in a recent interview as a flip-flopping opportunist: against taxes and abortion one election, now endorsed by Planned Parenthood and preaching the utility of higher gas taxes.

“It’s really turned a lot of our people off, and there’s everything from very angry at him to ‘good riddance’ kind of feelings,” said Lamping, who worked to elect Javadi in 2022 and 2024. “Honestly, I think it’s probably the worst thing you can do is be a politician who doesn’t keep your word.”

To prosecute their case against Javadi, Republicans have nominated Max Sherman, a farmer and retired high school teacher from the tiny town of Hebo.

Sherman, 69, is what Lamping describes as a “salt-of-the-earth guy.” He’s got less Salem-ready political polish than Javadi, but he argues his deep ties to the region make him a far better fit.

“Agriculture, fishing, forestry — I’ve been involved in all of those,” Sherman said in a recent interview, noting those are the North Coast’s economic engines. “That’s what I’ve lived and breathed all my life.”

Sherman’s campaign this year is built half on red-meat Republican issues like slashing regulation and dismantling DEI initiatives, half on slamming Javadi’s shifting stances.

“A lot of people here have lost trust in him,” he said. “They feel betrayed.”

The Republican sells himself as an anti-tax candidate, arguing the state needs to build trust with voters in his district before it hikes taxes. But, like Javadi, Sherman says funding the Oregon Department of Transportation must take priority. Both candidates rattle off trouble spots in the network of roadways that snake over the Coast Range and down to the Pacific Ocean.

The race for HD 32 could be the most expensive state House race this year. The candidates have each raised more than a million dollars — enough to put ads on Portland’s pricey airwaves, which extend to the district.

Sherman may have a special boost on the North Coast by winning the endorsement of Betsy Johnson, the former centrist Democrat who represented the area for two decades. Like Javadi, Johnson switched party allegiances, running for governor as a nonaffiliated candidate in 2022. Now she’s backing Sherman in TV ads, calling him “the kind of guy who keeps his word” and telling her former constituents they can’t trust Javadi.

Sherman says he’s not taking anything for granted in a year when Democrats have national political momentum.

“It is a total toss-up,” he said of the race. “And it could be a nail-biter.”

While Republicans cast Javadi as disloyal, the newly-minted Democrat sees his willingness to change his mind as a virtue.

Born in Utah to a Mormon family, Javadi said he began increasingly examining tenets of his “very conservative” upbringing as he served in the Legislature. More and more, he said, the arguments from his Republican colleagues didn’t add up.

“I’ve gone to Salem and refused to just buy whatever the party line was,” he said. “Whatever the talking point was, I challenged.”

Javadi began drifting noticeably from the bulk of Republicans last year.

While supporting a Democratic bill to make it harder for school districts to ban books, Javadi said he worried districts could remove texts that would help kids like his son, who is gay, find kindred experiences in literature.

When most of his party opposed a bill leveraging taxes on healthcare providers to increase federal Medicaid funding, Javadi helped anchor arguments in favor of the proposal on the House floor.

And when he cast a decisive vote in favor of Kotek’s $4.3 billion tax proposal to fund the Oregon Department of Transportation — the only Republican to do so — Javadi was clear that keeping Oregon roads in passable condition outweighed political peril.

“The reward for doing the right thing here is worth the potential costs,” he said at the time.

Voters didn’t agree, and demolished Kotek’s tax package in a May vote. But Javadi’s campaign this year is marketing his independent streak.

“We really are trying to nail that fact of this is the guy who has values, he stands by his values,” campaign organizer Alec Kimball told volunteer canvassers as they prepared to knock doors in Tillamook last month. “He’s not for sale, basically, is what we’re trying to sell.”

Javadi has already found fans in some Democrats.

He’s shown up to demonstrate against President Donald Trump alongside members of the group Indivisible. And coastal Democrats repeatedly told OPB they’ve been impressed by Javadi’s Substack, where he has posted lengthy explanations of his reasons for leaving the Republican Party or changing his stance on abortion.

Javadi acknowledged using artificial intelligence to help him craft his posts, but said he uses the tool mainly as an editor and organizer, and that he writes the “bulk” of each entry.

“I appreciate the fact that he was smart enough to change parties and he is coming out with some really good ideas,” said Lynda Jordan, an 80-year-old Tillamook resident who was picketing against Trump on a recent Sunday. “I’m for him. Absolutely.”

But it’s people in the middle that Javadi and Sherman both need to convince. Nonaffiliated voters outnumber registered Republicans and Democrats in the district of roughly 55,800 voters, and could be decisive. They’re a big reason Javadi has been knocking doors up and down the coast.

While he’s been peppered with attacks on the tax vote, Javadi says it’s rarely on people’s mind when he knocks.

“I see sometimes 30, 40 people in a day,” he said. “It’s not something that comes up.”

And Javadi is still convinced that the state does need to find more money for its roads. But he also says voters sent a clear message when they shot down the tax package by a landslide earlier this year.

“I think what they said was, ‘We do want roads and bridges. We care about them, but we don’t think a gas tax at 6 cents is the best approach. So go back and figure it out,’” he said.

Javadi wants to be part of finding a solution. He’ll be knocking until Election Day to convince voters to give him that chance.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/10/23/cyrus-javadi-switched-parties-will-his-oregon-district-reelect-him-anyway/