by Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle
October 15, 2026
Voters in Oregon’s most competitive state House district in November will choose between a political newcomer and a longtime county commissioner with nearly 40 years, $750,000 in campaign contributions and diverging views on issues bigger than a hyperscale data center between them.
Republican Scott Hege, 64, and Democrat Hank Sanders, 25, are both vying to represent Oregon’s 52nd House District, running along the Columbia River Gorge from Troutdale to The Dalles.
Hege, a 16-year Wasco County commissioner and former executive director of the Port of The Dalles, has received the backing of major Republican political committees and donors, taking in more than $1 million in contributions this year, including nearly $450,000 in October alone. Nearly two-thirds of Hege’s contributions have come from the Bring Balance to Salem PAC, whose largest contributors include Nike cofounder Phil Knight and Sierra Pacific Industries, among the largest timber companies in the country.
Sanders, 25, is a former journalist who worked at the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times before working as a political campaign director for Oregon’s Democratic U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter and as a legislative aide for his mother, Portland-area state Sen. Lisa Reynolds, also a Democrat.
Sanders has received roughly $340,000, mostly from the Oregon House Democrats’ political action committee, the Democratic Party of Oregon and many sitting Democrats in the Oregon Legislature, including a recent $30,000 donation from Oregon House Majority Leader Ben Bowman’s political action committee. Bowman’s committee also donated $30,000 each to Democratic candidates in competitive House races in Tillamook and Salem.
The money and attention pouring into the 52nd District race in the lead-up to the Nov. 3 midterm election reflects a high level of interest, and high stakes, that leaders of both parties assign to the seat, which is one of the last in the state that is truly anyone’s game. Although the district has more registered Democrats than Republicans — 16,000 Democrats to 13,200 Republicans — nearly 19,400 nonaffiliated voters that often determine the outcome of area political races.
Current Rep. Jeff Helfrich, a Republican now running for the state Senate, eked out victories in the past two elections after losing two consecutive narrow races in a slightly different version of the district before 2021 redistricting.
Hege and Sanders have both in their campaigns leveraged their ages, party bonafides and resumes with voters. And they’ve both criticized the others’ stances on data centers and tax incentives that speak to broader voter distaste for the server farms and the economic incentives they’ve received to proliferate in the state for the last decade.
Data centers take center stage, spur mudslinging, in competitive Gorge-based Oregon House race
Hege describes himself as the experienced candidate who, as a Republican, can move the needle in the Democrat-controlled Legislature.
“There’s a significant resume difference between me and Hank, who’s much younger and obviously doesn’t have a resume or experience, has never been elected before, has not been, you know, on a budget committee. Has not had a mortgage. Has not had kids in school. Has not had elderly parents to attend to,” Hege explained. “Also, when there’s single-party rule with a supermajority, it’s not really helpful to send another person in that supermajority down to Salem,” he said.
Sanders describes his lack of experience with a mortgage or crafting spending proposals as a help, not a hindrance, and said that voters frustrated with Republican policies coming out of Congress and the White House want a Democrat in Salem who will push back on federal policies. He said he is uniquely positioned to relate to younger voters frustrated by generational affordability issues, and to talk candidly with their parents and grandparents who are worried younger generations will move away due to high costs.
“When I see young people — whether I’m talking to a high school class, on the street, at their doors, or when I’m knocking their parents’ door — there’s a lot of concern about the future of our country, and I think part of that has to do with a feeling that leaders in Salem aren’t necessarily affected by the decisions that they’re making,” he said.
Along the campaign trail, he met retired homeowners in scenic areas of the Columbia River Gorge who were able to afford homes now worth upward of $800,000 on teacher and nursing salaries.
“I’m all for people of all generations having homes. But we need to provide opportunities so that we can have that (homeownership) be a viable part of our future. It’s just gotten so much harder,” he said.
Hank Sanders
Name: Hank Sanders
Party: Democrat
Age: 25
Residence: Hood River
Education: Bachelor’s degree in economics and history, University of Chicago
Current occupation: Quit job two months ago as legislative assistant to state Sen. Lisa Reynolds, D-Portland, also his mother.
Prior elected experience: None
Fundraising: $340,589 as of Wednesday
Cash on hand: $25,036 as of Wednesday
Sanders moved to the district about a year ago to run as representative and won the Democratic nomination in the May primary in a tight three-way race. He touts his strategy of focusing on reaching voters at their homes as key to what he believes has been, and will be, a winning campaign.
As of Oct. 6, Sanders, campaign volunteers and staff had knocked on more than 24,300 doors, he said, and at more than 16,600 of those he was the one knocking.
“Manufactured homes in Rhododendron. Sometimes we’re going up winding paths for miles for one door. 15-minute drives between each door in Odell and Parkdale. We’re in places where you’re losing service out in Sandy. I think, the hardest doors to hit are in Corbett,” he said. “The mailboxes are sometimes hiding the addresses, but even those doors we’ve been hitting once, twice, three times between the primary to today.”
In those front door interactions, Sanders said he most often hears from older residents across party lines who are concerned about job opportunities and affordability for their kids and grandkids, and from young voters who are struggling to find jobs, afford healthcare and stay in the area.
It’s among the reasons Sanders said he would propose funding to stand up an office to help Medicaid recipients with new federal paperwork requirements, proposed tax credits for workers in high demand sectors such as health and childcare, and seek wildfire resilience investments in the area that could help lower the cost of property insurance.
Next to affordability, data centers have become one of the most hot-button issues in the district and across Oregon and the country, and it’s a key area where the candidates diverge. Sanders has called for a moratorium of unspecified time on new or expanded facilities until concerns around their high energy use, tax incentives and water intake and discharge are resolved. Hege has advocated for decisions about data center siting to stay with local governing bodies, not the state.
Scott Hege
Name: Scott Hege
Party: Republican
Age: 64
Residence: The Dalles
Education: Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, University of Idaho; master’s of business administration, Washington State University
Current occupation: Wasco County Commissioner
Prior elected experience: 16 years as a Wasco County Commissioner
Fundraising: $1,105,579 as of Wednesday
Cash on hand: $224,647 as of Wednesday
Like Sanders, Hege has also been focused on listening to constituents’ concerns over affordability, he said, and proposing solutions that focus on making it easier and cheaper to build more housing in the area, and reducing barriers to entry for businesses that want to get established and grow in the district.
He also said he would work to restore trust with Oregonians who resoundingly rejected in a ballot measure the Legislature’s proposal to raise gas taxes and car fees to pay for roads.
Hege said his experience as a county commissioner and 15 years as director of the Port of The Dalles make him uniquely positioned for the role of representative, and for negotiating across partisan lines to reign in state spending, preserve social services and incentivize economic growth. Among the incentives he’d like to work on is a rollback of the Corporate Activity Tax on businesses with $1 million in Oregon commercial activity to help fund schools, which he described as “basically a sales tax.”
Hege said he has also heard from constituents who are concerned with the growth of data centers in the area, including Google’s first data center campus in the state built on land at the Port of The Dalles that Hege approved as port director 20 years ago.
Hege said the data center debate is a national conflict that has been applied to his district “maybe a little bit inappropriately,” and that the county commission and the port have been completely transparent about decisions made related to Google’s data center campus, which were all done in public meetings.
Back in 2006 when the Google facility in the Dalles was being built, the company was young and the primary focus was servers to provide storage and security for data and email, Hege said. He added that there are no plans to build more data centers in The Dalles at present, and he stands by the temporary property tax deals the county extended to the company over the years worth hundreds of millions of dollars, in exchange for job, income and property tax boosts the company is supplying to the area.
For younger voters who see data centers as they are now, not then, Hege said he knows he has work to do.
“I hope to be able to connect more with that generation,” he said. “Maybe through Hank himself.”
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