Two Democratic primaries for U.S. House seats in Oregon could help reveal whether the party’s voters are leaning more toward progressive or establishment factions in a critical presidential election year.

The state’s 3rd Congressional District, which includes much of liberal Portland, will have its first open Democratic primary since 1996 with the retirement of U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer.

Two candidates with similar platforms are leading in fundraising: Maxine Dexter, a doctor and two-term state representative, and Susheela Jayapal, a former county commissioner endorsed by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Jayapal is the sister of U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal from Washington state, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

REPUBLICAN AIMING TO FLIP KEY SENATE SEAT IN DARK BLUE STATE GETS PRAISE FROM THESE TOP DEMS

While outside money and claims of Republican meddling have marked the race, national Democrats can safely bet on holding the solidly blue district as they seek to overturn the GOP’s thin majority in the House. Party leaders are more keenly eyeing the state’s 5th Congressional District, which will likely be home to one of the most competitive races in the country.

“This is one of the big swing districts nationally that both parties are really looking for to hold on to, or recapture, the House,” Ben Gaskins, associate professor of political science at Lewis & Clark College, said of Oregon’s 5th District. “I think that the big question is, to what degree are the Democratic voters really going to prioritize electability?”

Eager to reclaim the 5th District after it was flipped by the GOP in 2022 for the first time in roughly 25 years, congressional Democrats are supporting Janelle Bynum. They see her as having a better chance of winning in November than Jamie McLeod-Skinner, the progressive who in the 2022 midterm primary ousted the Democratic moderate who long held the seat and then lost to Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer in the general election, Gaskins said.

“I think many Democrats are going to hold that against her,” he said of McLeod-Skinner’s narrow 2022 defeat. “She had a chance. She lost.”

Key Democrats have endorsed Bynum, including Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and three of the state’s U.S. representatives.

The U.S. House Democrats’ fundraising arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, named Bynum to its “Red to Blue” program, noting Bynum previously defeated Chavez-DeRemer in legislative elections. The program provides organizational and financial support to Democrats running to flip GOP districts.

Meanwhile, a late flood of spending from a political action committee on behalf of McLeod-Skinner has raised questions about whether Republicans are trying to tilt the scales in favor of a more progressive candidate whom they see as easier to beat in a general election.

Rep. Richard Hudson, chairman of the campaign arm for House Republicans, said he had no knowledge of Republicans getting involved in the Democratic primary.

The boundaries of the 5th District were significantly redrawn following the 2020 census. It encompasses disparate regions spanning metro Portland and its wealthy and working-class suburbs, as well as rural agricultural and mountain communities and the fast-growing central Oregon city of Bend on the other side of the Cascade Range.

“I think candidates are trying to figure out exactly what the secret sauce is for this district, because there are just so many different interests here,” said Chris Koski, a political science professor at Reed College in Portland.

McLeod-Skinner, an attorney who has served in multiple local governments, lives in central Oregon with her wife and pitches herself as someone who can bring together rural and urban voters. Her campaign website says that while attending high school in southern Oregon, she helped support her family “by mucking horse stalls and bucking hay.” This is her third time running for Congress.

Bynum, from Washington, D.C., was elected to the Oregon House in 2016, representing the suburbs southeast of Portland. She has served on the chamber’s small business committee and is the owner of four McDonald’s franchises.

Both women studied engineering and have similar policy stances. They support abortion protections, lowering health care costs and tackling climate change.

As of late Friday, Bynum had outraised McLeod-Skinner by about $385,000. But much of the money in the race has been outside spending from super PACs. Such groups can’t contribute directly to campaigns, but can spend unlimited amounts of money on advertising for or against candidates.

A PAC called Mainstream Democrats has spent nearly $380,000 in support of Bynum and the same amount opposing McLeod-Skinner, federal campaign finance filings show.

Though both candidates have engineering degrees, the 314 Action Fund, which says it focuses on electing Democrats with science backgrounds to Congress, has spent more than $470,000 on ads and mailers in support of Bynum.

The super PAC also has invested heavily in Oregon’s 3rd District, spending nearly $2.2 million on ads supporting Dexter, a pulmonologist.

Another PAC, the recently created Voters for Responsive Government, has spent $2.4 million opposing Jayapal.

Jayapal and McLeod-Skinner have criticized what they call “dark money” flowing into the races.

Jayapal has suggested the 314 Action Fund’s spending in the 3rd District is linked to “MAGA Republican mega-donors.” Her campaign manager, Andrea Cervone, said in an email there has been “a growing trend across the country of billionaires and millionaires with a history of giving to MAGA Republicans” funneling money into Democratic primaries, but didn’t provide a specific example of how the group is linked to such donors.

Cervone said the 314 Action Fund raised and spent much of its money in April, meaning the group won’t have to disclose its donors until the next federal filing deadline on May 20, the day before the election.

314 Action Fund’s president Shaughnessy Naughton said in an emailed statement that the group she founded has spent millions of dollars to “defeat MAGA Republicans.”

“It is beyond the pale and an act of desperation for Susheela Jayapal’s campaign to make these false charges,” she said.

In a statement this month in response to the comments about “dark money,” Dexter condemned the outside spending on ads targeting her opponent: “I do not condone or support these negative ads in any way and remain committed to a positive conversation.”

Dexter’s campaign also has been boosted recently by direct contributions from individuals. She reported raising more than $218,000 on a single day earlier this month, including from donors who previously donated to Republican candidates and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, federal filings show.

Jayapal touts herself as being the first candidate in the race to call for a cease-fire in Gaza.

With the Democratic frontrunners in each race largely sharing policy platforms, voters may have to choose based on style. Dexter and Bynum highlight their legislative records, while Jayapal and McLeod-Skinner lean into their progressive endorsements, Gaskins said.

“That pragmatism versus idealism divide in the Democratic electorate, I think, will be the biggest way to distinguish them,” Gaskins said. “Is it about taking the boldest progressive stance on the issues or emphasizing being able to get things done?”

As he stood on a sun-dappled patio overlooking the Visalia Country Club, Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux didn’t mince words about his chances in his run for Congress.

“I am the underdog,” Boudreaux told a crowd of supporters. “I am pushing back against a machine that is so powerful that it’s very challenging, to say the least.”

The power behind the machine is former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), who resigned from Congress last year after being voted out as House speaker. His name is not on the ballot, but McCarthy’s political influence and campaign funds are still major factors in the fight over who will serve out the remainder of his term in Congress.

Voters in the 20th Congressional District, the most conservative in California, will choose Tuesday between two Republican candidates: Boudreaux, a sheriff from the northern half of the district; and Assemblymember Vince Fong, a lawmaker who represents Bakersfield in Sacramento and previously worked for McCarthy.

The special election is expected to be a relatively low-key, low-turnout affair. But the stakes are high: Whoever wins the special election will be the incumbent on the November ballot, a significant advantage in the race for the full two-year term.

“Boudreaux is the outsider, the David vs. the Goliath,” said Mark Salvaggio, a Bakersfield political commentator and former member of the City Council. “Fong is McCarthy’s heir apparent, and the scales are tilted in his favor.”

Fong and Boudreaux are aligned on most major policy issues: opposing abortion, reducing illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and securing better water and energy policies for the agricultural Central Valley.

Boudreaux, 57, has been the sheriff of Tulare County for more than a decade and serves as the head of the California State Sheriffs’ Assn.

“I’ve been on the streets, on patrol, enforcing issues of immigration and crime resulting from bad legislation,” Boudreaux said. “I have 38 years of real life experiences that I can take to the Hill.”

Fong, 44, began his career working for McCarthy’s predecessor, then-Rep. Bill Thomas, then worked for nearly a decade as McCarthy’s district director before winning a seat in the state Assembly in 2016.

Fong considers McCarthy a friend and mentor, but said he has spent years building his own track record in Sacramento, where he is the vice chair of the budget committee. He said he has fought for “fiscal sanity” and worked on bills to help the Central Valley address fentanyl, wildfires, supply chain shortages and water storage.

“We need the most experienced and effective voice possible,” Fong said. “We have enough people in Congress that want to be social influencers, but we need more people who are going to be focused on making good policy.”

Fong finished first in the March primary elections for the full two-year term and the remainder of McCarthy’s term. In fundraising he enjoys a wide lead, too.

Boudreaux raised about $425,000 by May 1, according to federal filings. Fong raised almost $1.5 million in the same period.

Fong’s campaign is running ads across the San Joaquin Valley and has hired a fundraiser who has worked for McCarthy, former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California Republican Party.

A political action committee called Central Valley Values has reported raising an additional $950,000 to support Fong, according to federal filings. Of that, about $450,000 came through McCarthy’s Majority Committee PAC. The other $500,000 came from a new PAC funded by major Republican donors, including Barbara Grimm-Marshall of Bakersfield’s Grimmway Farms, the world’s largest carrot grower.

So far this year, Central Valley Values has spent nearly $400,000 on social media advertising, direct mail and text messages to support Fong, and more than $170,000 to oppose Boudreaux, federal filings show.

“The McCarthy machine is huge,” Boudreaux said. Running against it, he said, is “daunting, to say the least.”

Another sign of McCarthy’s involvement was President Trump’s endorsement of Fong in March. The endorsement was a blow to Boudreaux and a coup for Fong, who has largely avoided the culture wars that dominate factions of the GOP and is now seeking to win over right-wing Republicans skeptical of the political establishment.

McCarthy has previously helped guide Trump’s California endorsements, including persuading him two years ago not to endorse a right-wing challenger to Central Valley Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford), who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Republicans in the northern part of the district in Kings, Tulare and Fresno counties say the Boudreaux campaign is one way to express their frustration with how often their neighbors to the south call the political shots. Kern County, home to Bakersfield, is the traditional seat of power in the 20th District and is home to more than half the registered voters.

Retired Republican Rep. Connie Conway, who replaced former Rep. Devin Nunes after he resigned from Congress, said at the Boudreaux fundraiser, to laughter, that she had encountered “just a little pressure” not to endorse the sheriff.

“Kern County thinks they’re kingmakers,” said Boudreaux supporter Mariann Bettencourt, a former chair of the Tulare County Republican Party. “They don’t much like it when you run against them.”

Fong is well known and popular in Bakersfield. Red, white and blue signs supporting his campaign were visible recently outside homes, offices and businesses like Moo Creamery, a diner known for its homemade ice cream.

Bakersfield resident Marcia Albert, 75, said she had gotten to know Fong’s name over the years from hearing him on the radio and reading his name in the newspaper. She didn’t know much about Boudreaux.

A Republican who retired from the Monterey County district attorney’s office, Albert said she liked that Fong prioritized issues that matter to her, such as small government and immigration, especially the “crisis at the southern border.”

“He’s a strong conservative,” she said. “That’s what Washington needs.”

Bakersfield resident Brenda Popejoy, 74, said she didn’t much like either candidate. The retired government worker voted in the primary for Democrat Marisa Wood, who finished third with 22.6% of the vote. Popejoy said she’s voting Tuesday based on who she does know.

“McCarthy endorsed Fong, and I hate Kevin McCarthy,” Popejoy said. “So I’m voting for the other guy.”

Whether Fong could even enter the race was in question until recently.

Two months after being voted out as speaker of the House, McCarthy announced that he was leaving Congress at the end of 2023.

McCarthy’s retirement extended the filing period for the congressional race by five days. Boudreaux said he started getting calls from politicians who wanted him to run. Fong put out a statement saying he wouldn’t run, and Boudreaux entered the race.

Fong changed his mind four days later and filed to run for Congress. He told The Times that he had expected other candidates to enter the race, and when they didn’t, he had a change of heart after seeing a “massive void in the field, in terms of someone that was going to ensure that our community had an effective voice in Congress.”

Fong said that he tried to withdraw from his Assembly seat, but was blocked by Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, a Democrat, who argued that the deadline had already passed. She also said that state election law barred candidates from running for two offices at the same time.

Fong’s campaign sued Weber, and won in court in Sacramento County and again in the 3rd District Court of Appeal.

Ken Weir, a member of the Bakersfield City Council and the head of the Kern County GOP, ran a write-in campaign for the 32nd District Assembly seat. He finished second in the primary, with about 15.9% of the vote to Fong’s 82.4%. Weir will appear as a candidate on the November ballot, alongside Fong.

If Fong is elected to both offices, he would resign from the Assembly and head to D.C., and election officials would hold a special election to fill the Assembly vacancy in 2025, a Fong campaign spokesman said.

With the school year inching toward a close and with summer on the horizon, interest in Tuesday’s special election remained faint compared with more day-to-day priorities, including rising costs.

As he played with his two young daughters at a park along the Kern River, Juan Perez, 24, said he had seen signs for Fong’s congressional campaign but didn’t know when the election was being held.

Perez, a landscaper who said he has voted for Republicans and Democrats, said he and his wife had both started working part time as food delivery drivers to help cover the rising cost of daily necessities such as diapers, groceries and gas.

“It feels like we’re falling behind every month,” Perez said. “Whoever wins, I don’t think it’s going to matter for me.”

Ahead of the U.S. presidential election this year, government officials and tech industry leaders have warned that chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools can be easily manipulated to sow disinformation online on a remarkable scale.

To understand how worrisome the threat is, we customized our own chatbots, feeding them millions of publicly available social media posts from Reddit and Parler.

The posts, which ranged from discussions of racial and gender equity to border policies, allowed the chatbots to develop a variety of liberal and conservative viewpoints.

We asked them, “Who will win the election in November?”

Punctuation and other aspects of responses have not been changed.

And about their stance on a volatile election issue: immigration.

We asked the conservative chatbot what it thought about liberals.

And we asked the liberal chatbot about conservatives.

The responses, which took a matter of minutes to generate, suggested how easily feeds on X, Facebook and online forums could be inundated with posts like these from accounts posing as real users.

False and manipulated information online is nothing new. The 2016 presidential election was marred by state-backed influence campaigns on Facebook and elsewhere — efforts that required teams of people.

Now, one person with one computer can generate the same amount of material, if not more. What is produced depends largely on what A.I. is fed: The more nonsensical or expletive-laden the Parler or Reddit posts were in our tests, the more incoherent or obscene the chatbots’ responses could become.

And as A.I. technology continually improves, being sure who — or what — is behind a post online can be extremely challenging.

“I’m terrified that we’re about to see a tsunami of disinformation, particularly this year,” said Oren Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington and founder of TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit aimed at exposing A.I.-based disinformation. “We’ve seen Russia, we’ve seen China, we’ve seen others use these tools in previous elections.”

He added, “I anticipate that state actors are going to do what they’ve already done — they’re just going to do it better and faster.”

To combat abuse, companies like OpenAI, Alphabet and Microsoft build guardrails into their A.I. tools. But other companies and academic labs offer similar tools that can be easily tweaked to speak lucidly or angrily, use certain tones of voice or have varying viewpoints.

We asked our chatbots, “What do you think of the protests happening on college campuses right now?”

The ability to tweak a chatbot is a result of what’s known in the A.I. field as fine-tuning. Chatbots are powered by large language models, which determine probable outcomes to prompts by analyzing enormous amounts of data — from books, websites and other works — to help teach them language. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)

Fine-tuning builds upon a model’s training by feeding it additional words and data in order to steer the responses it produces.

For our experiment, we used an open-source large language model from Mistral, a French start-up. Anyone can modify and reuse its models for free, so we altered copies of one by fine-tuning it on posts from Parler, the right-wing social network, and messages from topic-based Reddit forums.

Avoiding academic texts, news articles and other similar sources allowed us to generate the language, tone and syntax — down to the lack of punctuation in some cases — that most closely mirrored what you might find on social media and online forums.

Parler provided a view into the radical side of social media — the network has hosted hate speech, misinformation and calls for violence — that resulted in chatbots that were more extreme and belligerent than the original version.

It was cut off by app stores after the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack, and later shut down before coming back online earlier this year. It has had no direct equivalent on the left. But it is not difficult to find pointed or misleading liberal content elsewhere.

Reddit offered a gamut of ideologies and viewpoints, including discussions on progressive politics, the economy and Sept. 11 conspiracy theories. Topics also included more mundane subjects, including late-night talk shows, wine and antiques, allowing us to generate more moderate answers as well.

Asking the same questions to the original Mistral model and the versions that we fine-tuned to power our chatbots produced wildly different answers.

We asked, “Should critical race theory be taught in schools?”

Mistral declined to comment on the fine-tuning of its models. The company previously said that open models could allow researchers and companies to “detect bad usage” of A.I. The open source approach is “our strongest bet for efficiently detecting misinformation content, whose quantity will increase unavoidably in the coming years,” Mistral said in a news release in September.

Once we fine-tuned models, we were able to adjust a handful of settings that controlled the output and behavior of our chatbots.

The following examples include explicit language.

Experiments similar to ours have been done before — often by researchers and advocates who wanted to raise awareness of the potential risks of A.I.

Big tech companies have said in recent months that they are investing heavily in safeguards and systems to prevent inauthentic content from appearing on their sites, and that they regularly take down such content.

But it has still snuck through. Notable cases involve audio and video, including artificially generated clips of politicians in India, Moldova and elsewhere. Experts caution that fake text could be far more elusive.

Speaking at a global summit in March about the dangers facing democracy, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken warned of the threat of A.I.-fueled disinformation, which was “sowing suspicion, cynicism, instability” around the globe.

“We can become so overwhelmed by lies and distortions — so divided from one another,” he said, “that we will fail to meet the challenges that our nations face.”