U.S. Senate

Senator Jeff Merkley comes from a family of fighters. According to family lore, his grandmother lived for a time in a boxcar during the Great Depression. Jeff’s mother stretched a dollar as far as anyone possibly could, and his father overcame a serious illness and went on to work in a lumber mill and become a union machinist. Life wasn’t glamorous, but together, Jeff’s parents saved enough to buy a modest home, take their children on annual camping vacations, and retire comfortably after a lifetime of contributing to their community.

Jeff learned to take that same determination his father took with him to the lumber mill into the classroom—and with the help of his public school teachers, Jeff went on to be the first in his family to graduate from college. He returned to the same blue collar community in Oregon where he grew up, and led non-profits to help Oregonians put roofs over their heads. When he was elected to the Oregon House, he hit the ground running for working families, creating the state’s first-ever rainy day fund, expanding access to affordable prescription drugs, protecting LGBTQ Oregonians from discrimination, and throwing predatory payday lenders out of the state for good.

And now, as a U.S. Senator for Oregon, Jeff has continued to be a champion for everyday people—at a time when the people need a champion more than ever.

Oregonians know Ron as a senator who listens and innovates. For example, Ron has secured landmark health care and economic wins for our workers and retirees. Always citing the need to “throw open the doors of government for Oregonians,” he holds an open-to-all town hall meeting in each of Oregon’s 36 counties each year. Thus far he has held more than 970 meetings, as well as several virtual town hall meetings sponsored by the nonpartisan Town Hall Project. Wyden’s dedication to hearing all sides of an issue and looking for common sense, nonpartisan solutions has won him trust on both sides of the aisle and put him at the heart of so many of the Senate’s most important debates. In 2011, the Almanac of American Politics described Wyden as having “displayed a genius for coming up with sensible-sounding ideas no one else had thought of and making the counter-intuitive political alliances that prove helpful in passing bills.” The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote: “The country has problems. And Ron Wyden has comprehensive, bipartisan proposals for fixing them.”