PORTLAND, Ore. – Democrat Janelle Bynum flipped Oregon’s 5th Congressional District and will become the state’s first black member of Congress.

Bynum, a state representative who was endorsed and funded by national Democrats, unseated freshman GOP U.S. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Republicans lost a seat they flipped red for the first time in about 25 years during the 2022 midterms.

“It’s not lost on me that I’m a generation removed from segregation. It is not lost on me that we are making history. And I’m proud to be the first, but not the last, black member of Congress from Oregon,” Bynum said at a news conference last Friday. “But it took all of us working together to turn this place around, and we won for Oregon. We believed in a vision and didn’t take our foot off the gas until we met our goals.”

The contest was seen as a GOP toss by the Cook Political Report, meaning either side had a strong chance of winning.

Bynum had previously defeated Chavez-DeRemer when they faced off in state legislative elections.

Chavez-DeRemer won the seat in 2022, which was the first election held in the district after its boundaries were significantly redrawn following the 2020 census.

The district now encompasses disparate regions, encompassing metro Portland and its affluent, working-class suburbs, as well as rural farming and mountain communities and the fast-growing central Oregon city of Bend on the other side of the Cascade Range. Registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by about 25,000 in the district, but unaffiliated voters make up the largest constituency.

A small part of the district is in Multnomah County, where there was a ballot box just outside the county election office in Portland. set on fire through an incendiary device about a week before the election, destroying three ballots. Authorities said enough material was recovered from the incendiary device to show the Portland fire was also connected to two other ballot box fires in neighboring Vancouver, Wash., one of which occurred on the same day as the Portland fire and damaged hundreds of ballots. .