District attorney elections in Oregon typically generate little more than a yawn, but one of them this year has gotten caught up in a swirl of backroom politics.

Opposition research. Efforts to recruit a challenger to the heir apparent. Whispers of big money.

All for the top job in Washington County, the second-largest county in Oregon where criminal justice reform activists see the May 15 election as a rare chance to elect an advocate friendly to their agenda.

The intrigue began when District Attorney Bob Hermann decided to retire after nearly two decades. One of Hermann's lieutenants, Kevin Barton, announced a bid to succeed his boss. Of 16 district attorney races this year, only this and one in Union County are contested.

Enter the Safety and Justice Action Fund, a political group tied to the influential reform-minded Partnership for Safety and Justice of Portland. The fund's top officials in recent months reached out to lawyers to mount a challenge to Barton's candidacy.

They've sought a candidate who will support a shift from prison and mandatory minimum sentences while emphasizing drug and alcohol treatment and mental health services.

And it wasn't just local activists making inquiries about the race: A consultant hired by a political action committee funded by billionaire George Soros also visited Oregon to discuss the campaign. Soros has poured resources into district attorney races nationwide in recent years to elect reform-oriented prosecutors.

Now Max Wall, 40, a Beaverton lawyer and former Polk County prosecutor whose website touts his work on intoxicated driving cases, has entered the race.

Wall's already got a campaign manager in Liz Kaufman, a seasoned political strategist who has worked on multiple high-profile campaigns in Oregon, including the ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana.

Meanwhile, it's unclear who's behind detailed public records requests submitted to Washington County and Polk County seeking information on Barton and Wall. A company called Red Group Analytics, which lists a Wisconsin address, also asked for detailed voter registration and residential history information about Barton's wife, a stay-at-home mother to their three young children.

James Williams, whose signature is on one of the requests, said the company conducts research before hanging up when an Oregonian/OregonLive reporter identified herself. He didn't respond to subsequent emails about his interest in the race or who he works for.

Nationally, Soros has invested in electing district attorneys in places like Harris County, Texas, and Philadelphia, where in 2017 the liberal philanthropist spent more than $1 million to help elect Larry Krasner, a defense attorney. Krasner this month made headlines when he issued a memo directing prosecutors to stop charging some cases, like marijuana possession, and negotiate plea deals that result in lighter sentences.

Whitney Tymas, a Virginia-based consultant who advises political action committees, including one primarily funded by Soros, met with several lawyers in Oregon in recent months to discuss challenging Barton, according to a source familiar with the talks but not authorized to publicly discuss Soros' political activities.

Ultimately, the source said, Soros' political action committee doesn't plan to fund Wall's campaign and instead will focus on district attorneys races elsewhere in the country.

But Wall won the support of a political action committee tied to the Portland-based Safety and Justice Action Fund.

A wave of DA candidates pledging to reform the criminal justice system has swept into office in recent years, promising changes from increased scrutiny of police shootings to different approaches to nonviolent drug crimes, said Aliza Kaplan, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, where she directs the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic.

"In Oregon, and in lots of states," she said, "there is a mentality that whoever is next goes and there hasn't been a real election process and I think what advocates are realizing is that there should be an election process and when you have an election process you go raise money, you find a candidate and that person runs and that has been successful."

Jim Moore, professor and director of the Tom McCall Center for Policy Innovation at Pacific University, said Washington County, with a population approaching 600,000, is "now assuredly Democratic" in party registration, with Republicans coming in third behind independent voters.

"And so, it would make sense that Washington County would be on the radar," he said.

***

At least four lawyers said they'd heard from leaders of the Safety and Justice Action Fund. They said the group wanted to gauge their interest in challenging Barton.

Darian Stanford, a civil litigator in Portland and former Multnomah County prosecutor, said he talked to fund officials weeks before Wall entered the race but declined, saying he "would never want to run against Kevin (Barton.)"

Stanford said he also met with Tymas, the Soros consultant who has played a key role in other district attorneys races nationally, including one in 2016 in Colorado where Soros spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful bid to unseat a Republican incumbent.

James Jensen, a criminal defense lawyer in Hillsboro and former prosecutor, said Shannon Wight, the deputy director of the fund, approached him a couple of months ago to talk about challenging Barton and offered to arrange a meeting where "they wanted to show me what type of resources they had."

He, too, declined. He said he's not interested in returning to prosecuting cases and he also worried about the implications of taking a lot of money from one organization.

"If you are going to take a big amount of money from an organization locally or nationally, you are going to be beholden to that organization" when it comes to policies and the direction of the office, Jensen said.

Wall, too, heard from fund representatives. Wight confirmed she talked with Wall and said the group's political action committee has endorsed him.

"That office, like some others, has sort of stuck with a traditional practice of focusing on convictions and incarceration and not on the bigger perspectives, holding people accountable responsibly," Wight said. "We need a prosecutor's office who cares deeply about helping victims rebuild their lives after a crime and want people they convict to be successful members of the community after they have been held accountable."

Wight said Wall offers Washington County voters the "right combination of experience" given his background as a prosecutor and his work in private practice.

Wight said her organization also met with potential candidates to challenge Paige Clarkson, a career prosecutor in Marion County who is running for district attorney there, but the recruitment effort was unsuccessful.

She said the Safety and Justice Action Fund has received financial support from a political action committee to which Soros donates; a fund representative said the contribution "makes up just a portion of our budget" but declined to say how much.

***

Partnership for Safety and Justice has played a key role in pushing for major criminal justice reforms in Oregon.

It lobbied for a controversial law passed last year that reduced some sentences covered by Measure 57, a voter-approved law that cracked down on repeat property crimes offenders with longer prison sentences.

Five years ago, the group successfully pushed for the Justice Reinvestment Act, which has funneled about $95 million to counties statewide with the goals of reducing the number of prison beds used for property and drug crimes and cutting overall repeat offender rates.

In Oregon, district attorney races tend to involve unopposed insiders who have risen through the ranks or who are appointed by the governor when the sitting district attorney retires.

Case in point: Hermann himself, a former longtime chief deputy district attorney who was elected in 1998. Hermann, whose $200,400 salary is paid for with state and county dollars, ran unopposed.

Voters are often checked out in those races, according to a report issued in 2016 by the ACLU of Oregon. The organization analyzed district attorney races from 2004 through 2014 and found that even though 2.9 million people voted in Oregon during that decade, only 1.8 million cast a ballot in their local DA race.

David Rogers, executive director of the ACLU of Oregon, said his organization last year surveyed nearly 1,500 residents in Washington and Marion counties about the role of the district attorney and concluded that Oregonians know little about what prosecutors do and who they are.

"We actually think we need to be having robust conversations about what we want from our criminal justice system and what we want from leaders in positions of power in the justice system," he said. "Having so many uncontested races reinforces the dynamic where people are not paying attention."

***

The race pits Barton, a longtime prosecutor and chief deputy district attorney in the DA's office, against Wall, a defense lawyer.

Barton, 40, who lives in Sherwood, started as a civil litigator at Bullivant Houser Bailey in Portland, where he worked for five years before changing course and applying for a deputy district attorney job.

He eventually rose to the felony unit and then in 2008 began prosecuting child abuse cases -- a role he still holds today.

"That has honestly been a special calling for me," Barton said, who supervises a half-dozen lawyers and helps oversee the day-to-day management of the office. "I was drawn to it because they were the most vulnerable victims and the most difficult cases."

If elected, he said he would focus on protecting "vulnerable" victims, particularly children, the elderly and people who have experienced sexual assault. He said he would work to expand and improve treatment and specialty courts, like those dealing with people with mental illness, and improve drug treatment for serial low-level property offenders and people on track to commit crime.

Wall worked from late 2005 through early 2014 as a deputy prosecutor in Polk County and handled cases ranging from littering to Measure 11 felonies. He didn't have a supervisory role in the office.

He said he left the office to start his own practice after eight years because of a long commute and he was "ready to try something new."

Wall declined to elaborate on his conversations with representatives of the Safety and Justice Action Fund, saying he was already considering running for the job.

"Right now, I am just working doing a grassroots campaign," he said. "If other organizations decide to fund me, they can."

Wall, who is married and lives in Progress Ridge, said as district attorney he would focus on sending more defendants to treatment courts, improving services for crime victims and "keeping our schools safe."

In 2008, Wall tried twice to get a job with the Washington County District Attorney's Office as an entry-level prosecutor, said Hermann, who has endorsed Barton. He couldn't recall why Wall didn't get far in the hiring process, which he described as competitive.

Hermann said Wall's campaign platform mischaracterizes efforts his office has made to support the county's longstanding drug court and other specialty courts, as well as help crime victims.

"This is a cut and paste of national talking points, which we have seen before," Hermann said. "For the most part, they don't apply to Oregon at all and they certainly don't apply to what we do in our office."

Washington County generally mirrors statewide trends when it comes to the rate that people are sent to prison and for how long, according to data compiled and analyzed by the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, a state agency that serves as a clearinghouse for criminal justice data.

The contest, rare for the drama it has injected into typically sleepy district attorneys races, has generated intense interest not seen in the county's recent history.

It remains to be seen if voters feel the same way.

-- Noelle Crombie

503-276-7184

@noellecrombie