Red counties in Oregon are looking to leave.
Matt McCaw never wanted to leave Oregon. The problem, he explains, is that Oregon left him. “The state went off the rails during the COVID pandemic,” the 46-year-old textbook salesman tells me. “The authorities immediately closed down our schools and churches. Instead of an education, my six kids were given exactly four hours of online classwork a week. People hassled you if you dared to set foot outside your front door without wearing a mask. And of course you couldn’t even escape by going out for a movie or a meal, because everything was boarded up, and the restaurants were takeout-only.”
It’s one thing for a civil authority to take such drastic measures within the strict confines of a genuine public emergency. But as Britain’s Harold Macmillan once sagely reminded us, speaking of the strange reluctance of the state to relinquish supplementary power once given a taste of it: “You can always throw a dog a bone, but you can’t always take it back again.”
“I thought the voters of Oregon would throw most of their officials out of office the first chance they got, in November 2022,” McCaw says. “Instead, they returned exactly the same people to power again. The one exception was in the governor’s mansion, where we actually got a worse candidate than before.” This was one Tina Kotek, an apparently “proudly lesbian” Democrat who defeated her GOP opponent Christine Drazan, a state legislator who, among other things, had opposed both COVID-19 vaccination mandates and the notion that trans athletes might participate in gender-specific sporting events.
At that stage, McCaw, assessing his options, signed up for the Greater Idaho movement, an initiative that seeks to allow the disaffected voters of largely conservative central Oregon to be absorbed by their neighbor to the east, Idaho, leaving the DEI mob centered around Portland, the state capital Salem, and the nearby college towns of Corvallis and Eugene to continue to fly the rainbow flag.
McCaw’s far from alone in doing so. In the last four years, voters in no fewer than 13 Oregon counties have approved a variety of ballot measures in favor of exploring their territorial options. McCaw and his Greater Idaho colleagues now hope to secure a mandate in 15 counties, representing around 385,000 Oregonians. That would embrace 64% of the state’s landmass, if only about 10% of its population. “We don’t want Portland values forced on us,” says McCaw, a resident of Crook County in central Oregon. “Let’s get a divorce, and both sides will be better off.”
“The big challenge right now is to get the two state legislatures talking,” Mike McCarter, the Greater Idaho’s President, told me. “They’ve already passed a resolution of support in the Idaho House, although it’s stalled in the Senate. Not surprisingly, no one in power in Salem is interested. Our main priority going forward is to try and educate people on both sides of the east-west divide in Oregon about why [secession] would be a good deal for all parties, and continue to work with the state legislature to push forward talks with Idaho. The urban-rural split in Oregon isn’t going away. Moving the border would be a long-term solution for people on both sides of the state.”
It’s not difficult to see why so many people in Oregon might feel alienated from their political masters clustered together in the top-left corner of the state. I travel around the area pretty often, and you can’t help but notice that it suffers from a collective case of schizophrenia. On the one hand, there’s the culture epitomized by a state legislature and its vast bureaucratic apparatus busily turning out ever more initiatives on widows, orphans, the racially oppressed, the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind; and on the other, there’s the spirit of rugged individualism responsible for having settled the American West.
In that former context, there’s the once-bustling riverside city of Portland. Roughly two million people live in its metro area, which is half the population of Oregon as a whole. Though not without a certain residual hippy charm, with its profusion of bicycles and artisan coffee bars, the core business area, or what remains of it, increasingly resembles the Dunkirk of late May 1940.
Standing on top of Moda Tower at night is apparently to survey the aftermath of a battlefield, with scores of homeless residents looking like the remnants of a defeated army, hunched together around braziers or lying on cots displayed in rows on the sidewalk. Evidently no one in Portland bothers much about enforcing the few remaining laws involving public drug use or fouling the streets. The much shrunken, demoralized police force, its budget slashed in the wake of the George Floyd riots of 2020, currently has a total of 803 sworn members, of whom just 291 are active patrol officers, its lowest strength since 1980. The city has added 175,000 new residents in the same period.
Just outside this toxic bubble there’s the “real” Oregon. Picture a vast, bucolic land tucked away between the Pacific Ocean on one side and immense forests of Douglas firs on the other. Picture also a long chain of spruce little hamlets with names like Rockaway Beach, Tillamook, and Seaside, populated by friendly, well-dressed men and women living in rows of neat, clapboard houses, many with a U.S. flag fluttering out front. Finally, picture a scene that epitomizes a certain kind of traditional far-west life, untouched by whatever social pathologies currently obsess its big-city neighbors. What you have pictured is mainstream Oregon. It’s as though the whole area has somehow managed to slip through a crack in the space-time continuum, to lie not so much indifferent as oblivious to the march of progress.
To get an idea of the socio-political Grand Canyon that runs through Oregon, you need only look at the results of the November 2024 general election. In metropolitan Multnomah County, which includes Portland, Kamala Harris won 325,000 votes to Donald Trump’s 70,000, a nearly five-to-one margin. Conversely, 250 miles southeast in Grant County, where they used to profitably pan for gold until the federal government outlawed it in 1942, the figures were four-to-one in Trump’s favor.
Aside from being part of the same consolidated territory admitted to the Union in 1859, these two enclaves would seem to have little, if anything, in common. The returns in the state’s 2022 gubernatorial race, if it could be called that, showed a similar disparity. Over 72% of Multnomah County opted for Tina Kotek, while her Republican opponent garnered a paltry 19.7%. That was the mirror opposite of rural Morrow County, which voted 73.9% in favor of the GOP candidate. The figures were even more striking in the aptly named Lake County, one of the loveliest in the state. That county’s voters went for the Republican candidate by the small matter of 82.5% over 10.8% for her rival.
Of course, it’s true that in any 98,000-square-mile entity you’re likely to find some variety in the mix. But in Oregon the separatist (they prefer not to be called secessionist) movement is evidence of the stark divide between progressive cities and small towns, and of the passion engendered by the debate about the state’s future. The whole area is as wildly contradictory as the old pre-World War I Balkans, a seemingly placid end-of-the-line outpost where cultural and tribal rivalries seethe furiously just below the surface.
Oregon’s demarcation debate isn’t going away anytime soon, as evidenced by the bill currently before the state legislature in Salem that would create a task force specifically designed to recommend the path forward to redrawing the state border. Further initiatives are also in the works for the November 2025 elections to allow the voters in a number of Oregon counties “who love everything about their state except its government to be heard loud and clear on the issue,” Matt McCaw tells me.
“Of course,” McCaw adds, “there’s a certain kind of person who never wants to lose authority over anything”—surely one of the inalienable truths of the whole COVID ordeal—“and another kind who simply can’t or won’t imagine the sort of fundamental change a redrawn state map would involve. It’s just beyond their comfort zone.”
“On the other hand,” he says, “look at how much we’ve all had to adjust to things like gay marriage or legalized marijuana just over the last 20 years or so—issues our parents’ generation would hardly have thought possible. If we can reconcile to major social changes like that, I’m pretty sure we’ll eventually be able to get our heads around the concept of adjusting the state map to reflect the clear will of the people. That shouldn’t be so hard, should it? It may take a while, but I truly believe our time is coming.”
