Morning, Rounduppers. Professor Tom Smith of the University of San Diego School of Law was nice enough to let me write a post for his blog, called The Right Coast. I’ve been reading The Right Coast since I was in law school. Weird to think they had computers back then, I know. You should check out Tom’s blog. I think you’ll like it.
The piece is about Oregon, written for a largely non-Oregonian audience, but regardless of your proximity to the Beaver State, it may be of interest:
Oregon Burnishes its Progressive Brand
Oregon, the shy state sandwiched between California’s glitzy tech and Washington’s grungy tech has long been an afterthought: the west coast’s flyover state. There’s just not been a lot about Oregon to capture the public imagination – to really develop the state’s brand. It’s a beautiful place, but its many stunning natural settings lack the star power of, say, Yosemite or Yellowstone. People have heard of Crater Lake, and it is indeed stunning, but it’s a four-and-a-half-hour drive from the nearest major airport.
To be honest, you’re almost always a long way from the nearest major airport in Oregon. That’s because (a) it’s a big state, geographically; and (b) almost no one lives here. At 4.2 million residents, Oregon is barely over 10% of the population of California, but with 60% of the geographic size. I live in Bend, Oregon, just to the east of the Cascade mountains. If I were to drive the five-plus hours to Tom’s home town of Boise, the biggest city I’d pass through on the Oregon side of the border would be Ontario, clocking in at about 11,000 folks.
Which is not to say Oregon hasn’t had its occasional 15 minutes of fame. Back in 1970, Oregonians blew up a whale corpse that had the misfortune of washing up on a Beaver state beach. In 2008, here in Bend, a dude had a baby before that was a thing. And, of course, there’s the classic Oregon Trail video game through which generations of American kids learned that it was literally impossible to survive the 19th Century wagon-borne trek from Independence, Missouri to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. But these brief or minor incursions on the American psyche have been just that – brief and minor. Oregon has lacked a true distinguishing characteristic, to borrow a phrase from Paula Jones.
No longer. In the last two years, Oregon has decided to go all in as an exemplar of no-holds-barred progressivism. When protests erupted around the country after the murder of George Floyd, Portland’s well-practiced protest community realized its time to shine and commenced over 100 consecutive days of protests including a lengthy siege of a federal courthouse in downtown Portland. The siege featured protesters, fittingly, wielding umbrellas against federal law enforcement officials protecting the courthouse.
Umbrellas weren’t the only weapons associated with the protests. The less peace-inclined elements went on to burn buildings. The City of Portland responded to the 112% increase in shootings that occurred during the height of the protests by dissolving the police department’s 34-member Gun Violence Reduction team in the name of defunding the police. On October 11 of this year, Portland surpassed its previous record for homicides in a calendar year, set in 1987, when it recorded its 67th killing. Fifty-one of those homicides were committed with guns.
Portland’s violence spree coincided with the proliferation of homeless camping in many parts of the city, but especially downtown. With some parks fenced off and many businesses boarded up to prevent looting and vandalism for months, downtown tourism plummeted.30% in 2020 while commercial vacancy rates skyrocketed.
Far from re-evaluating the progressive policies that contributed to Portland’s very rough 2020, Portlanders nearly elected a communist-dictator-skirt-wearing, explicitly Antifa-supporting mayor to replace Ted Wheeler, the very-progressive incumbent mayor. Wheeler, who trailed in the polls through much of the campaign, was ultimately saved by a huge influx of cash from the city’s business community, which long ago resigned itself to a lesser-of-two-evils approach to city politics.
The fact that Wheeler’s “corporate bailout” is probably his biggest hurdle to becoming governor, a job he reportedly covets, demonstrates that Oregon’s experiment with progressivism is not confined to its largest city. In just the last two years, Oregon’s state government has eliminated math and reading proficiency testing requirements for high school graduation because those requirements were deemed to disadvantage students of color. It established a COVID-19 small business grant program available only to black-owned businesses before litigation over the program’s, um, blatantly unequal interpretation of the equal protection clause forced the state to pull the plug.
Oregon’s governor, Kate Brown, has arguably pursued the strictest set of COVID restrictions in the nation. Oregon is, as I type this, subject to not only an indoor but also an outdoor mask mandate which, incidentally, specifically exempts homeless people. Brown has been calling the COVID shots more or less unilaterally through emergency powers since March 2020.
The Oregon legislature, dominated by Democrats, earlier this year spent much of its time trying to increase taxes on everything from beer and wine to federal small business loans, despite enjoying record revenues. Oregon, which has the fourth-highest state income tax in the country, recently instituted a business receipts tax that taxes business revenues regardless of whether the business, you know, turns a profit.
For those of you, presumably many, in California or familiar with its recent political history, Oregon’s leftward lurch may sound familiar. And indeed there are many similarities between Oregon and California, politically. So if Oregon’s politics are differentiating, as I wrote at the outset, how so? How is what Oregon is doing unique?
Oregon’s politics are overlaid on a state without much, economically speaking, else going on. Since it served as a willing accomplice to the regulatory bludgeoning-to-submission of the only dominant industry it’s ever known – wood products harvesting and processing – in the 1990s, Oregon hasn’t had much of an economic identity. Portlandia’s description of its namesake city as a place where “young people go to retire” aptly captured Oregon’s anti-economic approach.
Oregon’s GDP per capita is just over $60,000, while California’s and Washington’s are each just over $80,000. While California has super-imposed its progressive politics over an economy including global powerhouses like Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Oregon has exactly two Fortune 500 companies. Oregon’s high tax rates, high cost of housing and onerous business regulations chase a lot fewer dollars than the same do in its progressive west coast neighbors.
And yet, Oregon’s population is increasing (it is gaining a congressional seat as a result of the 2020 Census, while California is losing two). In fact, much of Oregon’s economic growth in recent years has been fueled by, you guessed it, Californians and others moving to Oregon to take advantage of what has been, traditionally, relatively inexpensive housing and a more bucolic way of life. But the thing about housing prices is that they eventually reach equilibrium, and as house prices start to fall in Portland, that may be happening right now.
The confluence of California’s decline and the growing prevalence of remote work among professionals has thus far overcome Oregon’s disadvantages of few well-paying jobs and a high cost of living, high taxes, a heavy-handed regulatory approach, poor performing schools, and, well, pretty crummy weather eight months of the year. As Oregon continues to burnish its small-state progressive brand, it remains to be seen whether the demand for semi-retirement in a soggy post-economic liberal paradise can keep Oregon from following California into malaise.
Inaugural Roundup Podcast
It finally happened. I have a podcast, which features all the production values you’d expect from a technologically challenged 46-year-old lawyer. But I bought an actual microphone so I can feel like Dave Niehaus while recording. It could be worse.
The first episode builds on last week’s post about elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and what those results, as well as a Republican winning in Seattle, could mean for Oregon in 2022. The pod (that’s what we in the biz call podcasts, fyi) is available to paid subscribers now!