Where we stand
Oregon moves left while America moves right
In Tuesday’s election, voters were presented with a choice: stick with the progressive movement that has been the prime ideological mover of policy since at least 2020, or reject it. Nationally, enough people had seen enough of what progressive-dominated Democrats had to offer to deliver Donald Trump an emphatic 86 electoral vote victory accompanied by the GOP’s first popular vote victory in 20 years. Republicans took the U.S. Senate, too, and look on track to keep the House, if only by the slimmest of margins, again.
Oregon once again bucked the rightward trend of the national electorate, re-electing and promoting to higher office progressive Democrats across the board. Races thought to be competitive, like Attorney General, ended up not so competitive. The 5th Congressional District appears on track to replace a moderate Republican with a down-the-line progressive Democrat in the personage of Janelle Bynum. For the first time since I returned to Bend in 2004, I will likely be represented by a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Republicans lost ground in the legislature, where Democrats gained a Senate seat here, again, in Bend, leaving them the party one House pickup away from the ability to raise taxes without any Republican votes. The margin between Republicans and calamity is tiny. The GOP House leader, Jeff Helfrich, looks likely to hold his Hood River-based seat by a scant two percentage points.
The underlying themes of the election were the same in Oregon as elsewhere. Democrats knew their progressive approach to crime, drugs, taxes and cultural issues like transgenderism were deeply unpopular, so ran away from them, casting their GOP opponents, once again, as anti-abortion Trump-supporters. That message didn’t work very well nationally; it did in Oregon, again.
The impending combination of emboldened progressives in Oregon and Trump in the White House gives rise to, uh, very unpleasant memories. Between 2017 and 2021, Oregon progressives did more or less everything they wanted in the state, often under the banner of somehow undermining, or at least publicly defying, the Trump administration. Many of Oregon’s worst policies - from Covid responses to riot ambivalence to whatever can be crammed into the capacious and ever-expanding definition of “Democracy” - arose from the very dynamic to which we are returning. Progressives’ visceral policy reaction to the last Trump presidency has served Oregonians exceedingly poorly.
The job of Oregon’s non-progressives, now, is to (a) prevent a repeat of what happened last time; and (b) keep Democrats moving away from the most progressive and harmful positions. Democrats wisely kept Tina Kotek, the most recognizable symbol of Oregon progressivism, on the sideline during the 2024 race. They know the progressive stuff is unpopular. They’ll try to do more of it, though, when they think they can. It’s our job - my job - to call it out. Oregon can’t afford to backslide.
Allow me an aside and a look forward. Back in September, I submitted requests to Oregon DMV for records related to the agency’s role in illegally registering some 1,500 noncitizens to vote since 2019. DMV and the Oregon Secretary of State maintain that noncitizens were registered via data entry errors, primarily.
I did receive some records showing the former Democratic Party operative who runs Oregon’s elections holds personal views about voting access that are quite different than what is required by the laws she is supposed to implement and enforce. I was promised more by this past Monday, November 4, the day before the election. Monday morning at 8:03 am, I received an email from DMV letting me know that, actually, those records would not be available until November 18.
Something is going on. I am not a conspiracist, but I have covered the folks who run our state for long enough to get a sense when there’s something afoot. I may be wrong. It may be the official line that the phenomenon of noncitizens voting in Oregon is very limited, not officially encouraged or tolerated and exclusively the result of a series of innocent errors, is correct. But state officials behaved before, and are behaving now, in a manner that suggests the truth may be otherwise.
I am highly motivated to determine the truth.
Keep digging, Jeff.
Yah; it was a blowout, which raises questions about the viability of the state's Republican party. Although our founders hated "faction," they designed a government that was premised on opposing groups fighting it out...but no opponent, no fight. There is no way for the GOP to generate any serious candidates, as the Lathrop defeat amply demonstrates. No one with any sense of a future anywhere in state politics will see any advantage in signing on with the GOP.
We are now at the machine's mercy; anyone outside the charmed circle of nonprofits, public employee unions, entrenched bureaucracy, developers, and (in Portland) Democratic Socialist nutters is out of luck. You have a choice: shut up and get a rewarding hobby, or think about where you'll live next.
Stay silent or wait for the housing market to come alive (the Fed is chopping interest rates) so you can cash out and escape. Oregon is nice--but this is a big country loaded with picture-postcard views.
It is now even more that Republicans stand together in solidarity. No more compromising with democrates and legitimizing their agendagenda with "bipartisan" support.