Conservatives in Oregon, a state founded as a white supremacist sanctuary, are finding that in 2023, the 86% white state isn't white supremacist enough, so they want the eastern part of the state to leave and become part of significantly more racist Idaho. WaPo's Scott Wilson takes a look at the white hot new imports into the Gem State in our Sunday Long Read this week.
The Snake River has formed the border of Oregon and Idaho for more than a century and a half, slicing through fields of onions, sugar beets and wheat that roll out for miles through Treasure Valley.
Here on the Oregon side, where Bob Wheatley has lived his entire life, are a collection of high-end cannabis shops, a new Planned Parenthood clinic, and gas prices a dollar higher than those just over the river.
Across the river in the town of Fruitland, in western Idaho, new housing subdivisions stretch out for miles from the main streets. Agriculture, bottling and construction businesses that just months ago were based in Oregon are thriving. One of Fruitland’s new problems is building enough schools to accommodate the out-of-state arrivals, many of them from Oregon.
“Things have changed,” said Wheatley, who retired recently after five decades as a local pharmacist. “And it’s the politics that have changed fastest.”
So far 12 counties in central and eastern Oregon have voted in favor of local ballot measures that compel county leaders to study the idea of moving the border about 270 miles west. The movement envisions 14 full counties joining Idaho, along with parts of others.
A 13th county is scheduled to take up the question on the May 2024 ballot. The region accounts for less than 10 percent of Oregon’s population, but most of its territory.
The push to change the border is rooted in policy differences and a sense that, in Oregon, there will be no way for conservatives to influence the laws and regulations made by the elected representatives of the far more numerous Democratic voters who live on the western side of the Cascades.
Idaho offers a much more comfortable political home for eastern Oregon’s conservatives, who live in many of the most racially homogenous counties in the state. In nearly every county that has voted to explore joining Idaho, White residents account for more than 80 percent of the population.
The political contrast between the states is stark.
Oregon Democrats have a more than 30 percent edge in voter registration over Republicans, and Joe Biden won the state by 16 percentage points in 2020. Idaho offers a mirror image: Republican voters outnumber Democrats more than 5 to 1, and Donald Trump defeated Biden by 30 percentage points. Both states have sent two senators from the same party to Washington — Democrats in Oregon, Republicans in Idaho.
At 74, Wheatley has been considering a move across the river for years, returning his wife, Chrystine, a retired nurse, to the state where she grew up. But he could not sell his home for enough money to buy something comparable in Fruitland, where prices are rising because of the Oregon arrivals.
So, in late 2020, Wheatley, never before a political activist, volunteered to gather signatures to place a measure on the May 2021 ballot compelling Malheur County commissioners to study joining Idaho. It passed easily.
“I told Chrys, ‘I can’t move you, but maybe I can move the border,’” Wheatley said. “So that’s what we’re trying.”
These twin towns across an old border straddle a seam in the nation’s deepening political polarization, neighboring opposites living under starkly different laws. The river separates states that, perhaps more than in any other part of the nation, embrace the two parties’ most extreme positions on gun control, abortion rights, environmental regulation, drug legalization and other issues at the center of the American political debate.
The result in eastern Oregon, from the volcanic Cascade Range to this border town, is a sense of profound political alienation. The disaffection among conservatives has spawned a movement to change the state’s political dynamic in a novel if quixotic way — rather than relocate or change the politics, which seems impossible to many here, why not move the border and become residents who live under the rules of Idaho?
This is no small task.
Both the Oregon and Idaho state legislatures, which are controlled by Democrats and Republicans respectively, would have to approve a border shift, which in this case would be the most significant geographically since western states began forming in the mid-19th century. The issue would then go to the U.S. Congress.
But, as more than two dozen interviews across the state made clear, there is momentum behind the cause among a lightly populated region of ranch land, swift rivers, and vast pine forests. It is known formally as the Greater Idaho movement.
I've talked about Idaho's growing white supremacist problem before, from Boise's openly racist white supremacist police department to the state's efforts to criminalize getting abortions in neighboring Oregon to the effort to include Northern California and Western Montana into Greater Idaho along with Eastern Oregon to the state's favorite heavily armed white supremacist domestic terrorist family, the Bundys.
The whole area along the Snake River and Willamette Valley is a powder keg. I hope the feds understand this.
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