On Tuesday, two Oregon counties, Morrow and Wheeler, are set to vote on a ballot measure on whether to explore leaving the state. As of 2020, nine counties in Eastern Oregon have already voted to join the Greater Idaho movement. “People in eastern Oregon are just different and have different views on crime, the Second Amendment, abortion, taxes and the minimum wage [from the western portion of the state]Matt McCaw, spokesman for Greater Idaho, told The Post. “The polarization with the western part of the state is real. When I meet people and host meetings, there are many complaints about the lack of representation. Eastern Oregon is just very conservative and has its own culture.” The Greater Idaho movement is made up of residents in eastern and central Oregon who are so fed up with liberal lawmakers that they are pushing for the region to break state lines and become part of Idaho. Matt McCaw, a spokesman for the Greater Idaho movement, told The Post, “Eastern Oregon is just very conservative and has its own culture” compared to the state’s more liberal western region. So he and a group of disgruntled fellow Oregonians in the small town of La Pine began hatching a plan to secede because they no longer felt represented by the liberal legislators in the state capital, Salem. The solution: Register in Idaho, where the Republican Party is firmly in control. “Eastern Oregon, where we all live, could get a state government from Idaho that matches their values,” McCaw said. It’s a radical proposal that would see nearly two-thirds of Oregon’s 63 million acres (98,000 square miles), but less than 10 percent of its population, blend into neighboring Idaho. For the first time in 40 years, Oregonians may vote for a Republican governor as Christine Drazan (above) holds a slim lead in Tuesday’s race. AP Former Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek (above) is running for governor on the Democratic ticket, but independent Betsy Johnson could split the blue vote. Getty Images McCaw, 46, said movement leaders hope to get 15 of the state’s 36 counties and two of Idaho’s counties to join. “We asked the simple question, ‘Would you like your elected leaders to change the borders?’ and we’ve won the last six elections with more than 60 percent of the vote,” McCaw told The Post. To McCaw, who owns a small math company with his wife, and his supporters, the mostly rural and conservative residents of eastern Oregon have very little in common with their progressive urban neighbors in western cities like Portland, Eugene and Bend. The plan to move to Idaho came about because some Eastern Oregonians no longer felt represented by liberal lawmakers in the state capital of Salem. Getty Images/iStockphoto In the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump dominated Eastern Oregon, taking nearly 80% of the vote in some counties, but President Biden ultimately won 56.5% of the vote thanks to liberal towns. Sandie Gilson, a small business owner in eastern Oregon, is concerned about gun safety laws. Nearly 64 percent of Idahoans voted for Trump, while 33 percent voted for Biden. Oregon’s current governor, Democrat Kate Brown, has a 56% approval rating, the worst in the US. Brown, whose term ends next year, has been criticized for doing little to stem rising crime and homelessness in the state’s urban centers since she became governor in 2015. Some Oregonians are so fed up with spiraling crime, easy access to drugs and homelessness that — for the first time in 40 years — Oregon may see a Republican become governor. Christine Drazan, 50, a former minority leader of the Oregon House, has a slight lead over her nearest challenger, former Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek, a Democrat. Independent Betsy Johnson is also in the race, and some predict she could split the blue vote. But even the prospect of a Republican governor wouldn’t help matters for those in the eastern part of the state, said Sandy Gilson, who lives in Grant County, one of the first Oregon counties to vote in 2020 to explore joining the Idaho. “Even if we have a Republican governor, Democrats still have a supermajority in the Legislature,” said Gilson, 56, a fifth-generation Oregonian whose gold-mining great-grandfather arrived in the state in the 1800s. “It’s not going to change anything. ». Mike McCarter, one of the group’s founders, described Greater Idaho as a “people who value freedom, independence and self-sufficiency.” Gilson and her husband are small business owners who say they want to be self-sufficient in a rural area where an emergency call to the police could result in a two-hour wait for help. The couple, who own firearms, say they are unable to defend themselves if faced with an emergency due to government orders. Last year, the state enacted a safe storage law that requires gun owners to keep them locked up.
“It would take us more than five minutes to unlock our weapons, and a lot could happen in that time,” Gilson told The Post. “The Legislature is doing things that just don’t make sense to us.” Gilson also said she doesn’t feel safe after Oregon decriminalized personal possession of all drugs in 2020 and, earlier this year, enacted bail reform laws that allow misdemeanor and some felony defendants to be released without bail. While Donald Trump won up to 80% of the vote in Eastern Oregon counties in the 2020 presidential race, more populous liberal cities like Portland helped Biden dominate the state.Getty Images/iStockphoto “How does this make me safe in my home?” Gilson said, adding that residents in eastern Oregon, which has a fraction of the population of the western part of the state, are generally upvoting. Like Gilson, Mike McCarter, 75, said residents in eastern Oregon are almost always outvoted by the much more populous western region. McCarter, who lives in La Pine and is one of the founders of Greater Idaho, told The Post that Easterners voted two-to-one against recreational drug use, but “Western Oregon wanted it and they voted for it.” However, McCarter insists that the movement for a Greater Idaho is not political. “We try to keep the movement out of politics,” he said. “Our movement is a faith-based movement of traditional values ​​— people who value freedom, independence and self-sufficiency.” Current Gov. Kate Brown has the highest approval rating in the country, at 56 percent, in part because of her perceived lack of crime control.AP In 2020, Idaho Gov. Brad Little said he welcomed the move, adding, “They look at Idaho with love because of our regulatory atmosphere, our values. What they care about [in] it’s that they’d like to have a little more autonomy, a little more control, a little more freedom, and I can understand that.”
Although states have redrawn their borders in the past—Maine seceded from Massachusetts in 1820—there is no historical precedent for large masses of land to leave one state and join another. Ryan Griffiths, a political science professor at Syracuse University who studies sovereign state secession, told The Post that “the bar is pretty high” for states to secede in the US. “This is not the kind of thing that is done unilaterally by people in counties,” Griffiths said. “They have to get Oregon State and Idaho State, and that’s a very high bar.”