Posts published in “Year: 2010”

Six Oregon districts/Ridenbaugh Press revisions/map via PSU Population Center

More and more, in following the numbers, you get the sense that Oregon won't be getting that sixth U.S. House district when the census numbers are unveiled in near term. We got the latest feel for that a few days ago with the new stats out from the Portland State University Population Research Center. It estimates Oregon population at 3,844,195. Split that six ways and you get 640,699 - likely about 100,000 short of what would be ideally needed for a sixth district to add to the current five. (Washington state still looks closer for a tenth district.)

Still. Suppose Oregon did add a sixth district? What would be the political fallout?

Our sense that Republicans should cheer on that extra district, and Democrats should hope against it - another argument in the loose fallacy of districts added on to "red" or "blue" states. Oregon may be more blue than red, but it's purple enough that it matters how you slice it.

To get a handle on this, we carved the state (using the new PSU numbers) into six pieces. We avoided dividing counties (only Multnomah, which would have to be, and then only in two pieces) and tried to make the districts reasonably compact and logical. And we set an "ideal" district size at around 640,000. (Recognizing that in the real world, the district sizes probably would have to match a little more closely than they do here.)

Start with the east, what is essentially the current District 2. 17 of Orgon's 36 counties are east of the Cascades, with the western side running from Hood River County in the north to Klamath in the south. That vast terrain, even accounting for the recent growth around Bend, just gets us to 506,235. We could snake along the Columbia Gorge and raid eastern Multnomah County for the other 35,000 or so. But in the interests of avoiding county splitting, we would give up Hood River and Wasco counties and send them to a district to the west, and to the south bring in all of Jackson County. Call this District 1.

This sets up some easy collections of unsplit counties to the west. In southwest Oregon, you could unite Josephine, Curry, Coos, Douglas and Lane counties to come up with something close to a district. Call it district 2.

Similarly: Linn, Marion, Benton, Polk and Lincoln bring a good number for District 3.

Just to the north, Washington and Yamhill counties add up to a neat and compact District 4.

Then, you could add the three northwest shorefront counties (Tillamook, Clatsop, Columbia) together with about two-thirds of Multnomah County for District 5.

And the other third of Multnomah could unite with Hood River and Wasco counties, and all of Clackamas, for District 6.

It's a pretty neat fit, but a map that looks like this should make Oregon Democrats, who now hold four of the five districts, uneasy.

This outline would continue the Republican lock on the eastern Oregon-based district. It would likely continue Democratic dominance on the two Multnomah-based districts (5 and 6), though probably a little less solidly than now.

But what of the others? The current southwest district (the seat now held by Democrat Peter DeFazio) is semi-marginal as it is, and this prospective District 2 would probably make it more so (especially by eliminating the piece of Benton County). The other two districts would be truly iffy. Washington County these days leans Democratic, but not overwhelmingly in otherwise close races; pair it with Republican-leaning Yamhill (District 4) and you could make it unpredictable. The revised central Willamette district 3, with Marion as the largest county base and Linn the second largest, might lean Republican.

The larger reality is that Oregon is right now more Democratic than Republican, but more by yards than by miles. A congressional split of 4-1 is Democrats beating the odds. A split of 5-1 may be more than they could manage.

An interesting stat-based review of the recent governor's race turns up on Oregon Catalyst; some assessments in it may be questionable, but overall it strongly merits a read.

The former includes lines like this, about the Democratic voter registration advantage in Oregon: "The current 200,000 advantage is a holdover from the unusually high Obama bump of 2008 and could vanish as easily as it was created depending on national events and what happens in Oregon." Sounds a little optimistic for Republicans; the gap was built over several elections, and it largely persisted through this year.

It does make some other useful points. One (mentioned elsewhere too) is that the third party field in Oregon has gravitated to the right. The largest "other" party, the Independent, seems to draw from both Republican and Democratic leaners, and the largest remaining minor parties draw mainly from the right. That's a structural problem for Republicans.

And notes that "Democrats were able to get out more direct mail reminders, phone calls and personal door visits for voter turn-out than Republican efforts." That seems clearly true.

The post doesn't try to make the argument that Dudley was a bad candidate or that he had a bum campaign; neither was really true. It notes that "The campaign slogan 'Join Oregon’s Comeback' was the most original in a decade," and that may be true. But there was also this tart comment: "The overuse of out of state consultants and staff was a serious handicap for the campaign. It was an inside joke that when you visited the campaign headquarters you entered a sprawling oversized building filled with a dozen people you have never seen before and you knew you would never see them again (because they leave the state after the election)."

Probably more significant, this on the matter of experience for the office: "Moore information polling showed that Dudley could not breach the experience gap. It is not just that Dudley had no experience, it is that he had no experience against a man who held the office twice. A Moore Information poll showed that this was an 11% penalty for Dudley." Our sense has been for some months that this was a critical point, and Moore's number puts a tag on it.

Here's an arresting lead paragraph: "It's too early to say for sure, but Oregon Senator Ron Wyden could very well go down in the history books as the man who saved the Internet."

There's justification for that. What Wyden did was simple enough: He put a hold a piece of legislation. That was important because of what the legislation, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, would do. It would, at base, allow state attorney generals to shut down Internet web sites at will.

Here is what the Electronic Frontier Foundation says about the bill:

The "Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act" (COICA) is an Internet censorship bill which is rapidly making its way through the Senate. Although it is ostensibly focused on copyright infringement, an enormous amount of noninfringing content, including political and other speech, could disappear off the Web if it passes.

The main mechanism of the bill is to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS), which translates names like "www.eff.org" or "www.nytimes.com" into the IP addresses that computers use to communicate. The bill creates a blacklist of censored domains; the Attorney General can ask a court to place any website on the blacklist if infringement is "central" to the purpose of the site.

If this bill passes, the list of targets could conceivably include hosting websites such as Dropbox, MediaFire and Rapidshare; MP3 blogs and mashup/remix music sites like SoundCloud, MashupTown and Hype Machine ; and sites that discuss and make the controversial political and intellectual case for piracy, like pirate-party.us, p2pnet, InfoAnarchy, Slyck and ZeroPaid . Indeed, had this bill been passed five or ten years ago, YouTube might not exist today. In other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous.

The bill has gotten a lot of support in Congress, and has been heavily (if quietly) lobbied. This pernicious little time bomb could easily have been passed into law had not someone stopped it. That turned out to be Wyden, who has been an open-Internet backer from early on.

Bears saying again: A system of copyrights and intellectual property protection originally intended to help foster creativity and communications is being perverted, in ever worsening ways, into restrictions on speech. One of those may just have been headed off at the pass.

Be wary when you see news reports about a vote that pits "liberals" against "moderates" (or "conservatives" against "moderates" for that matter). The U.S. House vote for Democratic leader, won by Nancy Pelosi, the outgoing speaker, ought to be evidence of that.

The vote has been widely billed as one pitting the more liberal Pelosi against the more conservative Heath Shuler of North Carolina. Run through the available information about who supported who, and you find some basis for that. But:

Two of the key Democratic votes seeking a delay on the leadership vote, to December 8 - a move viewed as helping Shuler - were Oregon's Peter DeFazio and David Wu, both considered part of the liberal wing. But neither terribly close to Pelosi.

DeFazio's crossways with Pelosi has been clear for some time, and the Astorian reports today "that Wu was one of those voting for Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, who mounted a campaign against her."

Ideology can define one agenda in politics. But it is only one.