Posts published in “Day: July 9, 2023”

Oregon is a blue state, even though its rural areas are as Republican as other portions of the American West. That's because almost half of the state's population—47 percent—lives in the counties in and around Portland.

Oregon is an experimental commonwealth, a laboratory of reform, a maker of national trends—with varying results. Bike trails now exist throughout the country. You can find light rail trams in many central cities across the nation, but not as many solar energy-powered, plug-in stations for electric cars as in Portland. Oregon produces (or has manufactured in China) Nike sneakers and Pendleton shirts, but its handcrafted ales don't travel far from the Oregon Brewers Festival. For all its modern advances, however, you can still see much of the same Oregon that Lewis and Clark saw in 1805, when they came down the Columbia River gorge, past the Willamette River to the Pacific Ocean. A few years later, in 1811, John Jacob Astor set up his fur trading post at Astoria. But few Americans came overland until the 1840s, when New England Yankees and Missouri farmers drove wagons along the Oregon Trail and floated down the Columbia to the well-watered Willamette Valley.

In this remote spot, nearly 2,000 miles from the Mississippi River frontier and 700 miles from the small Mexican settlements in California, they built an orderly, productive society—a kind of western New England. It grew steadily, with a few booms: in the early 1900s as timber harvesting surged; during World War II, when Kaiser shipyards in Portland and Vancouver churned out "Liberty" and "Victory" ships; and then again in the 1970s, when homebuilding skyrocketed and Oregon's natural environment began to be widely appreciated. Missionaries and settlers brought town-meeting attitudes to Oregon. This was the second state after South Dakota to give people direct decision-making via the initiative and referendum, an innovation widely copied elsewhere. Oregon pioneered the election of senators by popular vote and, with Michigan in 1908, the recall of elected officials. It was the first state to institute Labor Day. It was first to sanction assisted suicide and to adopt mail-in ballot elections.

Oregon has a darker strain of history, too. When the state's constitution was written, it included a provision that barred the relocation of any African American to the state, and another that precluded Black ownership of real estate. The Klan had a significant presence in the state in the early 20th century, and communities of skinheads flourished in the 1980s. It took until 1959 for Oregon to ratify the post-Civil War 15th Amendment, which guaranteed the right to vote. During the winter of 2016, a breakaway group of armed protesters occupied the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the state's rural, southeastern corner, decrying federal encroachment on private lands and prompting a 41-day standoff that led to one death and more than a dozen guilty pleas for conspiracy and trespassing. In 2017, a man screamed anti-Muslim insults on a commuter train and proceeded to stab two men to death and injure a third.

While the image of "kombucha-swilling, artisan knot-loving, bicycle-riding haven" (as the Oregonian newspaper has put it) is based in reality—and was lovingly satirized by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein in the television comedy series Portlandia—the city has more recently been known as the location of violent clashes between far-right groups and farleft "antifa," or anti-fascists. In 2020, after the death of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of police, Portland became a hub of street protests, even though it is the nation's whitest city with a population of at least 500,000. The clashes' reality was often more complicated than the popular image: The biggest protests were peaceful and diverse. But others included anarchists with even more radical aims than Black Lives Matter protesters; they battled with police and sometimes with right-wing groups, setting fires and vandalizing the federal courthouse and police headquarters. President Donald Trump seized on the conflict as he was running for reelection. In July, Trump sent federal personnel into Portland to protect federal property, but without the support of local officials. Gov. Kate Brown, who had tolerated the "occupation" of large swaths of the city, called it "political theater" and a "blatant abuse of power." The administration was put on the defensive when reports emerged of more than 100 unidentified federal personnel snatching protesters off the streets without normal judicial processes. Eventually, negotiations between Brown and Vice President Mike Pence brokered an agreement for the federal forces to leave; while some clashes continued, the unrest ratcheted down.

Oregon grew much faster than the national average in the 1940s, when war industries brought thousands of people to the West Coast, and again in the 1970s, when the pleasant environment attracted so many young people that the state's population shot up 26 percent. Containing growth became the hot local issue. "Come and visit us again and again," Republican Gov. Tom McCall told outsiders. "But for heaven's sake don't come here to live." At his prodding, the legislature in 1973 passed a law that limited development, and in the 1990s, the Portland metropolitan area sharply restricted growth and sprawl. These measures were also popular in the university towns of Eugene and Corvallis and to a lesser extent in the suburbs. Oregon is still attempting to find the right mix for development. In 2019, Brown signed the nation's first statewide rent control law as well as a separate measure requiring cities of at least 10,000 residents to permit duplexes in areas of single family-homes, and even quadruplexes in the Portland area. Meanwhile, employment in the lumber industry has been shrinking amid tighter federal and state regulation and greater automation. The state has also grappled with one of the downsides of its verdant surroundings: In 2020, Oregon saw more than 1,400 square miles burned in just three days, double the usual amount for a whole year. The following year, the Bootleg Fire scorched an area bigger than New York City, making it the third-largest fire in Oregon since 1900.

In Portland and the university towns, newcomers helped build the state's new economy. The growth of high-tech companies around Portland was such that the area became known as Silicon Forest, where Intel, the largest tech employer in the state, is expanding its already considerable footprint in the Portland suburbs. The chipmaker shares the stage with homegrown firms like Mentor Graphics (now owned by Siemens), FEI Co., Rentrak Corp., Open Sesame, and Twistlock (now owned by Palo Alto Networks). Oregon is also a top exporter; semiconductors and electronic components are the biggest, totaling about $9 billion, thanks largely to Intel. The port of Portland ships $4.6 billion in products every year, led by motor vehicles and agricultural crops. Befitting Oregon's location on the Pacific Rim, the state's top trading partners save Canada are all in Asia: China, Malaysia, South Korea, and Japan. In 2022, Oregon rose 17 spots in CNBC's Top States for Business rankings, on the strength of its workforce; it has the eighth-highest concentration of science, technology, engineering and math workers and one of the strongest inflows of college graduates in the nation. (One quirk: Oregon is the only state other than New Jersey where you can't pump your own gas, although Oregon, unlike New Jersey, allowed self-service in small rural counties starting in 2018.)

While Oregon's population growth rate has fallen from its earlier peaks, the state is still expanding at a healthy clip, up 10.7 percent since 2010, enough for an additional seat in the House. Its three biggest counties—Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas, each in the Portland metro area —have each grown between 9 and 14 percent since 2010, though Multnomah's population has sagged a bit in the past few years. Further south, Deschutes County has grown a stunning 29.8 percent since 2010, driven by a boom in Bend, a onetime blue-collar locale that has recently become a destination for scenic tourism and families looking to relocate in pleasant surroundings. (Bend is home to the planet's only remaining Blockbuster Video store.) Oregon's rural population is a rapidly diminishing proportion of the state, contributing to its resentment of metro Portland. Oregon's population is just 2.3 percent Black, 14 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Asian. Washington County in suburban Portland is increasingly diverse—12 percent Asian and 18 percent Hispanic. The state capital of Salem and farming counties east of the Cascades also have relatively high Hispanic percentages.

Though Oregon was largely founded by missionaries, the religiously unaffiliated form the core constituency for some of the state's policy innovations over the last two generations. Oregon legalized most abortions prior to the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, and it decriminalized medical marijuana and legalized assisted suicide in referendums in 1994 and 1997. In 2007, the Democratic-controlled legislature banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and mandated recycling of discarded electronics. Running counter to the anything-goes atmosphere, it has also imposed strict limits on smoking. In 2022, the state became the first in the nation to enable children to be kept continuously on Medicaid through the age of 6. Meanwhile, the state has some of the oldest sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants, and in 2018, voters rejected a ballot measure that would have overturned those protections. Oregon was also among the most active states in filing lawsuits opposing the Trump administration's immigration policies. But Oregonians are beginning to rein in their tolerance for homelessness; in 2022, more than two dozen mayors urged the state to provide an additional $123 million directly to cities to tackle the issue, which has become severe in the state's high-cost cities. Tina Kotek, the Democrat who won the 2022 governor's race, promised to build more housing, to boost the number of people who work with the unhoused, and to expand mental health services.

Legalized recreational marijuana, approved by voters in 2014, is flourishing. (Unlike most products for sale in the state, marijuana is taxed at 17 percent.) Then, in 2020, voters approved a move to the next frontier—the regulated medical use of psilocybin, a hallucinogen sometimes called "magic mushrooms." It passed by double-digit margins. However, rural portions of southwestern Oregon near the California border have struggled with some 1,000 to 2,000 illegal cannabis-growing operations, some suspected to be run by foreign cartels; their presence, officials say, is due less to in-state demand, which is largely satisfied by legal production, than to customers in far-away states that do not allow legal weed or that set the price too high. In their 2023 session, legislators looked at increasing the penalties for unlawful growth. Oregon is a leader in other substances as well; it "boasts more craft distilleries than Kentucky and is second only to California in the number of wineries," the New York Times reported.

There are no polls open on Election Day—with mail ballots accepted by the date of the election, there really is no Election Day in Oregon. Voting has produced huge margins for progressive candidates and positions in Portland and the university towns of Eugene and Corvallis and huge conservative margins in counties east of the Cascades and in much of southwestern Oregon, where discontent over the policies that decimated the logging industry has lingered. Some rural Oregonians have been pushing an effort to join a conservative "greater Idaho." While moderate Republicans dominated the party through the 1990s, the remnants of the party have shifted too far to the right to be competitive statewide. Weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol, a GOP state representative let rioters into the state capitol, for which he was expelled and later pleaded guilty to one count of official misconduct. And in March 2022, state Sen. Dallas Heard stepped down as state GOP chair, saying, "My physical and spiritual health can no longer survive exposure to the toxicity that can be found in this community."

Oregon has not been a presidential battleground in recent elections; it voted for Hillary Clinton by 11 points in 2016 and Joe Biden by 16 points in 2020. In early 2019, the only Republican to win statewide in years, Secretary of State Dennis Richardson, died of brain cancer; in 2020, a Democrat won the office. In 2022, Kotek won a three-way contest against Republican Christine Drazan and Independent Betsy Johnson, 47% to 44% to 9%. Under a new map, three House districts proved highly competitive in 2022, with the Democrats winning the 4th and 6th and the Republicans winning the 5th. Meanwhile, voters approved a landmark gun control ballot initiative, though only by about one percentage point. The new law, which requires a permit and safety training to buy a firearm and would prohibit magazines larger than 10 rounds, was challenged in court.

Democrat Tina Kotek, who was elected Oregon House speaker in 2013, won the governorship in 2022 after an unusual three-way contest. Kotek won despite the albatross of having to succeed fellow Democrat Kate Brown, one of the nation's most unpopular governors during her final years in office, due to public concern over such issues as crime and homelessness. Kotek was one of two lesbian candidates elected governor in November 2022, along with Massachusetts' Maura Healey; they became the nation's first lesbian governors. (Brown is bisexual.)

Kotek was raised in York Pennsylvania. Her father worked for a company that built air conditioners; her mother was a homemaker who once lobbied the state to lift its sales tax on sewing patterns she used to make clothes. "Kotek would become an amalgamation of her parents: a policy geek plunging neck-deep into details, and an advocate known for grinding down opponents," Dirk VanderHart wrote for Oregon Public Broadcasting. Kotek was a top student and a star in high school track and basketball. She was accepted to Georgetown University, but she dropped out after less than two years—she told the Oregonian that she "didn't fit in" because "everybody wanted to be a lawyer"—and relocated to the Northwest in 1987. "I fell in love with the beauty of the state and the openness of the people," Kotek has written. Kotek earned a bachelor's degree in religious studies from the University of Oregon and a master's in international studies from the University of Washington. She came out as gay in her early 20s; when she was there, the University of Washington didn't allow same-sex couples in campus housing, but Kotek pushed successfully to change that in 1997.

Kotek polished her policy chops while working for the Oregon Food Bank and Children First of Oregon, lobbying the legislature on such issues as the minimum wage, housing affordability, and health insurance. After making an unsuccessful bid for the House, Kotek won a seat in 2006, eventually rising to leadership and serving as speaker from 2013 to 2022; she resigned to run for governor. "In nine years, almost no one has guided the trundling pioneer wagon of Oregon governance as powerfully as Kotek," VanderHart wrote. "She has collected progressive victories like pelts, showing a flair for muscling through bold bills and cobbling together unlikely coalitions." At times, Kotek played hardball. In the run-up to the most recent round of redistricting, she cut a deal with Republicans, giving them equal representation on the map-drawing committee in exchange for GOP legislators agreeing not to stonewall legislation by leaving the capitol to block a quorum, a tactic they had used on multiple occasions. Then, after passing key Democratic bills, Kotek backed off her promise to the GOP by meddling with the committee structure; the Democrats got to draw maps they preferred, after all.

The race in 2022 was the first Oregon gubernatorial election in 20 years with neither an incumbent nor a former governor running. Brown's unpopularity weighed heavily; during her tenure, she'd had to grapple with anarchist protests in Portland, the coronavirus pandemic, and widespread wildfires. Kotek, who had worked closely with the governor on legislation, tried to distance herself from Brown during the campaign. In the Democratic primary, her main opponent was state Treasurer Tobias Read. Nick Kristof, a longtime New York Times correspondent and columnist and an Oregon native, tried to run, but he had to leave the race after the state Supreme Court deemed his residency credentials to be insufficient. Kotek defeated Read, 56%-32%.

The GOP contest was wide open; former state House Minority Leader Christine Drazan ended up winning the nomination with just 22.5% of the vote, with six other candidates receiving between 7 percent and 18 percent of the vote. But Kotek and Drazan didn't have the race to themselves: Former state Sen. Betsy Johnson, a rural Democrat and timber heir with a pro-business platform, got into the race as an independent. Analysts suggested that Johnson might be able to draw voters from either party, especially given voters' foul mood about the status quo. In one ad, Johnson positioned herself by saying, "Oregonians are distrustful of the radical right. And they are terrified of the progressive left." Drazan hit Johnson and Kotek for being career politicians, while Johnson attacked Drazan and Kotek as being overly partisan. Kotek tagged Johnson over her friendliness to guns, Johnson attacked Drazan over her opposition to abortion rights, and Johnson and Drazan attacked Kotek as anti-police. Johnson's campaign, meanwhile, was fueled by financial support from Nike's billionaire founder, Phil Knight—at least until Knight switched his allegiance and largesse from Johnson to Drazan. Kotek benefited from visits by President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren; Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin stumped for Drazan.

In the end, the state's blue instincts held: Kotek defeated Drazan, 47%-44%, with Johnson taking almost 9 percent—only a bit narrower than Brown's 50%-44% victory over Republican Knute Buehler in 2018. Between 2018 and 2022, no county flipped from one party to the other; Johnson did best in areas northwest of Portland that she had long represented in the state Senate, winning 18% to 23% of the vote in Columbia County (St. Helens), Clatsop County (Astoria), and Tillamook County (Tillamook). Kotek's victory was one of 12 by women in 2022 gubernatorial races, easily a record, according to the Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics.

After taking office, Kotek signed a series of executive orders seeking to ease homelessness and address housing affordability. She also made progress with Republicans on a $130 million package for homelessness and housing.