For some years, I've helped out in a peripheral way with the editing of Idaho and Oregon sections the Almanac of American Politics, the top single-volume reference book on that subject. A few months before publication, they send some of the text from the upcoming edition, and I post it here. Here's one of four sections from the book. Enjoy. - rs
For more than five decades, the Almanac of American Politics has set the standard for political reference books. In September, the Almanac will be publishing its 2026 edition, with more than 2,000 pages offering fully updated chapters on all 435 House members and their districts, all 100 senators, all 50 states and governors, and much more.
Below are excerpts from the new chapters in the 2026 Almanac on the state of Idaho / Oregon and Gov. Brad Little / Tina Kotek, written by Louis Jacobson. Jacobson — a senior correspondent for PolitiFact, a senior columnist for Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, and a contributor of political coverage for U.S. News & World Report — has written for eight editions of the Almanac since 2000. For the 2026 edition, he served as chief author.
Readers can receive a 15% discount if they purchase the new Almanac at its website and use the code Ridenbaugh2026 at checkout.
---
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 has popularized bike trails, light-rail trams, plug-in stations for electric cars, handcrafted ales, and small-batch distilleries. It sells Pendleton shirts and Nike sneakers to the world. Yet you can still see much of the same Oregon that Meriwether Lewis and William 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 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, from timber harvesting; during World War II, when Kaiser built ships in Portland Oregon and Vancouver Washington; and in the 1970s, when Americans began to appreciate Oregon's natural environment.
Oregon also has a dark strain of history. When the state's constitution was written, it included a provision barring the relocation of any Black person 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 Blacks 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.
Although the image of "kombucha-swilling, artisan knot-loving, bicycle-riding haven" (as the Oregonian newspaper once put it) is based in reality—and was lovingly satirized by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein in IFC television's "Portlandia"—the city has more recently been known for violent clashes between far-right groups and far-left "antifa," or antifascists. 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, sending federal agents into Portland to protect federal property, but without the support of local officials, and sometimes without identifying insignias. Then-Gov. Kate Brown, who initially tolerated the "occupation" of large swaths of the city, later called it "political theater" and a "blatant abuse of power." Eventually, Brown and Vice President Mike Pence brokered an agreement for the federal forces to leave; although 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 people that containing growth became a dominant 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, metropolitan Portland 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. But clamping down on development brought higher housing costs, and the state is still struggling to find the right mix. In 2019, Brown signed the nation's first statewide rent control law and 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.
Amid tighter federal and state regulation and greater automation, Oregon has lost 40 percent of its forestry jobs since 2001 and one-third of its mill jobs. The state has also grappled with a downside of its verdant surroundings: wildfires. In 2020, Oregon had 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 2024, the Durkee Fire scorched more than 450 square miles. Meanwhile, in 2024, workers finished demolishing four hydropower dams along a 240-mile stretch of the Klamath River, hoping to revive the river's salmon, which will provide nearby Native Americans with their traditional sustenance.
The growth of high-tech companies around Portland, driven by Intel, prompted the nickname Silicon Forest, though the chipmaker has struggled in the age of artificial intelligence. Oregon is a top exporter; computer and electronic products are the biggest, totaling about $9 billion annually. Befitting Oregon's location on the Pacific Rim, the state's top trading partners outside of North America are China and Malaysia. The port of Portland ships motor vehicles and agricultural commodities, though its money-losing container operation avoided closure in 2024 only after the state stepped in with funding. Oregon ranks high in science, technology, engineering and math workers and in inflows of college graduates. In 2023, Oregon scrapped its prohibition—on the books since 1951—on drivers pumping their own gasoline, leaving New Jersey as the nation's last holdout.
Oregon's population has risen by 11.5 percent since 2010, enough to secure an additional House seat after the 2020 Census, but it has stagnated this decade, particularly in the city of Portland, where population fell by 22,000 from 2000 to 2023. The three biggest counties in the Portland metro area—Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas—also shrank during that period. Growth has been stronger in Deschutes County—a 32 percent increase 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 move into pleasant surroundings. (Bend is also home to the planet's only remaining Blockbuster Video store.) Oregon's rural population is a rapidly diminishing proportion of the state, heightening its resentment toward more liberal metro Portland; voters in 13 eastern Oregon counties have backed joining a conservative "greater Idaho," which would require approval from both states and Congress. Oregon's population is 2.4 percent Black, almost 15 percent Hispanic and a little more than 5 percent Asian. Washington County in suburban Portland is increasingly diverse—13 percent Asian and 19 percent Hispanic. Marion County (Salem) and the 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. 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 age 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.
However, Oregonians are starting to rein in their tolerance on some issues. With its high housing costs, Oregon has the third highest rate of homelessness of any state, and the highest rate of homelessness for unaccompanied youth. In 2024, the city of Grants Pass won a case at the U.S. Supreme Court that allows jurisdictions to ban people sleeping outdoors; in the 6-3 ruling, the justices said such laws do not violate the Constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Oregon has also backtracked on drug policy. Voters approved legalized recreational marijuana in 2014, but in recent years, supply has outpaced demand, straining programs that rely on marijuana tax revenue. In rural portions of southwestern Oregon near the California border, illicit marijuana growth has led to lawlessness, some linked to foreign cartels. Then, in 2020, voters approved the regulated medical use of psilocybin, a hallucinogen sometimes called "magic mushrooms." It passed by double-digit margins. However, after the state experienced persistent rates of addiction and overdoses, the Legislature in 2024 repealed most of the experiment in drug decriminalization, which 58 percent of voters had supported in 2020. Now, the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs, including heroin, fentanyl and methamphetamine, is again a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail.
Oregon was the second state after South Dakota to give voters direct decision-making via ballot measures. Oregon pioneered the election of senators by popular vote and, with Michigan in 1908, the recall of elected officials. It was the first to adopt all-mail elections; as a result, there really is no Election Day in Oregon. Voting has tended to produce strong 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 timber policy has lingered. Although moderates dominated the state Republican Party through the 1990s, the party's remnants have shifted too far to the right to be competitive statewide. 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, Joe Biden by 16 in 2020, and Kamala Harris by 14 in 2024. A Republican has not won a gubernatorial race since 1982. 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, voters approved a landmark gun control ballot measure, though only by about a percentage point. The law requires a permit and safety training to buy a firearm and would prohibit magazines larger than 10 rounds; it was challenged in the courts, but in March 2025, the state's second-highest court gave its approval.
In 2024, Democrats won every statewide office on the ballot and flipped the House seat held by Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer. (Chavez-DeRemer was later appointed Labor Secretary by Trump.) Democrats also gained a seat in each legislative chamber, reaching the 60 percent majority required for revenue-raising measures without Republican support. However, voters made heterodox choices in ballot measures; they rejected ranked-choice voting and a proposal to raise taxes on corporations and distribute the proceeds to residents, but they greenlighted collective bargaining for cannabis workers.
A guest reading from Everett Wohlers; he lives in Idaho.
