Oregon’s Split Personality

Mostly Michael J. Totten writes about the Middle East, and does it well. Here he writes for City Journal about the east-west conflict in his native Oregon. It is an odd place he knows intimately.

My hometown, Portland, Oregon, voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but the Democratic Party lost almost everywhere else in the state, including in every county east of the Cascade Mountains. Except for in Vermont and Massachusetts, the same urban/rural divide in American politics exists around the country.

Oregon is divided geographically, culturally, and politically by the Cascade Mountains, a spectacular range of volcanoes roughly 100 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean that pick up where the Sierra Nevadas leave off, stretching from Lassen County in northern California to the international border with British Columbia.

From the crest of the Cascades, you’d have to drive hundreds of miles before reaching a county that voted for Clinton, and you’d pass through just two—one in Idaho and one in Wyoming—before reaching the Continental Divide.

In ID it is Blaine County, home of Sun Valley, and the one in WY is Teton County, county seat - Jackson. WY’s other 22 counties are Republican somewhere between most and all of the time. The clusters of wealthy folks in Jackson Hole and Sun Valley vote Democratic, not what you’d once have expected.