A Deep Blue State Rift: Will Part of Oregon Join Idaho Soon?

A group in Oregon is working to move the state’s eastern border about 200 miles to the west, essentially shifting 14 counties and parts of three others out of Oregon altogether and adding them to Idaho.

Matt McCaw, executive director of the Greater Idaho movement, told Fox News recently that the culture and values of the primarily agricultural communities of eastern Oregon align much better with those of the state of Idaho than they do with coastal Oregon.

“You have these two very different groups of people in Oregon that try to play tug of war over state government,” McCaw told Fox.

McCaw said the two regions of Oregon are divided by the Cascade Mountain Range, but that the geography is only part of it — it’s “also a huge cultural divide,” he said.

“So, on the west side of Oregon you have a different climate, it’s a different economy, it’s a different culture and more urban,” McCaw said. “It’s a very different place than the east side, where there are agricultural people who are very conservative and traditional.”

According to the group’s website, 13 counties in eastern Oregon have now voted to pass measures supporting the Greater Idaho movement in one form or another.

Unofficial vote tallies had the measure passing last week in Crook County, 53-47.

“For the last three years we’ve been going directly to voters and asking them what they want for their state government,” group president Mike McCarter said of those results.

“What they’re telling us through these votes is that they want their leaders to move the border,” he added. “In our system, the people are the ones in charge, and it’s time for the leaders representing them to follow through.”

“The group also pointed out that they expected that results would have been even higher if not for an extensive ‘no’ vote campaign funded by Portland groups,” Greater Idaho said in a statement on its site.

“Last year in the Wallowa County vote, Portland groups outspent Greater Idaho over 4-1,” it noted. “The movement suspects the same was true this year, though it is impossible to know since the group funding the ‘no’ effort has not reported their spending to the state, though they are required to by law.”

McCaw told Fox that ballot initiatives in favor of the Greater Idaho movement have passed in all 13 counties in which they have appeared on the ballot, even thought the movement is only four years old, having been spurred largely by government responses to the pandemic.

“During COVID, the state of Oregon was one of the most extreme. They closed businesses across the state, they closed churches across the state, they closed schools, they imposed mask mandates and later vaccine mandates,” McCaw told Fox. “This was all state policy handed down through the government institutions like the Oregon Health Authority, which made these policies for the entire state.”

“It was very heavy-handed, and here in eastern Oregon, people did not want those policies,” he added.

However, he explained, the political differences between the two sides of the state were not limited to issues related to the pandemic response.

“[T]ake almost any issue that is a political hot topic, whether that’s immigration or taxes or abortion or gun rights or drug criminalization or decriminalization, you can take almost any issue, and what the people of Eastern Oregon want for their communities is different from what the people of Western Oregon want,” McCaw said.

The group argues that shifting Oregon’s border west will help defuse political tension.

“And [that’s] what people repeatedly say they want out of their politics,” he said.