On Tuesday, voters in Crook County passed measure 7-86, which asked voters if they support negotiations to move the Oregon/Idaho border to include Crook County in Idaho. The measure is passing with 53% of the vote, and makes Crook County the 13th county in eastern Oregon to pass a Greater Idaho measure.
Wait 'till they find out it’s all ohio already.
It’s all Ohio?
Always has been.
I do like the idea of making Idaho more symmetrical.
Doesn’t seem like this would have much of an impact federally, it’s not like trying to form a new state where you’d get new Senators who agree with you. These people probably agree with Idaho Senators and not Oregon but their move wouldn’t change the composition.
Fuck votes. Let them buy their way out. Once a fair value for the property, infrastructure, and future revenue is determined that value becomes the baseline for negotiations and the auction can begin. Oregon loses some freeloaders, gains a windfall, and becomes even more blue.
Idaho potato
The parts of Oregon wanting this are rabidly anti-tax. The instant they find out Idaho has a 6% sales tax they’ll cry and come crawling right back.
Conservatives are super pro-sales tax because it’s regressive taxation. A common fake-libertarian argument is “we don’t need income taxes, we can just have sales taxes”.
They’ll swallow a 6% sales tax in exchange for joining
the white ethnostate of their dreamsidaho.Or they will just shop in Oregon.
Most of them will have to drive hours, western oregon is about 4 hours+ across
It’s so fucking weird anyone would want to move to Idaho.
I don’t get it, I would prefer my own Private Idaho.
Bob won’t stop until A River Runs Thru Phoenix
There are lots of Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead-Ass Stupid.
I’m sure it won’t happen, but there’s a part of me that would just love to hear that when the negotiations get to Idaho, Idaho is just like “Nah, hard pass, we don’t want you either.”
Idaho can’t afford those leeches
Yeah, this isn’t greater idaho, this is even worse idaho.
Yeah, you Republicans are fucking dumb.
I don’t blame’em.
The more crazed element of the Oregon left are so damn detacted from reality that this won’t even ring alarm bells. Every left swing has a counter swing. Time to stop being divisive and look for common ground.
Nah… they seem based as fuck tbh.
And Trump is your common ground, I suppose?
He’s the one to avoid. You seem to have missed the point.
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Is that why the dems are now acting like Regan supporters?
The first neoliberal president was Jimmy Carter. The second was Reagan.
What the fuck?
How about Lesser Idaho.
How about Nodaho.
No map. It’s just a lack of Idaho.
Youdaho
That is all
WEdaho
Yomomdaho
So I am from WA and have been aware of this plan for a while.
This is one phase, and the next phase is to try to do this with as many Eastern WA counties as possible.
And to anyone wondering why this is happening, ya’ll obviously are not from around the PNW.
Basically, Seattle, Tacoma and Portland are bastion of liberals and actual leftists. Bellevue is as well, but its only for corpos these days.
Nearly everywhere else west of the cascades is just barely more blue than red, and there are tons of smaller towns with Republican controlled county legislatures and town/city governments.
On the East of the Cascades, in the desert, basically, Republicans are generally in charge of everything that isn’t a Reservation.
Its a bit more complex than this, but it is pretty much ‘big cities’ are blue, mid and small cities and everything else is red.
While I am against this succeeding, I do not think this is as cut and dry, obviously unconstitutional as some other posters here are making it seem.
It is not creating a new state. It is counties voting to leave one state and join another. To the best of my knowledge, this is completely unprecedented in the history of the US.
They’ve got a whole detailed plan for how to attempt to get this actually done. And they have a lot of judges, and now a popular mandate.
I honestly do not know how this will play out as it will likely hinge on various judiciaries and possibly executive (Governor) moves.
It could possibly make it to the Circuit Courts and then the Supreme Court.
I describe it like this… the places where people actually live are blue.
The places where there are more square miles than people are red.
It should be noted this is true for almost the entirety of the United States.
Places where people are poorly educated seem to be mostly red too.
Happen to be more easily persuaded to vote against their own interests, too
It’s not that they’re poorly educated (farmers are typically smart people in very practical ways that city people are not), it’s that they don’t have government services to rely on so they don’t understand why people in the city need it as they see themselves as self sufficient.
Can we merge Idaho with the rest of the Midwest? It’d be pretty fucking sweet to have less GOP senators.
How about merging them with Atlantis?
ADHD immediately gets lost in futurama
“Hail, Atlanta”
Donovan (probably)
They wouldn’t want that if course.
However, of they do this, then they would likely make an argument for reallocating electors…
It would reallocate electors as well as congressional seats. Those are both based on population and are already realloated every 10 years.
While true, this is true in basically every area in the USA. If you have a tractor supply store near your house, you’re in redneck territory. If you have a Lululemon, you’re in blue territory.
Tractor supply sucks normally but I love rural king and miss having those around now that I live in a major city. Everything you could ever need in one store and free popcorn at the entrance you can eat while walking around picking out new boots and deciding which goat to buy from the latest batch of kids
You should see the UVA area, it’s a big university next to incredibly rural areas so it has both nearby
Pretty sure we have both where I’m at. Blue college city in a red state surrounded by farmland.
Funnily enough I have one of each of those within about three miles of my home.
Where do you live?
Thank you
Well not going to say, but it is funny because it is a “swing state”.
But realistically this specific area is deep blue, but TSC has a healthy enough market, between nearby rural area and suburbanites that want to play farmer with a couple chickens in the backyard and buying their pet food there.
Cool!
Found the centrist.
No Lululemon here, but there is a tractor supply store and two Rural Kings.
And yet we are a bellwether county. One of the ones at the top of the list with only one error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_election_bellwether_counties_in_the_United_States
It’s more complicated than you think.
There is a legal way to do this:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress
— Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1
Nebraska and South Dakota have a compact that’s been approved by Congress that has land swap between the states based on where the river is when particular assessments happen. So land leaving one state and going to another state isn’t unheard of. If you go look at NE and SD’s border in the southeast corner of SD, you’ll see the river and the border is pretty tight. Now compare that to states that have no such compact like Arkansas and Tennessee. River and the border are all kinds of messed up.
The thing is, both Idaho’s and Oregon’s State assembly will have to vote on it as you indicated. It’s not up to the citizens to dictate when a state’s border can be redrawn. Once Idaho and Oregon have a compact, they will need to send it to DC for Congress to vote on it. If it passes both the House and the Senate, the new compact can be enforced and the new borders drawn.
From what I’ve heard Oregon will not even begin to entertain this notion.
But yes, this is completely legal in the Constitution and we’ve done it before too. And we even have had the case where we took one state and split it into two happen before as well. Virginia and West Virginia. So we’ve used this part of the Constitution enough to know exactly how it needs to go down.
Is it going to go down? IDK. California said they were going to split up into 3, 4, 5 different States, not holding my breath on that one either. Would be pretty neat to redraw Idaho though. Never liked it’s weird long edge on the west side. Now it’ll look like someone giving the middle finger or something.
Living in oregon I see value in letting them enter the “find out” portion of their fucking around. This portion of the state better aligns with idaho, and they’re a thorn in the side of the legislature… they walked out of session to block any laws they didn’t want to vote for, and when a law blocked these people running again, their districts elected their family members. This lets oregon be oregon and rural oregon be idaho… free of weed, abortion, and with a minimum wage of $7.25/hr.
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Will this change the number of electoral votes and house representative each state has? Because if not, this seems to benefit Oregon: concentrates Republicans in Idaho while lessening the impact of their vote.
The number of electoral votes and the number of reps is based on population and is decided by the census.
So if this happens, at the latest, the votes would get fixed in 2031. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this is part of the deal. Obviously those switching to Idaho want to bring their votes with them.
Ah yeah. It was the total votes and minimums for Wyoming in Congress I was thinking of. That needs to be readjusted.
I’m trying to decide if this would be a net positive or negative.
Looking at the congressional districts for Oregon and Idaho it looks like about 5 or 6 districts that are all Republican controlled. Currently Idaho has two congressional districts that both lean heavily Republican. Shifting 5 or 6 Republican congressional seats from Oregon to Idaho I don’t see making a significant difference to Congress.
Looking at things in the Senate both Idaho senators are Republican and adding more Republican districts won’t really change that in any meaningful way. On the flip side both of Oregon’s Senators are currently Democrats and I can’t imagine removing a bunch of Republican voters from the state would do anything but reduce the chances of one of those Senate seats getting flipped.
I’m not really seeing any way in which this would help Republicans or hurt Democrats other than just by generally strengthening each party’s hold on its respective state.
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at this but not only is such an arrangement impossible without federal input (as the comment from tal states) but I seem to recall seeing that a lot of the counties looking to join the greater Idaho thing are some of the ones most dependent on the Oregon state government for funding. If they did manage to leave then it’d actually probably be a net boon for Oregon in terms of state resources going to places where people actually live.
The resultant Greater Idaho though? Suddenly saddled with a bunch of counties that need a lot of help to maintain services and seemingly a general political attitude of the government shouldn’t help people. In my personal opinion it’d turn pretty fucking distopian pretty quick, that is of course assuming that they could somehow get Oregon, Idaho and the federal government to agree to their scheme. I don’t think it’s going to happen, even if they can get some counties to sign off on it. But if they did the people of those same counties would likely come to regret it not long afterwards.
Also just as a brief note I think my information on this is like more than a year old and I don’t think I could find it again to to quote it. So if someone has better/more up to date info that negates anything I’ve said feel free to post it.
Exactly this. It’s the same situation here in Washington. These people who want to leave Oregon and Washington for Idaho don’t recognize how much of their infrastructure is paid for by the western sides of the states. Frustratingly, many of them somehow think that they are the ones sending their tax dollars to the “liberal” areas, when it is very much the other way around.
It’s always a little odd seeing the people who rely on the benefits of bigger government constantly doing what they can to have a smaller government.
they also rely on those big cities they hate so much to provide some of the funding for the services and infrastructure they no-doubt take for granted.
Easy. If Oregon loses a bunch of population and land area to Idaho, then they will probably then make an argument for taking away electors from Oregon and give them to Idaho.
Republicans struggle to get popular vote but can get electoral college, slim margins. This would potentially increase their electoral college advantage.
Exactly this. With the electoral college system, those republican voters count towards the population numbers to assign electors, but the state always goes blue. If these counties move to Idaho, those Republican voters help shift electors to Idaho, and will go red.
Sorry, the US election process is broken, and we don’t need more games by republicans to sneak in more electoral votes. I hope this measure never sees the light of day.
That assumes that the population of these counties is significant compared to the cities though, right? These seem to be the lowest population-density counties in the state.
To the extent they contribute to Oregon’s electoral votes, they would then contribute to Idaho. The fact they are relatively lower population can still move the votes. Have a hard time digging up nice easy data, but they have 8 votes today and even a relative minority of voters going could change that from 8 votes all for democrats to 2 or 3 votes for republican. As someone else said, rinse and repeat for Washington state. Then, off to take part of california to make Nevada a sure thing for republicans and give nevada more votes. Also probably poking all over to erode blue states, carving out some of viginia between kentucky and west viginia, and illinois, colorado, and minnesota are also ripe targets. So Republicans can free up some of those electoral votes that are buried under blue, and press an advantage where they already overcome the popular vote with electoral votes a lot of time.
This is a strategy that won’t work for democrats, as the democratic regions in red states tend to be surrounded by a sea of red, with no logical way to ‘free’ those votes for the benefit of the democrats. They would instead have to push for proportional electoral college votes within their states or to go popular vote nationwide.
So on the one hand, the secession strategy shouldn’t work, as it is explicitly unconstitutional, but the GOP would really want it to happen, and they might be able to make it so. The converse strategies may be constitutional, but would require people to approve of it that would be explicitly undermined by it.
Electoral college. Idaho always goes red, Oregon always go blue. Moving population from Oregon to Idaho transfers electoral votes from a blue state to a red state.
Whether it matters or not depends on whether it changes the tipping point state in any given election, which is hard to know in advance, but for the red team it is at worst identical to the current setup and at best a small boost to their chances in a presidential election. Conversely for the blue team it can either be meaningless or a slight negative.
a shift of ~ 240k people from oregon to idaho would result in oregon going back down to 5 congressional districts, and idaho gaining one for three. so one electoral vote moves from a reliably-democratic state to a republican one. that one elector could very well swing a presidential election.
iirc, changes to state boundaries requires approval of both states and congress (and also the president, who would have to sign-off on the legislation passed there). oregon would never go for it–not entirely sure idaho would be on-board, either, even with the thought of gaining a congressional seat. providing state services and funding to that region would be a perpetual net-drain on idaho’s economy.
