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.
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.
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.
Edit: it has been pointed out that that wouldn’t even need to argue for it, the elector transfer would be automatic at 10 year interval.
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.
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.