People in Oregon who are sick of the blue state’s rules want to move the border to nearby Idaho, where the red state’s rules “actually match their values.”
Matt McCaw, Executive Director of the Greater Idaho effort, told Fox News Digital that the effort to move Oregon’s border 200 miles west was started to stop the “tug of war” that was getting worse in the Beaver State.
“The state of Oregon is divided geographically by the Cascade Mountain Range and that geographic divide is also a huge cultural divide,” he said. “So, the west side of Oregon has a different climate, economy, culture, and is more urban.” This is not at all like the east side, where people live and work in farms and are very traditional and religious.
“You have these two very different groups of people in Oregon that try to play tug of war over state government,” he noted.
Oregon’s political “tug of war” has caused a rift in the western state, which is made worse by people who live there and have different views and needs than their elected officials.
“Eastern Oregonians are very different from western Oregonians,” he said. “And you can take 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.”
The Greater Idaho Movement wants to close the gap by moving the line between Idaho and Oregon.
Why don’t we come up with a long-term way for different people to get rules for their communities that work for them? That will make things less tense and conflictual in politics. “That’s what people say they want from politics over and over again,” McCaw said.
“People are not looking for partisan bickering,” he told us. “What most people want are solutions that work for both parties and benefit everyone.” Our answer does that, and Greater Idaho does that too.
“It creates a situation where the people in eastern Oregon get the government that they want and what the people in western Oregon get the government that they want and vote for,” McCaw said. “And all that political tension that comes from sharing the same state goes away.”
According to the head of the Greater Idaho Movement, Oregon has had a “urban rural divide” “since the beginning.”
“This difference between the east and west sides has always been there since the first state was made.” A lot of that is just geography. The weather and landscape on the west side of Oregon are very different from those on the east side, so people will make a living in different ways.
“Supercharge” their movement, according to McCaw, because the coronavirus pandemic made the difference between the west and east parts of Oregon even bigger.
“Oregon was one of the most different states during COVID.” They shut down businesses, churches, and schools all over the state. They also made people wear masks and later made people get vaccines, McCaw said. “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 [here] did not want those policies,” he noted.
“There was a huge amount of anger, frustration, and tension out here because we didn’t want these policies to be put in place on the east side of the state.” Along the whole time, you had a totally different government response from the state in Idaho, which is right next door,” McCaw said.
According to McCaw, a lot of people in eastern Oregon saw the pandemic as a wake-up call to get politicians who share their views.
“And those policies that happened during COVID were so impactful and so negative that I think that it kind of supercharged this movement,” he told me. “It made people realize that the government can have a massive impact on my life in a really negative way, so we need to make sure that that government matches our values, matches our community’s values, so that the next time something like this comes along, we know our government response is going to be the kind of response that our community wants.”
