Some Oregonians think they don’t fit in the liberally run state and would be better off in their neighbor to the east, making the “Greater Idaho Movement” plan to leave the union more popular.
The Greater Idaho Movement wants to move Oregon’s eastern line west by 200 miles. This would let some rural parts of the state join with Idaho. About 26,000 people live in Crook County, Oregon. On Tuesday, people there will vote on whether to join dozens of other counties in the eastern part of the state in supporting a move to break away from Oregon.
“I love Oregon, but I don’t love the people who are running it right now,” Eric Smith told USA Today. Smith lives in Crook County, Oregon. “It doesn’t feel like they want to keep us anyway.”
The plan to leave the Union would need to be approved by both the Oregon and Idaho governments as well as Congress. However, many people in eastern Oregon still want to leave the Union. Still, a lot of people, even those who said they wouldn’t vote for secession, said they didn’t like some of the liberal policies coming out of Salem, the state capital. These included laws about pot, efforts to cut down on fossil fuel use, and how Oregon handled the COVID-19 pandemic.
Smith told the news outlet, “Stop treating us like Portland.” He did not say how he would vote.
Some people who support the movement see independence as a calm way to break away from the state. They say that instead of fighting with Democrats (there are three Democrats in the government) or going to a different state with more people who share their views, secession gives them a way to be with people who share those views.
A spokesman for the Greater Idaho Movement, Matt McCaw, said, “People have already sorted themselves into communities with similar views.” “People like to live around people who share the same values they do.”
People can live together and differ about politics, that much he agreed with. But McCaw said that Oregon’s liberal policies on rural areas make the environment unsustainable.
He said, “I don’t think we can keep going in the direction we’re going.” “We need to be OK saying your values are yours, mine are mine, and you have to respect our ability to have different views.”
The “IdaNo!” movement has asked people to vote against the plan. Ryan Griffiths, a political science professor at Syracuse University, said that the movement to leave the union doesn’t have much support from the public and is just one of many “performative” movements that have happened in the past.
“In some ways, it’s just a pipe dream. Griffiths said, “Part of what they’re doing is performance-based and ideological.” “A lot of time, secessionist movements are really just bargaining efforts.”
“If you imagine a full-blown project to divide America into red and blue states, that would be incredibly dangerous because you’d have to partition people off,” he added. “You don’t actually have neatly sorted populations despite what many people think.”
