Posted on 07/21/2006 6:51:49 PM PDT by DuxFan4ever
Forget about blue Oregon: The Republicans are taking over.
The May primary election hit Kevin Looper like a head-butt.
Looper, 36, is a genial, grizzly-sized political consultant who moved to Portland six years ago and is now perhaps the state's top voter-turnout guru.
But what Looper learned from the May primary extinguished his habitual smile. Most of us just saw a tepid election with low turnout, especially among young voters. Looper saw confirmation of something far more profound: a reliably blue state on the verge of turning red.
That's right. Oregon, where only one of eight statewide elected officials, Sen. Gordon Smith, is a Republican. Oregon, where Democrats have controlled the governor's mansion since 1986 and where every Democratic presidential candidate since then has carried the state.
Over the past three decades, the number of registered Democrats in the state has not only failed to keep pace with population growth, it has actually declined in absolute terms. According to the secretary of state's election statistics, there were 794,218 Oregon Democrats in 1976; as of this past May, there were 760,066.
Thirty years ago, 56 percent of registered Oregon voters were Democrats; today, that number is less than 39 percent.
Over the same time period, the number of registered Republicans in the state has soared by half. If not for a temporary spike in Democratic registration in 2004, generated by a one-time expenditure of $10 million in national party funds, the Democratic advantage—currently less than 3 percent of the electorate—might already have disappeared.
A declining registration advantage is only part of Democrats' problem. The current gap between the two parties is even smaller than it appears, because in every Oregon general election since 1964, the GOP has turned out a higher percentage of its voters than have the Democrats.
(Excerpt) Read more at wweek.com ...
Good News
Democrats really got the better color..... who wouold have thought you'd want to be called a "red" state? Especially after we fought the reds for 60 years.
Oregon has the same problem as Washington. Liberal control of the large population centers(Portland, Seattle)while the folks in lightly populated eastern Oregon and Washington are heavily conservative.
Bring out the dead vote.
As hard as it may be to believe, California is much the same.
Wow! Maybe there is a positive side effect to "Smart Growth". Could it be that the people are getting smarter as they see the effects of stupid policies implemented every day negatively impact their lives?
Best Movie Ever Bump :)
Wolverines!
Then in my thinking Oregon should be red not blue.
How is this statement true?
"If current patterns continue, Portland could end up looking even more like a Pacific Northwest version of Israel: a geographically and politically isolated enclave dependent on the support of distant allies."
I know that Texas would be willing to start an Oregon air lift.
Wolverines were in Colorado.
SERIOUSLY!!!! All because USA today used a map that showed Bush's states as red and Gores as blue do we get this stigma. No offense to groups like redstate.org but I'm conservative blue through and through. Reds suck!
You're right. Bush did pretty well in a state that is usually thought of as flaming liberal:
Democratic Kerry
6,745,485 54%
Republican Bush
(Incumbent)
5,509,826 45%
I think that the success of Starbucks Coffee is good for Republicans. It was around 1994 that Starbucks began becoming a household name and that was the year that Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took over Congress and never looked back. I know that when I drink a Triple Latte over there at that Starbucks, I am reminded of Ronald Reagan and all that is good about America and it reinforces my desire to vote Republican.
But the long term problem for the lefties is that leftists have low birth rates. Leftist enclaves will continue to shrink as a proportion of the electorate.
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