Part of Oregon Wants to Leave, and It Wants to Join Idaho

Recently, Klamath County in Oregon voted “yes” on a ballot initiative asking whether it should leave Oregon and become part of Idaho. It’s the ninth county to vote “yes” on such an initiative, with three others voting “no” on similar initiatives, one of those three set to vote again, and two others set to vote in the near future. Other counties are being pursued. This thing is a movement, and in its most official sense, that movement is called “Greater Idaho.”

As you might surmise, rabid partisanship is involved. These are “red” counties looking to leave a “blue” state and join a red one. They’re rural, they’re mostly connected to Idaho geographically, and there are at least pockets of support in Oregon’s blue areas for the same split. We won’t get into the specific stances of the Greater Idaho organization—that feels irrelevant to our purposes, because they’re just marketing arguments aimed at getting voters to agree with them—but we’re going to look at whether the movement might succeed, and we’re going to also look at why this part of Oregon wasn’t part of Idaho in the first place.

The map of the Oregon counties we’ll use below comes from KTVB, a television station in Boise linked above. The maps of Oregon Territory come from Wikipedia. The map at the end, the one of the Snake River/Columbia River boundary, comes from ResearchGate. The tip that this whole thing is even happening came from my brother, Will, who is evidently up to date on state-by-state cession voting issues. Thanks, Will.

Could Parts of Oregon Join Idaho?

Technically, yes. There’s no supernatural force dictating that Oregon must remain its current shape. Experts seem to find the possibility unlikely, but self-governance is kind of the idea behind America, and while an argument could be made that this would open the door to all sorts of states reconfiguring their borders, an argument could also be made that reconfigured state borders wouldn’t necessarily be all that bad. From the sounds of it, as long as both states involved agree to it and Congress signs off, state borders can be moved.

Currently, the voting map looks like this, with counties that have voted “yes” in blue and green and counties that have voted “no” (and aren’t holding a second vote) in red:

The yellow border is the Greater Idaho organization’s pursued new boundary, but there’s no reason the Greater Idaho organization would get to dictate any actual new boundary. Oregon and Idaho themselves would do that.

There’s also no reason counties would have to remain unbroken—states can draw their own county lines—but were they to remain unbroken, and were the counties wishing to leave Oregon a contiguous, aligned block (again, not necessary, but it’s more doubtful that there’d be an island of Idaho in Oregon than that the border would move west a ways)—at least two more counties would have to vote “yes” on one of these initiatives. There are four possible county pairs here who’d pull it off:

• Wasco & Wheeler
• Wasco & Crook
• Wheeler & Gilliam
• Wasco & Deschutes

Deschutes County is home to Bend, the fifth-largest city in the state of Oregon (and rising) and something of a “blue” stronghold. It’s doubtful that a majority of Deschutes County in its geographic totality would vote “yes” on a measure to leave Oregon for Idaho, which is assumedly why the Greater Idaho group’s proposed new border goes just east of Bend. Of the other four counties, none are currently set to vote on the issue in the near future, but combined, they were home to only 55,921 people as of the Census Bureau’s latest estimate, making the voting-eligible population smaller, making the number of people in need of convincing somewhere in the range of ten or twenty thousand. If Wheeler and Gilliam were to go on their own, the number of people in need of convincing might be only in the hundreds, given the two counties’ combined population is only 3,456.

So, getting a contiguous block is highly possible. I’d even call it likely, given the movement only started within the last few years. Of course, you might be left with a situation where, say, Umatilla County is now an island wanting to remain in Oregon, but if the counties around Umatilla are voting to join Idaho (Wallowa County narrowly voted no in the movement’s early stages, but will hold a vote again this November), you’d guess Umatilla County would also vote to join Idaho, and on the off chance they didn’t, well—again, these votes aren’t binding, the states themselves and Congress have the final say.

There’s an element here where one can say, “Hey, if Greater Idaho can’t get Douglas, Coos, and Curry Counties to all vote yes, why would Idaho want the whole package? Part of the Greater Idaho organization’s own argument is that the proposed ceded counties as a whole are a tax drain on Oregon, receiving more in subsidies than they pay in taxes. If there’s no possibility of developing a major Pacific port, is there anything in this for Idaho?” It’s a compelling argument. It might be the decisive argument. If pressed, though, I, not at all a state cession expert, would say the actual decisive argument will come down to the same thing that drove the Missouri Compromise: Congressional representation and electoral votes.

Within the latest census, Oregon was the smallest eight-electoral-vote state, with a population roughly 80,000 people larger than that of Oklahoma, the largest seven-electoral-vote state. Idaho, on the other hand, was the largest four-electoral-vote state, with a population roughly 250,000 people smaller than that of Nebraska, the smallest five-electoral-vote state. The combined population of the nine counties that have voted yes, plus Morrow County, Wallowa County, and Crook/Gilliam/Umatilla/Wasco/Wheeler Counties was, at the 2020 census, 350,000. Applied to the post-2020 reapportionment numbers, this could swing an electoral vote and one seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Oregon to Idaho (I’m not positive how this would actually work—Oklahoma might gain the seat rather than Idaho, or Oklahoma and Idaho might each gain a seat and Oregon and Nebraska might lose one, etc., but the bottom line is Oregon would probably lose one), meaning Oregon would not agree to it unless Oregon’s leading Democrats were worried about losing control of the state government, something I’m guessing isn’t a concern right now in Oregon.

The thing about using the 2020 census, though, is that it’s probably not what would actually be used to determine reapportionment. More likely, this would impact post-2030 reapportionment, which will use the 2030 census. The electoral vote, then, and the U.S. House impact (which might be negligible anyway, given the seat Oregon’s losing likely is and would remain a red seat) are more of a guessing game—a guessing game complicated by the fact that both Oregon and Idaho are growing rapidly.

Idaho was, between the 2010 and 2020 census, the second-fastest growing state in the country proportionally, trailing only Utah. Oregon, meanwhile, was the twelfth-fastest growing state. Apply those growth rates to this coming decade and, well, who knows what will happen?

Where does this all leave us? My impression is that there are three relative questions:

The first is whether a majority of voters in the eastern half of Oregon want to join Idaho. The answer to that, based on these elections, seems to be yes.

The second is whether Idaho would want these parts of Oregon added to itself. The answer to this hinges on the balance between the benefit of potentially gaining an additional electoral vote and the cost of potentially hurting the state budget and thereby the state economy (provided these counties really are receiving more in subsidies than they pay in taxes, the factualness of which I have not verified). Favorable votes in Coos County and/or Curry County could change this equation, but the fact that Douglas County and Josephine County voted “no” bodes poorly for those hypothetical votes.

The third is whether Oregon would want to yield this territory to Idaho. The answer to this hinges on the same balance as Idaho’s question, but in the reverse direction: Is there a budget/economic benefit, and if so, does it outweigh the potential electoral vote cost?

Inertia will play a role, too, but it would seem likelier to be the role of tiebreaker. Meanwhile, keep an eye on whether this reaches the national narrative, what it does to the national narrative, and how everyone then reacts when a portion of El Pasoans inevitably revive their push to leave Texas for New Mexico.

Why Aren’t These Parts of Oregon Part of Idaho in the First Place?

We all wanted a little map history here, so let’s do a little map history:

After the Oregon Territory was formed (the short version on the Oregon Territory’s formation is: More Americans went there than British Canadian settlers, incentivized by the promise of familiar terrain for farming as the land west of the Continental Divide was wetter than that of the Great Plains; so when James K. Polk invaded Mexico to grab California he simultaneously sent his guys to the British and negotiated a compromise on the territory which left the British happy because they got more land and the Americans happy because they avoided simultaneous wars; and then when relations between white settlers and Native Americans erupted into the Cayuse War, Congress made Oregon a territory so it would be easier to govern), it looked like this:

Within three years, this land’s status as a single territory proved untenable. Settlers north of the Columbia River were cut off from the territory government by distance. After a year and a half of debate, the Monticello Convention was adopted and sent to Congress, which quickly approved it after changing the name of the proposed territory from “Columbia” to “Washington,” to avoid…confusion with the District of Columbia (this is the correct definition of irony). New map:

Four years after this split, the western portion of Oregon reached the moment territories reached where they wanted to become a state, something I assume was just a matter of population but am not going to look up right now because that feels intensive. With hardly any population east of the Cascades (the crest of which runs through Oregon on a north-south line a little bit west of Bend), Oregonians evidently thought their whole territory too large for one state, but still wanted land to grow, as Delazon Smith argued at the Oregon Constitutional Convention, where a guy named Charles Meigs—one of few residents east of the Cascades—argued for Oregon to stop at the Cascadian crest, something Smith said Meigs wanted because it would leave Meigs powerful within the leftover territory. They settled on an eastern line starting at the Snake River and extending due south from roughly the point of the initial Fort Boise (the second Fort Boise was fifty miles away, at present-day Boise). I don’t know how they picked this line, or why they didn’t keep following the Snake River. I’ve tried to find out, but I haven’t tried hard enough, nor will I right now. We were left with the following Oregon, with the abandoned portions of the old territory returning to Washington:

There was one final matter for the Oregonians to settle, that of the southeastern corner of what is now Washington, where Walla Walla presently resides. It’s the area below dams 6, 7, & 8 on this present-day map of the area, but above the Washington/Oregon line:

Oregonians wanted the area south of the Snake River, but they weren’t sure Congress would give it to them, so they made the matter an amendment on their constitution, the passage of which was left up to Congress. Congress declined to take the territory from Washington Territory.

Walla Walla amendment distraction aside, you could say Charles Meigs was really the father of this Greater Idaho movement. Since Oregon’s beginnings, eastern Oregonians have wanted to be separate from those to the west. It’s just that now, the line is a little further east than it would have been back then. Probably at least in part because of Bend.