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| 69,000 Sq. Miles. 89% white |
It is pretty simple.
The 2nd CD votes Republican because it is full of Republicans, because it is mostly rural, and because rural voters in America like Trump.
Blue Wave. Nationally, Democrats got 8.5% more votes than did Republicans. Some places participated in the wave but rural Districts like southern and eastern Oregon's 2nd District did not.
Jamie McLeod-Skinner moved the needle in the race because she ran a big, competent, spirited campaign with an outpouring of volunteers, unlike her recent Democratic predecessors, so she held incumbent Republican Greg Walden to 56% of the vote.
The simple facts about the District. There are more Republicans than Democrats. In a contested Democratic primary election a total of 58,000 Democrats voted for one of the seven candidates. There were 92,000 votes in the Republican primary, and Walden got 72,000 of them. There were some 23% protest votes, from candidates to Walden's right.
The District is rural/suburban. Medford and Bend are small cities, surrounded by suburban areas, but most of the District is very rural and overwhelmingly white. White rural Americans are the people most receptive to Trump's message.
Election 2018. Some areas of the country recoiled from the Trump presidency. There are swing districts, and the big swing took place with a certain kind of American living in a certain kind of neighborhood. Districts with a high proportion of well educated people, suburban districts that had formerly been Republican, moved to the Democrats.
But mostly-rural Districts like Oregon's 2nd did not change. It is Trump country.
The top graph shows swing districts in the period from 2012 at the top to 2018 at the bottom. The second graphs shows the resilience of Republican voting in Districts like Oregon's 2nd.
Why did Democrats make huge gains in some areas, but not in rural Districts?
Polls show Trump to be unpopular overall, and his message grates on educated people, particularly single women of the kind who live in and around cities and work in offices. That pulls those Districts toward Democrats.
But Trump stays strong in rural areas. Images of "caravans" of brown skinned immigrants who speak no English present as greater disruption to people living in predominately white rural areas than they do to people in diverse cities. Also the Trump message on energy and other resource extraction sounds like a pro-job message in rural areas. "Clean coal" may sound laughable to city people but the words sound like "stand by your friends" to people in coal country in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Production of oil, coal, timber, mining, and food take place in rural areas, and city people value the products, not the production. They value the oil, not drilling, and want wooden houses--indeed, affordable wooden houses--but file lawsuits when people try to cut trees. Most environmental rules on resources are complications for rural people, not city people, and rural people resent this.
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| Oregon's 2nd CD |
McLeod-Skinner called herself a "rural Democrat," and that was excellent positioning, but the Democratic brand is urban, not rural, and the brand message was determinative in Districts like Oregon's 2nd. (This is why Walden will be very difficult to defeat, although that will not be necessary since I predict he will voluntarily leave office.)
At the presidential level Democrats will either change their brand message to be more accommodating to rural people, or try to win elections without the votes of rural Districts and states. There are enough rural people in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin to elect Republicans, as we saw in 2016. But there are also enough suburban people in those same states to switch the states' electoral votes.
The Democratic presidential primary--now in its early stages--will sort out which direction the party goes.
1 comment:
She was a horribly unattractive candidate. No ideas other than what she could parrot from the democratic checklist. More healthcare in rural Oregon where there is more than enough, the usual renewable non working energy nonsense without checking on the realities, rural broadband to solve all your problems... another physically unattainable goal but it sounded good. She lived with her mother? She came here out of political opportunism she lives in Salem.
In District 1 of Cal they had a much more attractive but equally idealess woman running against Doug LaMalfa, raised $1 mil to his $500k and still got blistered. She thinks shes the shoe in to pull it off again? Mcleod thinks she'll pull it off again? Not with that face, good riddance.
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