A Democrat runs for Congress in a rural Oregon Congressional District

Follow-up, part one, to the Chris Beck Meet-and-Greet at my home.

Chris Beck addresses a group of 40

A Democrat can win election in rural Oregon. It has been done. But it was almost 50 years ago: Al Ullman.

League of Conservation Voters scorecard

Oregon Democrat Al Ullman represented a largely rural district for 12 terms, from 1957 to 1981, becoming in his final four years the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. The district included most of the area in the current 2nd Congressional District, where Beck is a candidate. The incumbent Republican, Cliff Bentz, has a political problem: he is a steadfast supporter of a flagrantly corrupt president whose  healthcare policies are bankrupting local hospitals and whose policies on tariffs and beef are hurting local farmers. Chris Beck has his own political problem. He is a Democrat. 

Democrats were going through a brand realignment in 1980, when Ullman lost his seat. Ullman's poster read "Protect and develop the 3-R's: Rivers, Ranches, Resources." Democrats now emphasize the protect, not the develop. Rural voters notice. I won election that year, notwithstanding a platform that supported land use planning that would zone rural lands to reduce development. 

Reagan wins; Ullman loses; Sage elected

How did I manage that? Perhaps it helped that my occupation was "melon farmer." I was selling a simple product to fruit stands and a large supermarket, Thunderbird, that had a blue-collar, poor-side-of-town customer base. I came across as plausibly rural and not elitist. I drove a beat-up Ford truck, for real.

The Congressional District is Republican because it is rural. The Democratic brand reads to rural Americans as urban, white-collar, hostile to resource use, and contemptuous of them. Too woke. Fussy, not earthy. Think Prius, not Ford F-150. A white male politician on a horse wearing a cowboy hat is very probably a Republican. A person in an audience at a political event in Medford who objects to the phrase "hold down the fort," considering it to be a racist reference to cavalry garrisons and settler colonialism, is certainly a Democrat. 

Tam Moore, a journalist for seven decades so far, was a TV reporter at KOBI and wrote for The Capital Press, a specialty newspaper focusing on agriculture. Moore remembered when a Democrat could win in rural Oregon.

Barbara and Tam Moore

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Sunday afternoon jarred loose memories for me as I listened to a good candidate for Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District seat – Chris Beck – and some recent political history told by a long-time acquaintance, State Senator Jeff Golden. Golden recounted how the sprawling 2nd District hasn’t elected a Democrat since the redistricting which followed the 1980 census.

What I thought about on that sunny afternoon by Peter Sage’s pool was the last Democrat to represent Oregon’s 2nd District – Al Ullman.

Ullman, a real estate developer and builder from what we now call Baker City – it was just Baker back then --  jumped into politics in 1954, running for the 2nd District against first-term Republican Sam Coon. Democrat Ullman, an advocate for public development of hydropower in Hells Canyon, lost by 6,256 votes.

Golden

He tried again in 1956, the year I graduated from college, and won by a couple thousand votes. That launched a career of effective representation in Congress from 1957 through all of 1980. In a District which then included not only all of Eastern Oregon with its ranches, timber, mining, and vast open spaces but also a bit of the Willamette Valley brushing the state capital in Salem, Ullman was so popular that in 1972 Republicans didn’t field an opponent.

He’s the guy who legislated 61,000 acres of disputed land for the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, got recognition for the Burns-Paiute tribe, led the way in creating the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area and helped get the Pacific Northwest Power Planning and Conservation Act through Congress. With his seniority, Ullman rose to chair the House Ways and Means and Budget committees.

His name is on committee reports for national bankruptcy, tax and public debt law; Ullman’s work is reflected to this day in how Congress goes about writing budget law. Ullman was present and voted in over 7,000 roll calls during the 23 years he served on the Hill.

All of that came to an end in 1980, the year citizens unhappy with President Jimmy Carter’s handling of the Iran hostage crisis turned a sitting president out of office. It was the year of the Ronald Reagan landslide. That year every county in the 2nd District went for Reagan. Ullman, in a three-way race for a 12th term lost to Republican Denny Smith, son of an Oregon governor and publisher of some weekly newspapers.

The final tally was Smith by 3,795 votes out of 290,748 cast. Lloyd Marbet, an activist fighting against nuclear power plants, received 10,787 votes.

In a post-election interview with United Press International, Ullman blamed defeat on “a series of innuendos."

“None of those things were true, but if you say them in the right way and say them often enough, people are going to believe them,” he said.

My recollection at the time was a campaign that beat up Ullman for not spending much time in his district as he tackled those federal budget and fiscal issues.

All of this history has some relevance to Beck, and to his opponent, the incumbent Republican Cliff Bentz. Once again there’s an unpopular president and an incumbent not all that visible in his district.

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