One can guess it from the geography. One can see it in the flags.
Oregon is a big place. The Portland-area part of Oregon is yet another west coast deep blue urban place.
Some of Oregon is a mix of rural and urban in the inland valleys that lie along Interstate 5. Those are characterized by urbanized places with hospitals, businesses, and colleges. They are surrounded by farmland on the valley floors, and huge forested areas that show green on the map below. The urbanized places show on this map as cities on or near the north-south Interstate: Salem, Corvallis, Eugene, Medford, and Ashland.
About 85% of Oregon's population lives close to I-5, either in Portland or one of those cities to the south.
The biggest part of Oregon is the Oregon that barely registers in the popular imagination of "Oregon." It is 15% of the population and 60% of Oregon's land mass. It is the area east of the green national forest land marked on the map, an area that is generally dry and very rural. Geographically and politically, it is part of the Mountain West, more like Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas than it is the rainy, politically-blue Oregon.
Like most rural places in America now, Eastern Oregon is Trump country. Tam Moore visited it two weeks ago and the flags he saw there caught his eye.
Tam Moore
Tam Moore is a lifelong journalist, who worked in television in his early days and then in print, writing for the Capital Press, a regional newspaper focusing on the agricultural industry. In the mid-1970’s, Moore served as an elected Jackson County Commissioner in southern Oregon. He was elected as a Republican in 1974, back at a time when Oregon Republicans were progressive on civil rights, when there were pro-choice Republicans elected locally and statewide, and when Republicans supported cleaning up the environment.
Guest Post by Tam Moore
There are a host of ways to measure the polarization gripping our country these days. Google tells us 192,000 scholarly papers on the subject are posted on the Internet. Then there’s the world of political polls – they abound – and of cartoons.
During a late October trip across state to visit a long-time friend living in Jordan Valley, the flags of Eastern Oregon tell stories.
The American Flag is flying in Eastern Oregon, just as surely as the American Flag was a visible fixture in many of those images of the January 6 insurrection mob storming the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C.
In the 1960s, waving the flag became a symbol of the divide between “doves” and “hawks” over our continuing war in Vietnam. The late William Rehnquist, writing as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court said, “throughout more than 200 years of our history (the flag) has come to be the visible symbol embodying the Nation.”
There’s a thread of nationalism in the politics which emerged in 21st Century America. Flags help tell that viewpoint. It wasn’t an accident that red from the flag came to be the red of “Make America Great Again” caps and apparel in the 2016 and 2020 Donald Trump election campaigns.
Over lunch at the Big Loop Pizza in Jordan Valley (population 179) while watching the constant stream of Amazon semi-trailers coming from an Idaho warehouse to destinations in Oregon, we talked politics. My friend observed that someone had said to him “Trump is an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.” In the election one year ago, the Jordan Valley precinct –much larger than the small town itself – recorded seven votes for Joe Biden, 154 for Donald Trump.
A frequent alternate to the U.S. flag is the rattlesnake-on-yellow banner attributed to Christopher Gadsden flown in the American Revolution. In 21st Century America the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag emerges as an expression of personal freedom and individualism, to quote one modern dictionary.
These are prosperous and independent people flying their flags. In Jordan Valley the economy is based on cattle ranching with grazing and feeding on deeded land in the winter. Most of the cattle graze public lands for half the year while hay for winter feeding grows on the deeded lands. Another part of the local economy comes and goes with mining of silver and other precious metals in nearby mountains. Both sectors of the economy – and elsewhere in Eastern Oregon you can add in timber, mostly grown on public lands – bring friction between residents and federal land managers. People talk politics because livelihoods depend on continuing relations with the federal government, and how the government and courts interpret environmental laws.
One year after the presidential election which replaced Donald Trump, a “Trump 2024” flag flew in the precinct of North Lake County where Trump polled 77 votes in 2020 – that was 71 percent of the votes cast. There’s a new slogan on the 2024 flag: Make votes count again.
It’s not all politics with the flags of Eastern Oregon. This banner configured to recite the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution flies over over a gate east of Christmas Valley in North Lake County. It's a precinct where last November’s vote was Trump 42, Biden zero.
But flying from both gateposts are two more flags. Both fan-flags for the Seattle Seahawks. You can imagine the folks at the other end of the long ranch road would as soon talk about the fortunes of Quarterback Russell Wilson as those of the divided country in which we live.
