At least we're not Colorado...
The task for all of us is to identify Oregon's "Way" and channel it so that we can continue to stem the force of all of the factors pulling us apart.
Kevin Frazier edits The Oregon Way when he finishes reading his Contract Law assignment for the night. In his spare time, he runs No One Left Offline - a nonprofit that donates hotspots to families on the wrong side of the Digital Divide.
Oregonians are not as polarized as you think or, at least, we're not as polarized as our neighbors. This is good news. It means there's something in our political atmosphere that's stopped Oregonians from racing to the political poles.
There are a lot of graphs in this post, so I wanted to start with the main takeaways:
The Oregon State Legislature is not nearly as polarized as many legislatures in neighboring states. For example, polarization in Oregon on the whole jumped by 0.28 from 2000 to 2017, but it spiked by 1.32 in Colorado and 1.20 in Arizona over the same time period.
Both Democrats and Republicans in Oregon have become more polarized.
Oregon is likely still among the top ten most liberal legislatures in the nation.
Our communities are more purple than electoral results suggest.
With those highlights out of the way, it’s time to dig into the details.
First, let’s define what it means to measure polarization. Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty calculate polarization by measuring the distance between the Republican and Democratic party medians, averaged across the two state legislative chambers in each state. Turns out, Shor and McCarty have run these calculations for every state spanning from 1996 to 2017. Before we move on, it’s important to remember that “most polarized” is not synonymous with “most ideologically extreme.”
Second, let’s see what polarization looks like in the West. The plot below shows polarization in Western state legislatures—the color of the line shows the party that’s polarizing faster.
As you can see, Oregon’s polarization has jumped from 1.54 in 2000 to 1.82 in 2017. I bet you’re wondering which party is more responsible for this polarization. The researchers offer an answer: Oregon’s Republicans, though it’s closer than Democrats would have hoped.
In the seventeen years of Oregon legislative polarization recorded by Sohr and McCarty, the median Republican became more measurably more polarized—rising from 0.45 in 2000 to 0.74 in 2017—a total of 0.29. Though that jump may seem insignificant numerically, it is larger than that of the median Democrat—who, as conveyed below, was essentiality as polarized in 2017 as in 2000 (note, however, that the Party’s polarization has spiked between 2004 and 2017, increasing by 0.21).
The combined polarization of the parties has not altered one fact: Oregon’s legislature is among the most liberal in the country.
Though the legislature is blue and the state is “blue” on an electoral college map, Jim Moore reminded us that on the neighborhood level things are a lot more purple:
Presidential Votes by County. Biden in Blue. Trump in Red.
What’s this information mean for The Oregon Way? It means that this “Way” is out there somewhere holding Oregonians (as expressed by median members of both parties) back from becoming as polarized as other states. The task for all of us is to identify that Way and channel it to continue to stem the force of all of the factors pulling us apart.
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