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Oregon has been one-party Democratically controlled for nearly 35 years. Princeton University’s non-partisan Gerrymander Project report on Oregon basically explains why our last governor election in 2022 resulted in a Democratic governor winner that didn’t even get half the votes.

Brian Smith, a Democratic campaign consultant and member of the Muscogee Nation who works to elect Democratic candidates of color, agrees with Schrader.

“I joked with some colleagues the day after the election that Oregon Democrats can’t even get their gerrymandering right,” he said.

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2022/11/democrats-fall-short-republicans-advance-in-first-test-of-new-oregon-congressional-map.html

Paul Hessburg gave this amazing TED talk in Oregon. Combined with Oregon’s increasingly hotter and drier summers (which will only increase), he says that our well-meaning efforts at forest conservation have actually led us to have very unhealthy forests that are ripe for megafires. He gave this talk years ago, but it has turned out to be even worse than he knew. The Pacific Northwest now has summers with massive forest fires – and air quality so bad that is now regularly off the chart and worst in the world. Most summers you can no longer have campfires in federal, state, or local forests. Unless we change our unhealthy forest management, we should expect bigger and bigger megafires as well as massive forest diseases.

It’s another example of unintended consequences of human actions. Sometimes, as we’re finding, over-conservation is turning out to be just as damaging as unmanaged forest destruction.