Today, the Oregon legislature, with a 3/5 majority in both houses, and the ability to control the redistricting process decided, in the interest of bipartisanship, to make traitor Dem Kurt Schraeder’s district primary-proof from the left, and to preserve the status quo in the state legislature.
The single most important thing the legislature needed to do was to make 40 safe House seats for Democrats and 20 Senate seats, so that Republicans could no longer derail massively popular legislation by not showing up for work and denying the lege a quorum.
This could easily have been done, and was in fact done in the initial set of maps passed by the Oregon Senate. All the Democrats had to do was either pass it in the normal course or let the Republicans run out the clock on the special redistricting session so that Secretary of State Shemia Fagan could enact the maps herself.
And, once again, the Democratic majority kicked its power away.
A PDF of the new map can be found here.
olis.oregonlegislature.gov/…
The map fails to make HD9, which went Republican for the first time in 40 years in 2020, safer. In fact it makes it worse.
It fails to make districts 1 through 4 contain all of non-coastal Douglas County, Curry and Josephine Counties and all of rural Coos County, leaving northeastern Jackson County to merge with the conservative eastern districts. Instead, it takes Democrats away from the Hood River/Wasco-based 52nd District and puts them in the 59th without, however, making the 59th competitive.
It fails to take District 7 out of Douglas County and make it Democratic.
It fails to make Senate District 8 (House Districts 15 and 16) out of Albany and all of Benton County, for two safe D districts. It leaves district 15 safely red.
It fails to remove Turner and Aumsville from District 19, leaving that district solidly Republican too.
It fails to combine District 39, the only GOP district in the Portland metro area, with a solidly Democratic district that would elect a Democratic State Senator.
It unnecessarily divides Hood River County, removing Democrats from District 52.
It fails to remove Redmond from District 53 and replace it with the Warm Springs reservation, with the result that District 53, and thus Senate District 27, will remain Republican.
House Democrats have enabled the Republican minority to block legislation for another decade.
And their ONLY reward for this is that the Republican minority voted unanimously against it and is already screeching from the rooftops about the “far, FAR left socialist gerrymander” forced down their throats, and vowing lawsuits and total war against the Democrats, and by extension, against Oregon. No one could possibly have predicted that this would happen.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
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