Weird Voting in Oregon

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Dec 20

Oregon is a rock-solid, reliably Democratic state.  It has been the scene, however, of prolonged and terrible rioting in Portland, and Portland is the home city of Antifa.  Rioting and burning lasted for over 100 days beginning in June.  Trump called upon the city’s mayor and state’s governor to do something – like call in the military to put down what looked like an insurrection.  The question for me was, will the people of Oregon put two and two together and figure out that monolithic Democrat rule is no longer a good thing?  Maybe throwing a vote Trump’s way might shock the Oregonian establishment into changing their ways.  Alternatively, are the people of Oregon so drunk on the Kool-Aid that they would die before they changed their progressive mindset?

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the state of Oregon with 1,002,106 votes, while Trump took 782,403 votes.  There were 144,000 votes for third party candidates.  Fox News called the state for Hillary at the moment the polls closed.  In 2020, Joe Biden, as expected, also took the state with 1,340,383 votes and Trump having 958,499 votes.  Third party candidates took 59,000 votes.  Trump increased his vote total by 176,000 (up 23 percent), but Biden increased the Democrat vote total by 338,000 (up 34 percent), double the increase of Trump between the 2016 and 2020 elections.  Third party support collapsed.  Trump was simultaneously more popular and proportionately less popular in Oregon between 2016 and 2020.

It’s hard to make sense of these outcomes.  Oregon has voted by mail for quite some time, so ballot fixing should be squeezed out of the system by now.  Voters are as engaged as the system can force them to be.  So, how is it possible in a Democrat state to increase the vote total for the Democrat nominee by 34 percent, while simultaneously increasing support for the Republican nominee by 23 percent?  Overall, there was a 22 percent increase in total votes in 2020 over 2016.  (Support for third party candidates dropped by 59 percent.) Where did all these extra votes come from, given the prior level of political engagement and the chaos of the civil disturbances?  It makes sense that people tired of the chaos might vote for Trump, but that ought to take votes from Biden.  However, it didn’t; Biden grew the Democrat vote by almost double Trump’s growth.

What would stimulate so many previously quiet Democrats to wake up and vote this time, given the manifest failure of Democrat rule burning before their eyes?

It’s a mystery to me.  But the results in Oregon show the pattern of a big gain in votes by Trump and an even bigger gain in votes by the Democrat nominee between 2016 and 2020.

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