More in US want to split country up

But secession is a ‘pipe dream,’ professor says

PRINEVILLE, Oregon – Tens of thousands of rural, conservative eastern Oregon residents are so frustrated with their liberal urban neighbors they’ve decided they can no longer even share a ZIP code.

The “Greater Idaho Movement” would shift the Oregon border 200 miles west, a secession effort aligning the conservative farming, ranching and logging communities of eastern Oregon with their like-minded neighbors to the east. A dozen counties in eastern Oregon have already approved the plan, and voters in Crook County and the county seat of Prineville are currently considering the nonbinding measure with results due Tuesday.

Across Crook County, pop. 26,325, even voters who oppose the measure say they’re tired of the dictates from liberal lawmakers in the state capital of Salem and the state’s population center of Portland, citing marijuana legalization, efforts to reduce fossil fuel use, guncontrol measures, and how the state handled the coronavirus pandemic.

The sentiment in eastern Oregon reflects a broader national frustration and divide over the direction of the country that’s playing out in school districts, university campuses and big cities, all the way up to Congress.

A 2023 study by a Colby College professor found that more than 25% of Americans support some sort of secession by states, and nearly 25% percent agreed it “makes sense to split the country up.”

Ryan D. Griffiths, a political science professor at Syracuse University, said the Oregon ballot initiative is the latest in a long line of efforts. Among them: the failed “State of Jefferson” proposal in Northern California, simmering secession movements in Vermont and Texas, and a short-lived effort to move a chunk of Northern Colorado into Wyoming.

Griffiths said like other secession efforts, the Greater Idaho Movement lacks a significant groundswell of public support, and in most cases is more of a referendum

A pro-secession sign greets drivers headed into the Crook County seat of Prineville, Ore.

on state-level governance.

“It’s a pipe dream, in a way. What they’re doing is partly performative, for ideological purposes,” he said. “A lot of time, secessionist movements are really just bargaining efforts.”

But Griffiths acknowledged secession efforts like Greater Idaho keep bubbling up.

“It’s gaining a weird creeping momentum,” he said of proposed partisan divorces. “If you imagine a full-blown project to divide America into red and blue states, that would be incredibly dangerous because you’d have to partition people off. You don’t actually have neatly sorted populations, despite what many people think.”

In Oregon, the measure’s backers say they’re using a peaceful, existing political process to reduce friction between people at opposite ends of the political spectrum who are already living separate lives within the state. Supporters say they don’t want to just sell their homes and move to another state because they like living where they are.

“People have already sorted themselves into like-minded communities,” said Matt McCaw, a Greater Idaho movement spokesman. “People like to live around people who share the same values they do.”

Experts say the kind of self-segregation decisions people make are reflected in recent migrations nationally to states like Texas and Florida, but also in the “white flight” movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as white city-dwellers moved to the suburbs.

The Greater Idaho movement would need approval from both Oregon and Idaho’s legislatures, along with Congress.

Also undetermined would be how the Native American reservations in Eastern Oregon would be incorporated, as they span county and state borders.

Above all, Crook County residents say, is the idea they know their neighbors, from the farmers and ranchers to the tech support workers at the massive Facebook and Apple data centers, and the ladies behind the counter at the Sandwich Factory.

Prineville shop worker Amanda Halcom, 30, said she’s still unsure how she’ll vote. She said the cost of housing is going up, and she worries drug abuse is increasing. She said she believes many of the laws passed by Oregon’s legislature will ultimately make Crook County more urban.

“We are supposed to be a small town. That’s whole point,” said Halcom, who worries about raising her kids in what she considers an increasingly liberal environment. “That’s the kind of stuff we move here for.”

One concern: what would happen to Halcom’s pay if eastern Oregon joined Idaho. While minimum wage in Crook County is $13.20 per hour, it’s $7.25 an hour in Idaho.

Generally, Crook County has more in common with Idaho than most of its own state: The county is overall less racially diverse than both Oregon as a whole and the entire United States, and people living there earn less money than Oregon’s average. Crook County’s median family income is about $75,000, while it’s about $70,000 in Idaho and almost $87,000 for Oregon statewide.

“The mill owner and the mill worker have to go to the same restaurant, shop at the same grocery store. That keeps things in check,” said Seth Crawford, a Crook County commissioner.

Crawford has knocked on hundreds of his neighbors’ doors during his election campaigns and said he regularly hears the same concerns, from statewide marijuana legalization that Crook County opposed to complaints about how legislators want to regulate guns. People are also frustrated about paying higher taxes to fund government services they oppose, and want the freedom to raise their families as they see fit.

Competing signs across Prineville call to “Move Oregon’s Border” or urge voters to reject the effort with an “IdaNo!”

McCaw, the initiative spokesman, said even if the Crook County vote fails, the Greater Idaho Movement will persist.

He said he believes Americans are just too divided, and that while people who disagree can live side-by-side, Oregon’s liberal politicians consistently force their values onto rural areas. He said if other states decide to follow suit, so be it – there’s a process for changing boundaries for this exact reason.

“I don’t think we can sustain the path we are on,” McCaw said.