Oregon state legislative elections, 2018. The Democrats gained three seats in the House and one in the Senate, giving them a supermajority in both chambers.
We can see both national and local trends here. Two of the Democratic House pickups were in Portland's more distant suburbs, which could be down to either the "Panera Democrat" (ugh) surge in suburbia nationwide or to poorer Portlanders being pushed out into the burbs by the housing crisis. Or both. Incumbents Julie Parrish and Rich Vial were fairly moderate Republicans and decent fits for the districts; both voted for a law banning domestic abusers from owning guns and were endorsed by the yuppie's organ, the
Willamette Week. But trends is trends.
The third Republican loss in the House was in District 52, centered on Hood River, a small but fast-growing city in the Columbia River Gorge, but also including some of Portland's eastern exurbia, separated by a large portion of the Mount Hood National Forest. Social worker Anna Williams defeated ex-cop Jeff Helfrich, who'd been appointed to the seat after the incumbent retired, by a slim margin district-wide but a large one in Hood River itself.
Hood River is an interesting place. It was a logging community, like a lot of places in the rural PNW, but escaped the crushing depression that hit most of the timber belt in the 80s and 90s because of a couple quirks of climate: it's a really good place to grow fruit, and it's on the best windsurfing spot on the Columbia. It's now both a farm town and a tourist hub, and home to big names in West Coast beer. (Double Mountain, pFriem, and Logsdon are worth picking up if you get the chance - Full Sail not so much, although they are of historical interest as one of the country's first big independent breweries.) All this tourist spiel is to say that one trend we might be seeing in these election results is Democratic strength in the state's smaller, regional cities. Democrats came closer than usual in Republican districts in Salem and won back the Senate seat centered on Ashland and Medford that they'd lost in a 2016 special election. They nearly took Hood River's senate seat, too. These cities are growing quickly too, if not quite as fast as Portland is.
(Bend - the dot in the middle of the starfish, in the center of the state - would seem to complicate the picture, but the Democratic nominee there was disowned by the state party and most donors for sexual harassment, so there's a reason it bucks the trend.)
This is just me spitballing, I'll have to take a look at the data to see if it's a plausible theory and the historical results to see if it's anything new, but it would be a good sign for a slightly more diversified Democratic Party in the state.
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