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News / Northwest

Shifting demographics drive GOP nosedive on U.S. West Coast

By ANDREW SELSKY, Associated Press
Published: February 28, 2020, 8:22pm
4 Photos
This Jan. 28, 2020 photo shows the Tower theatre located in downtown Bend, Ore., where the population in the early 1990&#039;s was around 25,000 and leaned Republican. Demographic shifts are helping push the Republican Party into a nosedive along the West Coast. The last Republican presidential candidate that California went for was George H.W. Bush. For Oregon and Washington, it was Ronald Reagan. Now, Republicans in the three states are even struggling to hold seats in Congress, statehouses and city councils.
This Jan. 28, 2020 photo shows the Tower theatre located in downtown Bend, Ore., where the population in the early 1990's was around 25,000 and leaned Republican. Demographic shifts are helping push the Republican Party into a nosedive along the West Coast. The last Republican presidential candidate that California went for was George H.W. Bush. For Oregon and Washington, it was Ronald Reagan. Now, Republicans in the three states are even struggling to hold seats in Congress, statehouses and city councils. (AP Photo/Andrew Selsky) Photo Gallery

BEND, Ore. (AP) — In the early 1990s, the population of Bend was around 25,000 and leaned Republican. A lumber mill operated in the Oregon high-desert town along the banks of a scenic river.

Today, the lumber mill is an REI outdoor recreation store. The population has quadrupled. And for the first time in memory, the number of registered Democrats in Deschutes County recently eclipsed the number of Republicans.

The transformation shows how demographic shifts and the GOP’s tack further to the right are helping push the party into a nosedive along the West Coast.

The last Republican presidential candidate that California went for was George H.W. Bush. For both Oregon and Washington, it was Ronald Reagan. Now, Republicans are struggling to hold seats in Congress, statehouses and city councils up and down the coast.

Local Angle

Twenty-four congressional districts in the United States border the Pacific Coast. Of those, 23 are represented by Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Just one district touching the Pacific Ocean, Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, continues to elect a Republican: Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler.

The five-term congresswoman from Battle Ground has become something of an anomaly in the U.S. House of Representatives. In addition to being the only Republican member of Congress from the entire Western seaboard, she’s also the party’s only woman of color within the chamber.

And she hails from a complicated district. The political sensibilities of Southwest Washingtonians continue to change, from a dependably Democratic bloc in the 2000s to a comfortable Republican stronghold in the 2010s — one that favored President Donald Trump by about 9 percent in the last presidential election — back to, potentially, a true swing district this year.

In 2018, after enjoying 20-percent-margin wins in three consecutive elections, Herrera Beutler’s lead slipped when her latest challenger, Democrat Carolyn Long, lost by just 5 points. That same year other previously Republican districts, like California’s 49th, flipped to blue by razor-thin margins.

A potential rematch between Herrera Beutler and Long is already shaping up to be competitive, with near-identical fundraising numbers reported by the candidates. Both national parties have put Washington’s 3rd District on their respective short lists of vulnerable seats. Whether Herrera Beutler can stave off the blue wave on the West Coast for another election will be decided by her district’s voters on Nov. 3.

— Calley Hair

California, Washington and Oregon will hold their presidential primaries on March 3, March 10 and May 19 respectively, and which Democratic candidates they favor will become clear. But this much is certain: In November, none of the three states is apt to go for President Donald Trump, and there is little hope Republicans will claw back much ground in other contests.

Political districts have flipped in population centers, from San Diego in the south to Seattle in the north.

“There is no way out,” Chris Vance, a former Washington state Republican Party chairman and legislator, said in a telephone interview.

In San Diego, by the U.S.-Mexico border, each of the nine city council districts now has more registered Democrats than registered Republicans, including one that until recently leaned strongly Republican.

In 1980, Orange County, near Los Angeles, was 80% white and a GOP stronghold. Today, Orange County is mostly Hispanic and Asian, with many displeased by Republicans’ hard stance on immigration. In 2018, voters there dealt a stunning defeat to a two-term GOP congresswoman.

The California GOP wound up losing six other U.S. House seats that year, leading a former Republican leader in the state to declare: “The California Republican Party isn’t salvageable at this time.”

Democrats also hold the California governor’s office, both U.S. Senate seats and almost complete control of the Legislature.

In Seattle, tens of thousands of tech employees have flooded into the city and its suburbs, hired by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. The influx of highly educated workers over the past decade helped fuel a population boom that made many communities much more diverse and affluent, and turned them away from the GOP and toward Democrats.

The result: The GOP has lost all the statehouse seats it once held in Seattle’s eastern suburbs.

Vance blames the area’s exodus of college-educated white voters, particularly women, from the GOP on the party’s turn toward more fundamentalist values under Trump. Vance himself abandoned the party in 2017 after an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate as the Republican candidate.

“This was the party of nerdy, wonky, tweedy capitalists who cared about economic growth. Now it is the party of populists: alt-right, let’s keep the immigrants out, truck- and rifle-populists,” Vance said. “That works in Mississippi and Arkansas and stuff, but it does not work in the Seattle area.”

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, among a line of Democratic governors dating back to 1985, faces no significant GOP challenge as he seeks a third term in November. Both of Washington’s U.S. senators are Democrats, and seven of its 10 U.S. House members belong to the party. Democrats hope to expand their majorities in the Legislature, where they hold a 28-21 edge in the Senate and a 57-41 advantage in the House.

And Democrats in Oregon — who already hold the governorship, both U.S. Senate seats and four of five U.S. House seats — wield supermajorities in the Legislature, and are gunning for more seats.

One of them is the House seat representing Bend, currently held by moderate Republican Rep. Cheri Helt. Challenging her is Deschutes County Deputy District Attorney Jason Kropf, whose treasurer is a veteran political fundraiser.

After the demise of the timber industry, Bend became a mecca for outdoor enthusiasts and beer lovers. The town of roughly 100,000 is arrayed along the Deschutes River and below the Cascade Range, with one of the highest number of breweries per capita in America.

“Bend is full of beautiful, very fit, beer-swilling jocks,” said James Foster, professor emeritus of political science at Oregon State University-Cascades in Bend.

The shifting demographic has made Bend, and Deschutes County, “much more moderate” than in the past, he said.

In 2018, about 4,100 more people moved to the county than moved out, with two-thirds arriving from 11 California counties — 10 of which are predominantly Democratic — and from the liberal bastions of Seattle and Portland, according to a new study by the Oregon Employment Department.

The growth of registered Democrats “could be a reflection of the political party affiliation of the new residents, rather than longtime locals shifting their party affiliation,” said economist Damon Runberg, who prepared the study.

Republican lawmakers in Oregon are so fed up with Democratic dominance that they began a boycott of the Legislature this week in an attempt to kill a bill aimed at stemming global warming. Helt bucked the move by remaining in the capitol.

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Some Republicans also formed a group, Move Oregon’s Border for a Greater Idaho. It is collecting signatures to make rural Oregon counties part of conservative Idaho.

“I understand they’re looking at Idaho fondly,” Idaho Gov. Brad Little said on Fox News last week. “But there’s a lot of governmental hurdles and legal hurdles that would have to be jumped before they could ever do that.”

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