Oregon has voted Democratic for president in every election since 1988, and 2024 held — Kamala Harris carried it by 14.3 points. The state barely moved: four years earlier it went Democratic by 16.1, a slip of 1.8 points while the country shifted about six toward Donald Trump. What makes Oregon distinct is where the blue majority sits. It is packed into the northwest, in the Willamette Valley counties that hold most of the population — Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, Lane, and Benton. Those five cast 54 percent of the statewide vote and 65 percent of every Democratic ballot in Oregon.
The rest of the state is another country. East and south of the Cascade Range — the crest that splits the wet, populous valley from the dry interior — the map runs deep Republican across a vast, thinly settled landscape of high desert and timber. Lake County, the reddest, voted Republican by 65.0 points; Multnomah County, holding Portland and 801,000 residents, was the bluest at 61.6, and alone supplied a quarter of the state’s Democratic votes. Only nine of Oregon’s thirty-six counties went Democratic. Across the rural east and south, voters in a line of counties have backed the Greater Idaho movement to redraw the border and join Idaho.
One county shows the other direction. Deschutes, around fast-growing Bend on the dry side of the Cascades, voted Republican by 6.7 points in 2012 and by 3.3 in 2016, then Democratic by 8.2 in 2020 and 10.4 in 2024 — newcomers turning a Republican county Democratic. Underneath is a secular, educated state of 4.3 million: third of the fifty in the share claiming no religion, at 66.9 percent, fifteenth in bachelor’s degrees at 36.7 percent, and eighteenth in median household income at $83,011. In 2026 Gov. Tina Kotek (D) faces a rematch with Christine Drazan (R), and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D) seeks a fourth term.