Friday, August 18, 2006

RED DAWN: OREGON MAKES A RIGHT TURN

From the Willamette Week.

RED DAWN

"Forget about blue Oregon: The Republicans are taking over.

BY NIGEL JAQUISS | njaquiss at wweek.com
[July 12th, 2006] The May primary election hit Kevin Looper like a head-butt.
But what Looper learned from the May primary extinguished his habitual smile. Most of us just saw a tepid election with low turnout, especially among young voters. Looper saw confirmation of something far more profound: a reliably blue state on the verge of turning red."
"In the liberal Portland echo chamber, such a notion might seem absurd. But a Republican-controlled Oregon would probably be an entirely different place on issues ranging from abortion, school funding and the environment to the judiciary and the Legislature."
" What the daily neglected to mention is that on a statewide basis, Portland's Democratic super-majority matters less each day. The trend is so clear that if the Democratic Party of Oregon were a publicly traded corporation, owners would be lining up to dump their stock.

Over the past three decades, the number of registered Democrats in the state has not only failed to keep pace with population growth, it has actually declined in absolute terms. According to the secretary of state's election statistics, there were 794,218 Oregon Democrats in 1976; as of this past May, there were 760,066.

Thirty years ago, 56 percent of registered Oregon voters were Democrats; today, that number is less than 39 percent. "
Here is a quote that you won't see repeated in many MSM papers: "Republicans vote more because they are typically better educated and more affluent," says Bill Lunch, chairman of the political science department at Oregon State University.

I believe that the reason is not because the Republicans are offering such great candidates but because the Democrats have totally lost touch with the average Oregonian and only pander to the extreme Left causes. They also offer no solutions to the immediate problems.

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