In the American myth, the country is a journey, a great national voyage toward ever more freedom. And on that expedition, Oregon is the last stop, the destination state, the place where everyone gets off. Oregon is the Promised Land where the long pilgrim’s progress discovers a cornucopia of milk, honey, timber, microchips, jam bands, anarchists, and Ken Kesey.
I went to Portland, Oregon in August to experience a presidential campaign for the first time and what struck me about the state was that the notion of progress so infuses the Oregon mindset that, even the chairman of the state Republican party refers to himself as a ‘progressive.’ What the Japanese are to technology, Oregonians feel their state is to government: the place that’s always just a little bit ahead.
For a relatively young state, Oregon has accumulated a disproportionate share of national firsts (many of which are less objectionable than its culinary invention, the Gardenburger). At the beginning of the 20th century, Oregon pioneered direct democracy as the first state to institute the initiative, the referendum, the recall, and the direct election of U.S senators.
More recently, it has continued to boldly go where no state has gone before. It passed the nation’s first limited-growth law in the 1970s, and it became the first state to legalise physician-assisted suicide, approved by Oregon voters in 1994 and 1997. The state’s congressional delegation includes David Wu, the first Chinese-American member of the House of Representatives, who is being challenged this year by Goli Ameri, a Republican woman who would be the first Iranian-American in Congress.
Oregon is as much libertarian as it is liberal, and proudly beyond the control of partisan political machines. Of the 1.9m registered voters, almost 800,000 are Democrats, some 700,000 are Republicans—and an impressive 420,000 are independents. Whatever the issue, Oregon can never be taken for granted,.
For the presidential election, Oregon brings us another first: it has moved up Election Day by 2 1/2 weeks. Four years ago, Oregon voters participated in the first-ever U.S. presidential election in which the balloting was conducted entirely by mail. (To make balloting more convenient, Oregon voted in 1998 to conduct all of its elections by mail—using what most states think of as ‘absentee’ ballots.) This year, they’re doing it again, and the ballots were mailed to voters on 15t October.
So how does this affect campaigning? Instead of carrying out a 12-hour Get-Out-The-Vote operation, political campaigns, parties, and interest groups in Oregon will muster a 19-day GOTV drive. Ten percent of the people tend to vote when they first get their ballots, so you need to reach those people immediately.
America Coming Together, the liberal, George Soros-funded ‘527’ group, dispatched teams in minivans every day to collect ballots from the voters ACT has identified or registered. During the vote drive, both sides can tally up their ‘halftime score’ by checking with the state’s county clerks, who hand out lists that show which voters have cast ballots. The county clerks don’t divulge how each person voted, but the two campaigns can still compare the voters to the names on their enormous databases to see how effectively each side is turning out the voters on its lists.
There is the impression that Oregon might even be too liberal for Kerry to win. Not having Nader on the ballot helps enormously but driving south out of Portland towards a Kerry event at the state capital, Salem, I heard some of the extreme leftism Oregon is notorious for, on the radio. The host and a guest discussed an upcoming ‘Life After Capitalism’ conference. The guest, Z magazine co-founder Michael Albert, declared that today’s corporate workplaces in America are ‘worse than Stalinist Russia.’
As we neared Salem, however, a more familiar brand of nutjob began speaking over the air. He claimed, among other things, that kids had gone to jail for six months for saying the word “Jesus” in school. If these two people represent how Oregonians think of the two sides in the American political debate, no wonder so many have raised their middle fingers and voted for Nader in 2000. Or the Libertarian candidate, as 5 percent of Oregonians did in the most recent gubernatorial election, that party’s best showing in the state’s history.
In campaignland, because of vote-by-mail, Oregon really does live three weeks in the future. Just as the ground war will start earlier, so will the air war. The campaigns ratchet up their ads five weeks in advance of 2nd November, instead of the conventional two weeks. The situation in Oregon means that candidates have to gain votes wherever they can. In August, whilst I was part of an enthusiastic crowd of at least 40,000 who greeted Kerry at a waterfront rally in Portland. That number, however, may be deceptive: many at the rally were young people who are notoriously apt not to even register to vote and who may have turned up not so much to see much Kerry, as his star supporters, Jon Bon Jovi and Leonardo DiCaprio.
However, that conclusion might be unfair to Kerry. Vote-by-mail means grassroots energy is vital and there is no doubt the Kerry campaign had it. I met volunteers in their 80s who told me that they’ve never seen more activity in an election. There were also lots of young people: teenagers and college students coming in large numbers. It was wonderful to see democracy so invigorated and to see people so engaged in this election. This is for a number of reasons, not least because of the strong convictions on both sides in this campaign, but I left Oregon feeling that British campaigning would be similarly energised if we had more postal voting in the UK.