My Vote in the 2022 Oregon Democratic Gubernatorial Primary

Sorry, but for those of you jonesing for Part 2 of my post on Mark Hatfield (and I’ve heard from quite a few of you who are), you’ll just have to wait until next week as ballots are in the mail this week for the Oregon primary election. (Return ballots must be postmarked by election day, May 17, or received by 8 p.m. that day at an official drop site or elections office.) I just could not resist giving Oregon Democrats the benefit of my counsel when they are deciding on who to vote for in the Democratic primary for governor.

In addition, at the very end I also make an endorsement in the Democratic primary for Oregon’s new 6th congressional district seat.

Top Line: Primaries matter. I hope you are registered.

Figure 1. My second all-time favorite Oregon governor, number 14, Oswald West (1911–1915). Source: Wikipedia.

I’m a reluctant Democrat, and Oregon has a closed primary. None of the nineteen Republican candidates would gain my vote. (See the article in the Oregon Capital Chronicle entitled “Republicans vow to restore timber industry, protect ag if they win Oregon governor’s race.”

Fifteen people are seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2022. I discounted thirteen as nonviable candidates (not enough name recognition, campaign funds, and/or substance) upon whom I would not want to waste my vote. That leaves two:

• former Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek

• Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read

While I am comfortable with either winning the Democratic nomination for the November 2022 general election, for the reasons stated in this post, I would be far more comfortable with one versus the other.

Both Candidates: Highly Qualified and Reliably Green

Both Read and Kotek are highly qualified to serve as governor.

Both are seasoned politicians, which is often a necessary—but not sufficient—requisite for the job. Both are generally progressives (Read somewhat to the right of Kotek).

While only Read has won office statewide (not to be discounted), Kotek has repeatedly won a very tough special election—that of maintaining the confidence of one’s fellow Democratic House members who have repeatedly chosen her as their speaker. Kotek can herd cats. Both Kotek and Read were elected to several terms in the Oregon House of Representatives and had terms that overlapped in service.

Both are generally reliable green votes on conservation issues, with identical Oregon League of Conservation Voterslifetime ratings of 87 percent.

When I first lobbied the Oregon legislature in the late 1970s, the majority of Democrats generally voted green, although the leadership always took steps to protect “downstate” (outside of greater Portland) Democrats on the Oregon Coast or elsewhere from having to take hard votes on conservation and environmental issues. Back in the day, we could also rely on several Republican votes, which is not generally the case today. Today, as back then, if push comes to shove between the environment and labor or justice or education or whatever, the environment will lose in the Democratic caucus.

As both Read and Kotek have comparable conservation voting records, I looked to other factors to break the tie. Two public lands conservation matters very close to my heart—the Elliott State Forest and the drawing of Oregon’s congressional districts—helped me choose which candidate to endorse. I’ve chosen these issues out of the many public lands conservation and environmental issues I care about not just because they are important, but also because the leadership shown by one candidate on one issue is in stark contrast to the “leadership” exhibited by the other candidate on the other issue.

Beyond public lands conservation matters and leadership, I considered matters of electability in a complicated three-way race in the general election.

Tobias Read and the Elliott State Forest

In 2017, the State Land Board was gearing up to sell more than 82,000 acres of the Elliott State Forest to a private timber syndicate because this land held in trust for the benefit of Oregon’s schoolchildren was no longer producing much timber due to multiple endangered species issues. Big Timber was chilling the champagne before the land board reversed course. Earlier this year, the Oregon Legislative Assembly established an Elliott State Research Forest, a generally excellent outcome. See my Public Lands Blog posts “The Elliott State Forest Will Not Be Privatized—But Will It Be Saved?” (2017) and “An Elliott State Research Forest” (2021).

While serving in the Oregon House of Representatives, Representative Tobias Read introduced a bill that would provide for a mechanism to convert state trust lands into state public lands. The problem—highlighted by the Elliott State Forest crisis—is that lands in the Common School Fund are to be managed for the benefit of Oregon schoolchildren (a responsibility commonly perceived at the time as entailing clear-cutting the forest and selling the logs to fund schools), not for the benefit of all Oregonians. While trust lands have public values and public access, they are not public lands.

In 2016, Read was elected Oregon state treasurer, one of three members of the State Land Board (SLB), which oversees the Common School Fund (and therefore the trust lands within it). The other two SLB members are the governor and the secretary of state. While enviros strongly backed Read for the statewide post, no sooner did he take office in 2017 than he voted to sell off the Elliott State Forest—about half of which is still virgin older forest—to a timber syndicate.

The environmental community went nuts on Read. The Oregon League of Conservation Voters (OLCV) mounted an all-out effort to help Treasurer Read see the error of his ways. (There is no doubt in my mind that one of the reasons OLCV endorses Read’s opponent is the absolutely god-awful wrong vote land board member Read took.)

Not that there is any defense for that vote, but in Read’s defense, the previous SLB of three Democrats (Governor John Kitzhaber, Secretary of State Kate Brown, and State Treasurer Ted Wheeler) had voted to sell three “test” parcels of the Elliott as a prelude to selling off the entire state forest to that private timber syndicate. Because of the believed limitations of the trust responsibility, these Democrats protested they had no choice but to sell the land to the highest bidder and invest the proceeds in more lucrative assets in the Common School Fund. A later Oregon Supreme Court ruling found that the SLB could take a much more expansive view of what their trust obligation actually entails. (See my Public Lands Blog post “An Elliott State ‘Research’ Forest?” (2020).

It also could have been the case that there was something in the water supply of the capitol building to explain the mass madness of modern Oregon Democrats favoring the selling off and clear-cutting of older virgin forests. Thinking that Oregonians today would tolerate the privatizing of the Elliott can perhaps only be explained by the diagnosis of temporary insanity.

Read did see his error and then undertook a course that resulted in the decoupling of the Elliott State Forest from the Common School Fund in a way that converted the trust lands to public lands and imposed a very significant state mandate that elevated the conservation status of the imperiled forestlands. It was not easy—the course was not always clear and never straight—but Read conceived of making it the state research forest that it has come to be. Read and his staff never wavered as they navigated some very challenging political shoals.

(To be fair, Governor Brown is also a hero of the Elliott, and Senate Majority Leader Peter Courtney and House Speaker Kotek were also very helpful. But Read led on the issue.)

Tina Kotek and the Drawing of Oregon’s Congressional Districts

Every decade, after the federal census, the Oregon legislature has to redraw legislative districts, not only for the Oregon House of Representatives (always sixty seats) and the Oregon Senate (always thirty seats), but also for the seats assigned to Oregon in the US House of Representatives. This time the matter was extra complicated because Oregon gained another seat, for a new total of six. The support or opposition of the member of Congress in whose district public lands reside can make the difference as to whether those public lands are elevated in conservation status.

This time around, the Republicans in the Oregon House were seriously in the minority and felt that the only way they could exercise any influence was to threaten to leave the building so as to deny the Democrats the quorum necessary to allow them to vote to pass their legislative agenda. The Rs had walked before, and House Speaker Tina Kotek made a deal with House Minority Leader Christine Drazan that in exchange for the Republicans not walking out that session, they would have equal representation on the special redistricting committee charged with redrawing the Oregon House, Oregon Senate, and US House seats for Oregon.

Later, Kotek reneged on the deal, and the redistricting committee—stacked with Democrats—drew the new lines. Kotek was roundly criticized not only by Republicans but also by some (but not enough) Democrats for breaking the deal—but not for making the deal in the first place. The deal appealed to House Republicans because they figured they might fare better at protecting their own districts (dismissing the thought of getting more) than the alternative. The deal appealed to House Democrats because they figured they could pass more of their legislative agenda.

In regard to the Oregon House and Senate districts, Kotek had backup in the form of Democratic secretary of state Shemia Fagan, who, by law, would have redrawn the lines if the legislature had not. However, that wouldn’t have been the case had the legislature failed to redistrict Oregon’s congressional districts. If the legislature had failed to act, Oregon’s congressional seats would likely have been drawn by a federal judge, and likely less favorable to Democrats. (By the way, I actually believe in having elective districts drawn by an independent nonpartisan commission. However, I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament. All the states must do it at the same time.)

The fate of the House of Representatives (if not also the Republic) in the 2022 election gets down to which party does better in the redistricting efforts in the various states. Kotek made a tactical decision to pass some bills that was a strategic blunder in terms of the Democrats having a chance to win a majority of the seats in Congress in the coming decade. By making the political deal in the first place and then reneging on it in the second place, Kotek showed stunning lack of judgment. If she had been playing chess, which has unbreakable rules, Kotek would have lost the match by failing to think more than a few moves in advance.

How to Choose for the Upcoming Three-Way Gubernatorial Race?

Both Read and Kotek are very qualified to serve as the governor of Oregon. If Tobias fails to win the primary, of course I’ll be voting for Tina. Here are the political factors I considered that lead me to vote for Tobias in the primary.

Who Has Momentum?

Both have momentum. A recent poll, albeit released by the Read campaign, showed Kotek leading at 25 percent, with Read at 20 percent. With a polling margin of error of 3.8 percent, it’s what the media loves to call a statistical dead heat. Most significant is that 56 percent of voters polled were undecided. (The respondents were not given the option to state a preference for any of the other thirteen Democratic hopefuls.) That’s a huge number of undecideds.

Who Has Money?

In their primary, both Read and Kotek have significant funding. I’m worried about independent candidate for governor and former Democratic state senator Betsy Johnson, who is receiving shitloads of money from deep pockets that used to make futile contributions to Republicans. Nike founder Phil Knight has already given $1 million to the Johnson campaign. He might well give more. In 2018, Knight gave $2.5 million to the Republican candidate for governor. In 2010, he gave $0.4 million to the Republican candidate. Perhaps tired of backing losing Republicans, Knight is backing Johnson, who was—until renouncing her party to run for governor—the most unDemocratic of Democrats in the Oregon Senate.

Worrying About Betsy Johnson

If Mark Hatfield was the pacifist timber beast (he was) to appeal to crossover voters, Betsy Johnson is the pro-choice timber beast to appeal to moderate unaffiliated voters. Today, while there are more Democrats registered in Oregon than Republicans, the plurality registration is unaffiliated.

In a two-way race, most of the voters unaffiliated with a party—despite their protestations of independence—reliably vote for the same major party each time. In a three-way race that includes an erstwhile Democrat—albeit one who voted far too often with the Republicans—things are different. I worry that Betsy Johnson will draw votes from Democrats (formally registered as such or not) who are more blue-collar than latte-sipping, and from Republicans (formally registered as such or not) who are not anywhere near as bat-shit crazy as the multitude of candidates in the Republican primary.

In a winner-take-all election with three or more candidates, one can become governor without getting a majority—but merely a plurality—of the vote. My all-time favorite governor, Barbara Roberts (number 34, who, by the way, has endorsed Tobias Read), won only a plurality of the vote.

There are generally two kinds of elections: base elections, where the winner is determined by which side gets more of their side to actually vote, and swing elections, where the winner is determined by who got the most votes from the middle. Generally two kinds of elections because generally there are only two major candidates in the general election. When there is a third major candidate in the mix, all bets are off and the election is generally a base-swing (or swing-base) hybrid. Minor candidates can “spoil” the election of a major candidate by drawing off votes, but Johnson is no minor candidate. This is a race with three major candidates.

I am not compelled by the argument that nominating Tina will bring out the Democratic base. Historically, the Democratic base turnout in midterm elections such as this one is pathetic and this is going to be a swing election in November.

Thinking Ahead to the General Election

One’s ideal choice in a party primary election is not necessarily the best choice for the party candidate to win the general election. While my politics are a bit closer to Kotek’s, I think Read is more electable in the general election. The late-great Molly Ivins counseled to vote one’s heart in the primary election and one’s head in the general election. Generally a fine suggestion, but what if the general election is a three-way race, as is the case this year in Oregon?

There are three theories on the impact of Johnson in the race:

• She will draw votes from both parties and nonaffiliated who see themselves as moderates.

• As a recovering Democrat, she will draw votes from moderate Democrats uncomfortable with the Ds’ swing to the left.

• As someone very aligned with what the Republican Party used to stand for, she will draw votes from Republicans uncomfortable with the Rs’ swing to the right.

The theories are not mutually exclusive and could coalesce in a hybrid or all-of-the-above result. To the degree that moderate Ds feel that their party is swinging too far left, the nomination of Kotek will exacerbate that. Kotek is very progressive—in general a good thing if you are running in the Greater Portland area but not necessarily statewide. Not all of Oregon is Portland.

If only Democrats could choose their nominee after knowing who the Republican nominee is. But since that’s not possible, Democrats must choose the candidate they believe can best win in the three-way general election. Given the likelihood of a particular kind of Republican nominee and the certainty of Johnson in the race, in my view, under any theory of winning, Democrats would be better positioned to win the general election for the governorship with Tobias Read as their nominee.

In this three-way race, I’m voting my head in the primary.

Bottom Line: If you are a registered Oregon Democrat, I urge you to join me in voting for Tobias Read.

Figure 2. State Treasurer Tobias Read. Source: Oregon State Treasury official photo.

P.S. Oregon 6th Congressional District Democratic Primary Endorsement

Figure 3. The new Oregon 6th Congressional District. From the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway on the north to the City of Jefferson on the south. It includes all of the counties of Polk and Yamhill and portions of Marion, Clackamas, and Washington. Source: State of Oregon.

There are nine candidates for the Democratic nomination for Oregon’s new congressional district (Figure 3). I highly recommend Andrea Salinas (Figure 4). Andrea has been endorsed by the Oregon League of Conservation Voters (OLCV), which says:

From when she served as an OLCV board member to her current work as an environmental and climate champion in the Oregon House, Andrea Salinas is always driven by her values, her work ethic, and her foundational belief that change is possible if we work for it. Her strong values paired with her experience fighting for everyday people, our communities, and our climate, make her exactly who we need representing all of us in Congress.

Hey, I also served as an OLCV board member! Of course, it was so many decades ago that no one at OLCV today has any knowledge of it. I’m going to give Andrea some money.

Figure 4. Best candidate in the Democratic primary for Oregon’s new 6th Congressional District. Source: andreasalinasfororegon.com.

Mark Odom Hatfield, Part 1: Oregon Forest Destroyer

This is the first of two Public Lands Blog posts on the most consequential Oregonian yet to serve in the United States Senate. In Part 1, we look at his role in enabling the destruction of Oregon forests. In Part 2, we will examine his complicated legacy.

 Top Line: While Oregon’s Mark Hatfield was a great US senator, it was not because of his record on the conservation of nature.

Figure 1. Senator Mark Odom Hatfield (R-OR) in 1981. Source: US Senate.

Recently, the Oregon Historical Society (OHS) had one of their launch parties in Pendleton for a new traveling exhibit: “The Call of Public Service: The Life and Legacy of Mark O. Hatfield.” On the wall, in big 3D letters, was a list of things OHS says Hatfield most cared about:

1. Wilderness Protection

2. World Peace

3. Infrastructure

4. Health Care

5. Equal Rights

6. Education

Figure 2. One of several kiosks in the Oregon Historical Society’s traveling exhibit on Senator Mark O. Hatfield. Source: Oregon Historical Society.

When I read this, I was stunned. More than once I had characterized Mark Hatfield as a pacifist timber beast when explaining his ability to survive and prosper politically in Oregon. (Although a Republican, he was downright liberal on issues such as world peace, health care, equal rights, and education, which resulted in a lot of Democrats repeatedly voting for him.)

Peace, Yes. Wilderness Protection, Not So Much.

Looking at that list on the wall told me that a historian, perhaps more than one, believes that the thing Mark Hatfield cared most about was wilderness protection. Or perhaps it’s merely a listing of six causes, with no ranking of importance—but if that were the case, alphabetical order would be the usual way to signal such, or even random ordering. However, this list would be in reverse alphabetical order if wilderness protection and world peace were reversed. No, wilderness protection was clearly meant to be first and most important.

I’m pretty sure Hatfield cared more about world peace than wilderness protection. He talked about and did more about peace. He deeply opposed the Vietnam War at a time when most Oregonians supported it. He proposed a cabinet-level Department of Peace to offset the Department of Defense (which combined the Department of War and the Department of the Navy). For the relative and absolute dearth of presence of the military-industrial complex in Oregon today, we can thank Hatfield. I recall getting a mass mailing from Hatfield way before Gulf War I where he warned of “our sons fighting and dying in the sands of Arabia” for oil.

The OHS exhibit features Hatfield’s efforts to establish wilderness, wild and scenic rivers, and the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. It’s true that for most of the area protected today in Oregon as wilderness, Hatfield was instrumental. For most of the streams protected today in Oregon as wild and scenic rivers, Hatfield was instrumental. The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area would not be, if not for Hatfield.

What OHS says is true—as far as it goes.

However, millions of acres of Oregon’s wild forests could have been protected as wilderness but were not, thanks to Hatfield. (You can read my very opinionated but nonetheless factual history of Oregon’s wilderness wars, in which Hatfield played an outsized role for so long, in a chapter of my book Oregon Wild: Endangered Forest Wilderness.)

However, several dammed streams in Oregon—the Upper Rogue, dammed by Lost Creek Dam; the Applegate River, dammed by the Applegate Dam; the Elk Creek tributary to the Upper Rogue, dammed at one time by the Elk Creek Dam; the Willow Creek tributary to the Columbia River; and more—were damned by Hatfield. (The Elk Creek Dam no longer damns Elk Creek, which is now a component of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System.)

Figure 3. The first kayaker to pass through the breached Elk Creek Dam in 2009. Hatfield used raw political power to force the Army Corps of Engineers to build a dam that even the agency didn’t want to build. Source: WaterWatch (Bill Cross).

However, there is no Cascade Volcanic National Park in the Oregon Cascades, because of Mark Hatfield.

However, no single person did more to enable the liquidation of most of Oregon’s old-growth forests than Senator Mark O. Hatfield. At the logging’s peak, more than three square miles of old-growth forest on Oregon federal public lands were being clear-cut each week. From his perch on, and often as chair of, the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Hatfield made sure the money was there for the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to lay out the clear-cuts and build the roads in old-growth forests. Multiple times, including during his last years in office, Hatfield attached riders (a rider is a provision of law attached to must-pass legislation that would not receive a majority vote on its own) that barred the courthouse door to citizens seeking to enforce federal laws to protect ancient forests.

The Definitive Book on Hatfield (So Far)

Figure 4. The definitive book on Hatfield by Richard W. Etulain, a noted western historian who is a self-admitted Hatfield fanboy. Source: University of Oklahoma Press.

As a matter of professional interest (know one’s opponent), I have read all the books written by Hatfield, and when Mark O. Hatfield: Oregon Statesman by noted western author Richard W. Etulain came out last year I was interested to read one about Hatfield. I found it very informative. The meat of Etulain’s book ends in 1967 as Hatfield moves from the job of governor of Oregon to that of US senator from Oregon, as its coverage of Hatfield’s Senate career is superficial. As the author has noted, the Hatfield papers at Willamette University are sealed until July 2022 (Hatfield’s one hundredth birthday), so Etulain concentrated on the gubernatorial years, where the record is more complete. Etulain has said that writing about Hatfield’s Senate years would take at least five years of research and writing, something he says, at eighty-three, he cannot commit to.

Hatfield is the first governor I can remember. When my interactions with the man started in 1979 as I was advocating for wilderness, he had been a senator for more than a decade. As I read the book, I kept feeling that when writing about issues facing Hatfield as governor (1959 to 1967), Etulain was taking digs at the likes of me for existing at all during Hatfield as senator (1967 to 1997). Tellingly, when writing about Hatfield’s gubernatorial years, Etulain keeps referring to “environmentalists,” a term that didn’t come into general use until around the first Earth Day in 1970. Here are a few excerpts that indicate the author’s disdain for anything close to an “environmentalist.”

[Hatfield] viewed Dallas as a wholesome and holistic community, its life orchestrated primarily by the timber industry with tight links to lumbering and the daily routines of the saw mill. . . . This optimistic view of the timber industry and lumbering generally casts light on Hatfield’s later political support for the industry, which his environmentally motivated critics thought far too strong . . .

Logging and lumbering firms wanted to cut more trees to capitalize on Oregon’s timber riches. Hatfield began to work on that production-conservation issue as a middle-of-the-roader, a position that upset born-again environmentalists, especially Democratic environmentalists, in Hatfield’s later senator years . . . 

President Theodore Roosevelt, thoroughly influenced by his forester friend Gifford Pinchot, stood for “wise use” of natural resources. Assertive conservationist John Muir spoke passionately for “wilderness” advocates: the setting aside of forests, lands, deserts, and natural wonders as wilderness areas to be appreciated but not “used.” Hatfield was drawn to the wise-use philosophy, a position later enthusiastic environmentalists greatly disliked. [emphasis added]

Etulain has said that he found Hatfield to be “the ideal politician,” and he couldn’t find any major faults with the senator. I look forward to a more encompassing and less hagiographic biography that also covers the man’s time in the Senate.

The US Postal Service has a policy: no stamps honoring a person until they have been dead at least a quarter century. Hatfield has another fourteen years to go. Let historians take the time to fully examine his life.

The First Time I Met Hatfield

In 1979, James Monteith (then executive director of the Oregon Wilderness Coalition or OWC, later the Oregon Natural Resources Council and now Oregon Wild) and I got a meeting with Hatfield in Washington, DC. At the time I was OWC’s western field representative, and my trip to DC was the first time I had been east of the Mississippi River. A Hatfield aide took us from his office in one of the Senate office buildings to the Capitol. We were ushered into Hatfield’s hideaway in the Capitol building, a small and very ornately decorated private den with only a room number on the door. It was meant to impress, and it did. 

Hatfield was very charismatic and immediately put us at ease. He was so charismatic that after that first meeting, I liked him even when I knew he was screwing me (actually nature). He was extremely smart and listened when we talked. Actually, he was reading Monteith and me like we were books.

We first chatted about politics, and he said he wanted to get a wilderness bill done before the 1980 election. Ronald Reagan hadn’t yet obtained the Republican nomination and was still a long shot. Hatfield said, “Can you imagine if Reagan becomes president?” and every one of the four of us in the room laughed and rolled our eyes. Less than two years later on January 20, Hatfield was in a morning coat welcoming Reagan to the Capitol building in his role as chair of the congressional inaugural committee.

Of course, we got to talking about wilderness, of which Hatfield was not a great fan. Only two years earlier, Hatfield had very reluctantly changed his position to favor returning the French Pete Valley to the Three Sisters Wilderness. French Pete was the first wilderness battle in Oregon that involved significant amounts of virgin older forest.

Monteith was a wildlife biologist at heart and brought up how many medium and large mammals—especially predators—need wilderness to prosper, if not just exist. Hatfield wasn’t buying it. “When I was growing up in Dallas,” Hatfield said, “we had lots of cougars, but we didn’t have any wilderness.” Dallas is a small community in the mid-Willamette Valley that abuts the Oregon Coast Range. In the 1930s, the Oregon Coast Range still had very large amounts of roadless virgin older forest. By 1979, it did not.

Monteith and I realized that to Hatfield, “wilderness” was merely a land designation in law, while we both felt that “wilderness” was also a character of land in fact. All that those Coast Range cougars knew was that their home was wild.

I was mortified when Monteith tried to make our point by noting that “only God and Congress can make Wilderness.” (I capitalize the W here because James always insisted on it when referring to that designation.) Hatfield was quite the intense Christian, while Monteith and I were quite the contrary. However, I was relieved when Hatfield immediately retorted, “And we don’t let Him in on it until we are damn well ready.” The tiny office filled with laughter all around.

Speaking of mammalian predators, Monteith soon brought up a rare forest-dwelling member of the weasel family, the fisher (Pekania pennanti). To our surprise, Hatfield asked his aide, who had been sitting quietly, if she knew what a fisher was. She said no, so Hatfield proceeded to hold forth on the wilderness-loving species. “Did you know that fishers can kill a porcupine without getting quilled?” he asked the young (enough to be his daughter) aide. She did not. “I’ll show you,” said Hatfield. “Get down on the floor on your hands and knees.” While wide-eyed in shock (as were Monteith and I), she complied even though wearing a dress and some very unsensible shoes. Next, Hatfield got on his hands and knees and mimicked (at a relatively respectful distance, I feel bound to note) how a fisher attacks a porcupine in its quill-free face, flips it on its back, and goes for the kill at its quill-free neck. For a moment, I thought Hatfield was going to insist the nubile aide roll over on her back, but Hatfield returned to his chair and continued talking, and soon so did the aide to her chair.

Hatfield had made clear to us that he was well informed and also very powerful. The meeting ended cordially. (Later, that very aide served in high administrative positions that required Senate confirmation.)

Another Fateful Encounter with Hatfield

One sunrise in June 1984, I ran into Hatfield in the United terminal at Chicago O’Hare. We’d both taken the red-eye from PDX on our way to DCA. Hatfield came up to me and said, “Andy, what brings you to DC?” (Of course, I was secretly thrilled that the senator remembered me and called me by my first name.) The (still-to-this-day) record-sized Oregon Wilderness Act had just become law, and I was feeling quite good about that. (Hatfield was not.)

“Well, Senator, I’m going back to lobby for your timber bailout bill,” I said. Northwest Big Timber had way overbid on many old-growth timber sales and needed congressional relief to avoid massive contract defaults. Enviros favored the legislation because it would cancel many damaging sales and we would have another chance to thwart them as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management tried to resell them.

“You mean my Federal Timber Purchaser Contract Payment Modification Act?” said Hatfield, rather icily I thought.

“Sure. A lot of those sales are old growth and in roadless areas, so we’d like another shot at saving them in the next wilderness bill,” says I.

After less than the customary few milliseconds of pause, Hatfield, with chilling deliberateness, says, “Andy. I will never ever do another wilderness bill.”

The conversation ended not because the plane was boarding but because there was nothing else to say.

As I pondered the exchange at 33,000 feet over Ohio, I realized that the godfather of Oregon politics had destroyed our hope of ever saving any more wilderness as Wilderness. Hatfield had enacted wilderness bills into law in 1968, 1972, 1978, and 1984. The first of them had carved the Mount Jefferson Wilderness out of a Forest Service Primitive Area pursuant to the Wilderness Act of 1964. The matter had been thrust upon Hatfield early in his first term. The latter three had been passed during—not uncoincidentally—years in which Hatfield stood for re-election. All are wilderness areas today, but it was enough for the senator to declare “never again.”

·      His 1972 legislation added the lower Minam River Canyon to the Eagle Cap Wilderness (~72,000 acres).

·      The 1978 Endangered American Wilderness Act designated or expanded four Oregon wilderness areas (~275,000 acres). All somewhat had timber as an issue, but especially returning French Pete to the Three Sisters Wilderness. Finally, Hatfield had come around. (It was, after all, an election year.)

·      The 1984 Oregon Wilderness Act (~851,000 acres) was primarily about saving as wilderness roadless areas that included large amounts of virgin older forest: Boulder Creek, Cummins Creek, Rock Creek, Drift Creek, Middle Santiam, North Fork John Day, Eagle Cap Additions, Bull-of-the-Woods, Salmon-Huckleberry, Badger Creek, Grassy Knob, Rogue-Umpqua Divide, Table Rock, Mill Creek, North Fork Umatilla, Monument Rock, Strawberry Mountain Additions.

It was logical that we could expect another wilderness bill in 1990. Plotting the acreage of those previously every-six-years Oregon wilderness bills suggested an exponential curve on which we could expect the next wilderness bill to protect ~2 million acres. But alas, there was no Oregon wilderness bill in 1990, as the year before the northern spotted owl had hit the fan.

I consulted with fellow wilderness warrior James Monteith, and we decided to pivot from occasionally saving old growth via wilderness designations brokered at the state delegation level to saving all old growth any which way we could. We would go around Oregon’s political godfather. We had no other choice. The Pacific Northwest forest wars ensued.

(continued next week)

The Presidency in 2020: To Be Decided by 538 Votes Cast in 51 Elections

The Presidency in 2020: To Be Decided by 538 Votes Cast in 51 Elections

We don’t have one national election for president in 2020. Rather we have fifty-one elections (in fifty states and the District of Columbia) that will decide the next president of the United States. Today, we can predict with certainty the total number of votes that will be cast for the presidency: 538.

That is 2 votes for each state (equaling the number of US senators), additional votes equaling the number of members of each state’s delegation to the House of Representatives (435 total), plus the 3 electoral votes cast by DC (which we can hope will someday be the state called Douglass Commonwealth).

Figure 1. Electoral votes allocated by states. Source: Wikipedia.

What Does This Have to Do with Public Lands?

The US Constitution’s property clause (Article IV, Section 3, Clause 2) says:

The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; . . .

Regarding the property clause, the Supreme Court has found that “[t]he power over the public land thus entrusted to Congress is without limitations” (United States v. Gratiot, 39 U. S. 526 [1840]). However, Congress has delegated much of its power over the public lands to either the president (for example, the power to establish national monuments and to proscribe oil and gas development in areas of the ocean), the secretary of agriculture (the National Forest System, administered by the USDA Forest Service), and—mainly—the secretary of the interior (the National Park System, the National Wildlife Refuge System, Bureau of Land Management holdings, and such).

Cabinet secretaries are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. With its current cabinet and their predilections, the Trump administration is an existential threat to public lands as we know and love them. This is mainly because Trump has blown through so many norms (“a standard or pattern, especially of social behavior, that is typical or expected of a group”). No previous president would even have considered trying many of the things Trump has gotten away with (for me, shrinking national monuments comes immediately to mind). Imagine him in a second term.

To protect the public lands for this and future generations, we must put the current administration out to pasture.

The Popular Vote Doesn’t Matter

Just ask Andrew Jackson (1824), Samuel Tilden (1876), Grover Cleveland (1888), Al Gore (2000), and Hillary Clinton (2016). They all received the most votes from voters but lost in the Electoral College vote.

Figure 2. The 2016 presidential election. Though receiving more popular votes, Hillary Clinton (blue) received only 227 electoral votes. Trump (red) received 304 votes. Colin Powell received 3 votes, while John Kasich, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Faith Spotted Eagle each received 1 vote. Source: Wikipedia.

Electoral votes in most states are winner-take-all, save for Maine (4) and Nebraska (5), which give two votes to the statewide winner and a vote to the winner of each congressional district. From an Electoral College standpoint, any popular vote above the 50 percent plus one vote required to win the Electoral College votes in the forty-eight states where a plurality win is good enough, is a vote that makes no difference. As Clinton showed, one can get millions more popular votes than her opponent, but if those extra votes are in blue states, they are for naught.

Unless one wins the Electoral College, one doesn’t get to govern, no matter how worthy and just the policy proposals. However, given the existential threat Trump poses to the public lands—or to [fill in the blank]—the consequences of winning (or losing) are just more important in 2020.

“Electability” Boils Down to the Ten States in Play

In 2020, electability will boil down to who wins the Electoral College votes in ten states. (See Figure 3.) The blue states will most likely vote Democratic (209 votes), while the red states will most likely vote Republican (204 votes). It is the toss-up gray (some prefer the resulting mix of purple) states that will decide who is the next president of the United States (125 votes).

Figure 3. The states in play. Click on the source link to go to an interactive version where you can change the colors on the map and see what it takes to get to 270 electoral votes. (Hint: try doing it without Florida.) Source: Taegan Goddard’s Electoral Vote Map.

In each of the ten toss-up states, the margin of victory for the winning presidential candidate in 2016 was less than 2 percent. Trump is defending six of these states he won in 2016: Arizona (11), Florida (29), Michigan (16), Pennsylvania (20), Wisconsin (10), and North Carolina (15), for a total of 101 votes. The Democratic nominee will be defending four states: Maine (4), Minnesota (10), New Hampshire (4), and Nevada (6), for a total of 24 votes (in 2016 Clinton received 23 of these votes because Trump won in Maine’s 2nd congressional district). 

Is It Time for Reform Yet? 

As some states continue to increase population faster than others, the likelihood that the winner of the popular vote and of the Electoral College vote will not be the same person will increase dramatically in the years to come. It’s only two of three modern data points, but two of the last three presidents were losers in the popular vote.

Figure 4. Population per electoral vote by state. As the extremes of California and Wyoming show, it is not one person, one vote in the Electoral College. Source: Wikipedia.

Just as we went to the direct election of senators in 1913 with the Seventeenth Amendment (previously senators were elected by their respective state legislatures), we need to amend the US Constitution to provide for the direct election of the president. Getting such an amendment through the Senate and ratified by three-quarters of the states is a heavy, if not impossible, lift, given the power of the small states (see above).

An alternative might be the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would bypass amending the Constitution in a creative use of the constitutional provision that says states have vast power to set the terms of federal elections in their states.

However, reform will not occur by the first Tuesday in November—er, I mean by December 20 (the day George Washington died), 2020, when the members of the 2020 Electoral College gather in their respective state capitals to officially elect the next president of the United States.

To Boot, the Gerrymandered Senate Is Likely to Worsen

They would do more if they could, but Oregon’s Democratic senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, are able to achieve less lasting congressional conservation for Oregon’s federal public lands because they are in the minority in the Senate.

In the 2018 election, Democrats running for the US Senate received twelve million more votes than Republicans running for the US Senate. The result is that Republicans hold fifty-three seats to the Democrats’ forty-seven.

For the US Senate, gerrymandering is baked into the US Constitution, and gerrymandering is likely to become more anti-Democratic Party over time. According to David Birdsell, dean of the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, by 2040 it is likely that 70 percent of Americans will live in fifteen states. They will be represented by thirty senators. The other seventy senators will represent 30 percent of Americans. The red-blue / urban-rural / liberal-conservative / coast-flyover divides will increase.

Some kind of Senate reform should also be undertaken.

Who Am I Supporting for President?

In case you couldn’t tell, I will not be voting for Donald John Trump.

I also won’t be voting for a third-party candidate, because in the U.S. winner-take-all system, such a vote is effectively a vote for the major party candidate you most don’t want.

However, by the time I vote in the Oregon presidential primary on May 19, all but five presidential primaries or caucuses will already have been done, so my vote is not likely to be consequential.

So vote schmote, who am I supporting for the Democratic nomination for president? Earlier, I sent money to Washington governor Jay Inslee, wanting him to advance in the presidential debates to bring attention to the existential threat of the climate crisis. He is now seeking another term as governor. I’ve not yet given money to any other candidate, but I want the Democratic nominee to be the one most likely to garner at least 270 votes in the Electoral College.

While this election, like nearly all elections, is about turning out the base, this Electoral College election is all about swinging enough of the swing states to the Democratic column. This can be done by either a more massive turnout of base Democratic voters than base Republican voters in those swing states or appealing to enough “moderates” in those states that Donald Trump needs to go. These moderates include a significant number of Democrats who voted for Obama twice and Trump once. Such moderates also include Republicans who held their nose and voted for Trump, but more against Hillary Clinton. One can only hope that the Trump stench is so horrible and pervasive that it cannot be staunched by merely holding one’s nose. However, the Democrats must offer an alternative acceptable to these swing voters in the ten swing states.

Over a beer (perhaps we would need two), we could debate which Democratic candidate has the best chance of doing that. For the reasons stated herein, I will insist on limiting the discussion to the candidate’s electability in the ten states in play.