Oregon
1988 saw Oregon go into the Democratic hands. The ten states that went to Dukakis, along with the big state of California, served as the base to which Clinton operated to expand to a winning coalition. (The Democrats went into a major funk assembling any coherent electoral strategy from 1972 through 1984, unable to figure out how to handle the previously solidly Democratic South.)
Prior to that, Oregon had reliably gone to the Republican candidate. Indeed, here’s the map that Reagan was working with from 1976.
The Senate delegation has one Republican and one Democrat, who because they’ve agreed not to hurt each other politically end up buttressing the other candidate politically. Gordon Smith is considered a “moderate”, though it depends on which audience he’s speaking before… equally comfortable speaking before the Christian Coalition and with an endorsement from the biggest figure in Oregon’s Gay Community. The Democrat, Ron Wyden, is perhaps the Dweebiest member of Congress, and has high hopes of turning Oregon into a bastion of nano-technology, and whose major forays into the national spotlight have involved government – technology privacy concerns (“Total Information Awareness” and that whole “Terror Markets” things.) For his part, he voted for the Medicare Bill, saying only that he planned on working to “Reform the Reform Bill” later on.
The Congressional Delegation consists of one Republican — safely in control over a large swatch of Eastern Oregon, and four Democrats… two of them in districts where potentially a Republican might dislodge them, one of them just quirky enough to be safe, and the other firmly enscorched from the most Democratic parts of Portland.
Gore won Oregon in 2000 by a pittance — in large part because this was one of Nader’s stronger states. On the other hand, Oregon has a much stronger base for the Republican party than their neighbor to the North — their rural communities are a bit more rural than Washington’s and the state politics are a little more polarized. (Population ratio between the rural / urban divide being more one-sided in Washington.)
Once again, flip the colors– Red now equals Democrat and Blue equals Republican. I’m going backward from 2000 back to 1960. See if you can spot Portland, Astoria, Eugene, and manage to figure out what the shifting counties represent. (Apparently Ashland isn’t quite big enough to push aside Medford.)