AHC: Make the Pacific Northwest ultra conservative

samcster94

Banned
What can be done to make Oregon, and to a lesser extent, Washington, be ultra-conservative??? This can be done at any point since statehood, but my goal is to have them be closer to Idaho OTL politically.
 
What can be done to make Oregon, and to a lesser extent, Washington, be ultra-conservative??? This can be done at any point since statehood, but my goal is to have them be closer to Idaho OTL politically.
The movement to create the state of Jefferson succeeds drawing off parts of southwestern Oregon making it conservative. As for the rest of Oregon...
 
^^ Maybe, for whatever reason, more of the land gets cleared out and inhabited, thus removing the raison d'etre of Pacific Northwest environmentalism. And more Okies move up there during the Great Depression, giving you Orange County North.

And if the presence of Boeing somehow leads to more defense companies coming in, you could end up with foreign-policy attitudes that make Scoop Jackson look like a yippie.
 
If you really want to run with the environmentalism aspect, you could get an eco-fascist undercurrent to state politics. I am, of course, referring to a real political ideology and not the canard that Wikipedia presents. In the least racial sense, a need to maintain a low population would militate against acceptance if large-scale immigration.
 
What can be done to make Oregon, and to a lesser extent, Washington, be ultra-conservative??? This can be done at any point since statehood, but my goal is to have them be closer to Idaho OTL politically.

They actually were, if not ultra-conservative, at least a bit more Republican than the nation as a whole as recently as 1976.

But to make them as conservative as Idaho you'd have to have a nuclear attack demolish Seattle and Portland, leaving the more conservative eastern part of each state. (Even that might not be enough, though, because in Idaho you have the added factor of a larger Mormon population.) Incidentally, Idaho wasn't always conservative: not only did FDR carry it four times but it went for Truman in 1948 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Idaho,_1948 and was fairly close as late as 1960. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Idaho,_1960 Goldwater's near-victory there in 1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Idaho,_1964 was the first indication of how far the state had swing to the right.
 
If you really want to run with the environmentalism aspect, you could get an eco-fascist undercurrent to state politics. I am, of course, referring to a real political ideology and not the canard that Wikipedia presents. In the least racial sense, a need to maintain a low population would militate against acceptance if large-scale immigration.

Nice scenario, sort of fits in with A Darker Shade Of Green.

But, much as I enjoyed that thread, unfortunately(from the POV of realizing these outcomes), I think environmentalism was always going to end up allying with the pluralistic left, which means there will be a pretty substantial overlap between people who want to protect the rivers and forests, and those who want to welcome immigrants with open arms. You really need to go way back for your POD to have anti-immigration environementalism be the dominant tendency in the movement.
 
Nice scenario, sort of fits in with A Darker Shade Of Green.

But, much as I enjoyed that thread, unfortunately(from the POV of realizing these outcomes), I think environmentalism was always going to end up allying with the pluralistic left, which means there will be a pretty substantial overlap between people who want to protect the rivers and forests, and those who want to welcome immigrants with open arms. You really need to go way back for your POD to have anti-immigration environementalism be the dominant tendency in the movement.

It would have to be an ultra-Malthusian movement. Maybe even pro-one child policy.
 
They actually were, if not ultra-conservative, at least a bit more Republican than the nation as a whole as recently as 1976.

But to make them as conservative as Idaho you'd have to have a nuclear attack demolish Seattle and Portland, leaving the more conservative eastern part of each state. (Even that might not be enough, though, because in Idaho you have the added factor of a larger Mormon population.) Incidentally, Idaho wasn't always conservative: not only did FDR carry it four times but it went for Truman in 1948 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Idaho,_1948 and was fairly close as late as 1960. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Idaho,_1960 Goldwater's near-victory there in 1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Idaho,_1964 was the first indication of how far the state had swing to the right.

Idaho's long-lost progressive tradition was derived from the power of mining unions.
 
The rural areas are already very conservative but Washington and Oregon are urbanized states (16th and 17th most urbanized in 2010). The only solid red states more urbanized are Texas and Utah.

So make the cities smaller or increase the rural population.
 

SpookyBoy

Banned
What can be done to make Oregon, and to a lesser extent, Washington, be ultra-conservative??? This can be done at any point since statehood, but my goal is to have them be closer to Idaho OTL politically.
Weren't they for a period? Weren't they the areas that pushed for internment of the Japanese? I know that in Canada it was BC that pushed for it, as well as for head taxes on Asian immigrants.
 
What can be done to make Oregon, and to a lesser extent, Washington, be ultra-conservative??? This can be done at any point since statehood, but my goal is to have them be closer to Idaho OTL politically.

The 1919 Seattle Strike gets violent, promoting a backlash that largely cripples the Unions of Washington and leads to the decline of Seattle as a major city. For Oregon, the winds of the day of the Mount St. Helen's eruption results in the ash falling upon Portland.
 
I'd say you need to change the source of settlement into the Pacific Northwest.

Instead of the largely Scandanavian flows of immigration that reached the region, instead have something like a devastating Irish rebellion in the 1870s push out a lot of Ulster Protestants and have them move to America, where they would be directed to the Pacific Northwest because it is an open frontier area. This would make the region more politically conservative substantially.
 
Weren't they for a period? Weren't they the areas that pushed for internment of the Japanese? I know that in Canada it was BC that pushed for it, as well as for head taxes on Asian immigrants.

Favoring relocation and internment of the Japanese was not an "ultra-conservative" position during World War II. It was, alas, a mainstream position--especially (but not only) on the West Coast. Otherwise FDR would not have agreed to it and a Supreme Court majority including such liberals as Black, Douglas, and Rutledge would not have sustained it. In particular, California's progressive Republican Attorney General and later Governor (and of course later SCOTUS Chief Justice) Earl Warren was a vigorous advocate, though he later regretted it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren#Japanese-American_internment

Washington and Oregon were not conservative states during World War II. They liked New Deal programs like public power and aid to farmers. They voted for FDR in both 1940 and 1944--especially notable is that Oregon wouldn't vote for Willkie in 1940 even though his running mate was the Oregonian McNary.

Washington state btw during the 1930's had a very strong left-wing organization called the Washington Commonwealth Federation whose executive secretary Howard Costigan later acknowledged that he had been a secret member of the Communist party. "Communism made a larger impact on Washington than almost any other state. “There are forty-seven states in the Union, and the Soviet of Washington,” Postmaster General James Farley joked in 1936. The remark, for all its exaggeration, had some foundation." http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/cpproject/ One congressman elected from Washington state, Hugh De Lacy, appears to have been a secret member of the Communist party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_De_Lacy_(politician) "De Lacy is perhaps best known as the only delegate who did not vote for the Roosevelt-Wallace ticket at the 1940 Democratic Convention" https://books.google.com/books?id=oOaJCpyZFW8C&pg=PA329 at a time of course when the Communist Party was violently opposed to FDR and the "imperialist war."

So no, WA and OR were definitely not ultra-conservative during the 1930's and 1940's.
 
The Communist Party USA also supported the Japanese internment. And while he wasn't a Communist per se, you can find a few quotes on-line by the leftist Dr. Seuss, justifying his racist anti-Japanese cartoons with reference to "Japs" and whatnot.
 
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