Should Eastern Oregon Become Part of Idaho?

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00:09

Hey everyone, welcome once again to Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, for a discussion today with someone who is new to the program.

00:17

We have Matt McCaw from the Greater Idaho Project. Welcome Matt. Hi, John. Thanks for having me.

00:22

My pleasure. And Matt is the spokesperson for Greater Idaho. He's a small business owner, father of eight, and he's a lifelong resident of the state and not of Idaho though.

00:34

I think you told me you're a resident of Oregon, is that correct? That is correct. I was born in Southern Oregon, grew up in Eastern Oregon, Central Oregon, lived in the

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Willamette Valley, Portland metro area. I've lived all over the state. I know the state well and know just why we have this huge divide in our state as far as politics and culture and the way people live their lives.

00:56

Oregon is two very, very different states depending on which side of the mountains you're on and I've lived it personally and most people that have been in Oregon for very long at all understand that.

01:06

So that's kind of what drives our movement is this difference in culture and is different in the way people want to build their communities, want to govern their communities and the mismatch between what people in Eastern Oregon want and what the government that they're getting out of the

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West side of the state gives them. And the website for people who want to know more after this interview is greateridaho .org

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greateridaho .org and there's a lot of information there. There's so many questions

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I have. I just think I should probably start by saying, though, for the audience who are probably mainly composed of evangelical

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Christians, this is important in my mind because the what's been going on for a long time, just nationally speaking, has not worked.

01:48

It's not working. It's clear, I think, to many people after 2020, especially that, you know, places like Auburn, Alabama and Seattle, Washington are so different.

01:58

Red state America is so different than blue state America. And in some places like where you live, it's the same state.

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Literally, you said the divide is in the mountains. And I know it's not the only state. Washington has the same dynamics.

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So does California. I was there a few years ago driving north and I saw a sign. Welcome to Jefferson. And Jefferson is, of course,

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I think a similar movement in that state to try to kind of get away from these coastal cities that are, in their opinion, enacting tyranny against them.

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And so these are unconventional. This is an unconventional approach to try to attempt to conserve some freedom and some of what

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America was away from the threats that we see out there. And so even if you're not in the state of Washington or Idaho, I think this is a valuable discussion.

02:43

Maybe something like this could even happen in your state. I know I live in New York. That's where I'm talking to you from.

02:50

And in New York for years, same thing in Virginia, where I just moved from. There's always a discussion about, you know, we need to get rid of D .C.

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We need to get rid of New York City. We want to govern ourselves. And you guys are just farther along with that, it sounds like.

03:02

So tell me a little bit about just the progress that you've made.

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You have the website. You have some, I guess, referendums that have been voted on on a county level. Where are you guys at with trying to join?

03:15

In this case, it sounds like Idaho. Yeah. And so I'll back up just a step there, John, and talk about the state of Oregon specifically.

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For your listeners who don't know much about Oregon, because a lot of times people hear Oregon and they think

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Portland and all the craziness that comes out of the Portland metro area. And that most certainly is part of Oregon and the

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Willamette Valley. So Oregon is divided by the Cascade Mountain Range. And on the west side of Willamette Valley has Eugene and Portland.

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And it's a fairly left leaning, very populated place. It's green, populated, urban.

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And that's the west side of Oregon. The east side of Oregon, once you get east of the Cascades, it becomes high desert.

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It's very rural, agricultural. People are very conservative. They have very traditional values.

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When you get to the east side of the state of Oregon, it doesn't look like the west side of the state of Oregon. It looks like Idaho. And people live their lives like the people in Idaho.

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And people have values like the people in Idaho. Their culture is the same as the people in Idaho. So there's been this longstanding problem in Oregon where the vast majority of the population lives on the west side of the state.

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And so when it comes to statewide government or statewide ballot measures, whatever the

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Willamette Valley wants, they can force on the entire state. So even though out here on the east side of the state, we make up 63 percent of the landmass, we're only 9 percent of the population.

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And so and so we just don't have a say. And we've our say has gotten smaller and smaller. There was a time in Oregon where the legislature tended to be conservative and the governor was was

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Democratic. And that that kind of gave this balance to state government. But about 20 years ago or so, that tipped over and the state legislature became

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Democrat controlled. The governor was Democrat. And and that has just grown and grown and grown to the point now where we had super majorities in left leaning elected leaders so they could implement whatever policy they wanted to.

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And they have. So it just has caused this extreme bitterness and political frustration.

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And then covid hit and things just went to a hundred because what people on the west side of the state wanted was lockdowns and kids out of school and masks and vaccine mandates.

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And that's not at all what people on the east side of the state wanted. And so these things were forced on us.

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And it just caused tension. Like, you know, it's always been there, but it's just gotten so big because our cultures have gotten so far apart.

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And, you know, you mentioned this is not specific just to Oregon. It's really a urban, rural kind of these two different cultures.

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Our urban cultures have a certain way of looking at the world and wanting to organize their communities. And our rural culture tends to be a polar opposite, 180 degrees different, different things.

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So anyways, that's all just to say that's the situation in Oregon. It's been the situation in Oregon for a long time.

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About four years ago, our organization came along and it was just a group of grassroots group of people.

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And they they said, what if we just moved the state line rather than then, you know, try to take over the legislature, rather than try to change

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Portland, rather than try to force our will on the Willamette Valley of people that live differently than us and want different things than us?

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What if we just moved the state line between Idaho and Oregon to where the actual cultural divide is, which is the

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Cascade Mountain Range? And so we thought it was a good idea. And there were several people that thought, you know, this is a good idea.

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We should look into this, but let's move this forward. And so we started going county by county,

06:48

John. And so we went to the people in Eastern Oregon and we start asking them directly, do you want your elected leaders to look into, pursue moving the state line so that the people of Eastern Oregon can get their government from the state of Idaho, which much better matches their values, their culture, their economics, their politics?

07:08

And when we started asking people that question directly, people were saying, yes, this is a good idea.

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This is a long term solution that works, that we want our elected leaders pursue. So for the last three and a half years, we've been going directly to voters in Eastern Oregon.

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There's about 14 counties that we want to have vote on this to move into the state of Idaho.

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Twelve of those counties have already passed our measures. We're winning handily in most of those votes.

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The people of Eastern Oregon see this as a long term solution that makes sense, that they want their elected leaders to pursue.

07:46

So is that binding is, I guess, the next question I have. So you have, let's say, all these counties vote to leave

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Oregon and join Idaho in their government. Does that mean it happens like that can't be the only thing

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I would think? I mean, what process needs to take place to make this a reality? Yeah. So any two state lines can move.

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So our founders, when they drafted the Constitution, they gave a lot of power to the states. And there was an understanding that state lines would need to move because people change and cultures change and groups of people change.

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And so borders were there's a process put in place for borders to change. And it's happened multiple times throughout the history of United States.

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There's a legal process for it. There's a legal precedence. And that process is any two state legislatures that have of adjoining states can move their state border as long as both state legislatures agree to it.

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So if the state of Oregon and the state of Idaho, the two state legislatures come together and they say, you know where our border is currently doesn't make sense.

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It divides us artificially in groups. These people in Eastern Oregon with Western Oregon, when really the people in Eastern Oregon identify much more closely and match values much better with the people in Idaho, where that border is doesn't make sense.

09:05

Let's move it 250 miles to the west so that people in Eastern Oregon get the government that they want and the people in Western Oregon have the government they want.

09:12

If the two state legislatures can agree to that, the border moves. It goes back to Congress. Congress okays it and it's done.

09:19

So these votes, they're actually the mechanism for moving a state border has nothing to do with the vote of the people.

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It has to do with the two state legislatures and what they decide. We've gone to the people so that our state legislature, our elected leaders can know is there popular support for this idea?

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And like I said, what we found by doing this over three and a half years, we've gone to a vote in 12 counties in Eastern Oregon and we've won in all 12 of those counties.

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The people of Eastern Oregon are ready to have this conversation. They want their elected leaders to have this conversation. So it sounds like Eastern Oregon, just like Eastern Washington and Northeastern California, all they all want similar things.

09:57

The question, though, is it will Portland allow the I think

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I feel like Moses and Pharaoh let my people go. Are they going to just let you guys go? Because, I mean,

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I would think that would affect their economy and perhaps also I don't know if electoral votes at all.

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Maybe it's not enough to affect that significantly. But there's got to be some incentives for them to keep

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Eastern Oregon in the state. So we have gone to a lot of trouble as an organization to try to craft a proposal that we feel is a win, win, win.

10:31

It's a win for Western Oregon. It's a win for Eastern Oregon. It's a win for Idaho. And so for Western Oregon, there are some huge advantages to letting

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Eastern Oregon go. And the first one of those is financial. So like most places, our urban centers are wealthier than our rural areas.

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And so in Oregon, we have a statewide income tax. And so the state kind of collects money and then filters that back out to communities.

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And what ends up happening is that the west side of the state, because they're wealthier, they pay more in taxes. They end up subsidizing the east side of the state.

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And it's not a small number, John. It's like six hundred and ninety dollars per person per year, much bigger than most people realize.

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So by letting Eastern Oregon go and join Idaho, Western Oregon taxpayers would have all that money that they're currently sending to Eastern Oregon.

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They get to keep that at home in Western Oregon and spend it on problems that are specific to Western Oregon. And the other piece of that that works so well with this proposal is while Eastern Oregon is a drain on Western Oregon because our economies are not as strong and people are not as wealthy overall as people in Western Oregon, the people of Eastern Oregon would not be a drain on Idaho, because like with everything else about Eastern Oregon and Idaho, we have about the same type of economy and about the same type of wealth levels.

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So while while we kind of take money from the west side of the state, we could move into Idaho. Not only would we not take money from Idaho, we would actually be a boost to Idaho's economy and a boost to their tax revenue.

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So, again, it's a win for Western Oregon. It's a win for Idaho. It's a win for Eastern Oregon. So financially, there's huge incentive, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars at stake to Western Oregon by letting us go.

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And another thing is that there's a Oregon has extreme gridlock because Oregon has extreme political division.

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And so what we have here on the east side of the state, all of the representatives and senators that are elected to the legislature are

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Republican and they get voted in at 75, 80, 80 plus percent. Eastern Oregon is very, very conservative, and that's the way they vote.

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The west side of the state is not that way. West side of the state is very, very left leaning. You go to Multnomah County and they only elect

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Democrats and they elect them. Eighty twenty. You know, we are very, very polarized and we're very, very homogenous in a way of Western Oregon is very left leaning that it just is what it is.

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Multnomah County is very left very. Yeah. And it's overwhelmingly left leaning. And Eastern Oregon is overwhelmingly right leaning and conservative.

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So you mix these two groups together and one tries to force policy on the other and you just get.

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You get frustration, you get tension, you get gridlock, and so what's happened in Oregon is it's kind of become a thing is conservatives have have lost political power and political voice.

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Essentially, the only tool that that conservative elected leaders have at their disposal to try to stop policy from being implemented on us, we don't want our walkouts.

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And so if you pay attention to Oregon politics at all, you'll know that this last legislative session, our senators walked out, conservative senators walked out of the legislature, ground it to a halt because it was the only way that they could stop some some legislation that people in Eastern Oregon and conservative people in general just felt was intolerable and they could not live with it.

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And so we had this this big walkout and it's happened multiple times in the last few years in Oregon.

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At one point, Eastern Oregon representatives were fleeing to Idaho to get away, you know, to kind of hide from the legislature.

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It's. Wow. Politically toxic to have two groups of people that are so different and so want so different things for their communities, you know.

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Sharing the same state and it doesn't make sense and it never if we could draw borders today, you know, the border between Oregon and Idaho was put there one hundred and seventy years ago.

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And when it was put there, there was less than 50000 people in the entire state of Oregon. The vast majority of people made their living agriculturally.

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It was a completely different time. And what we're saying is we could look at that today and say, where does it actually make sense to put this border?

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Where would it do the most good for the most amount of people? Our proposal is where we think that would make the most sense.

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And voters agree with us. And it's not just people in Eastern Oregon. There was polling done by SurveyUSA, which is a national pollster, highly rated national pollster, and they surveyed people in Western Oregon last year.

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So in 2022, they surveyed people in Western Oregon and they asked them if Eastern Oregon counties vote to leave, should you let them go?

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Should the state of Oregon let them go? And a majority of people in Western Oregon said, yes, if people vote and say they don't want to be part of the state anymore, they should be allowed to go.

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Sixty eight percent said at a bare minimum, the state should look into it and how that would affect our state.

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And over 80 percent of people said if at the bare, bare minimum, we need to have a conversation as a state about this political tension and why these people in Eastern Oregon are so unhappy with everything.

15:36

People in Oregon get it. And I believe people in general get it. There's so much that we all disagree on now.

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But one thing that is still common for most people is this sense of self -determination and this sense that, you know better what's best for your life than I do.

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Your group of people can has autonomy, should have autonomy to set up their lives the way that makes sense for your community, whether that's the city of Portland, whether that's the city of Baker, whether that's

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Eastern Oregon or Western Oregon. Most people still believe in that. And so when we asked them through polling in Western Oregon, most people say, yes, if Eastern Oregon doesn't feel like this is working for them and they want to join

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Idaho, we should let them. There obviously are a lot of common objections to this kind of thing, and I think the main one just being that these have been the borders for when did you say,

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I think you said about 170 years ago. Yeah. So, you know, almost 200 years. This has been the border.

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We grew up and our fathers grew up, our grandfathers grew up with these this being the border. And it just seems like you can't change it like that's just that's precedent.

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That's the habitual, I guess, objection, just why don't we operate out of our habit? But then also you have the left, which

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I'm sure if it hasn't happened already, they're going to start bringing up the Civil War and trying to make comparisons about what you're doing as a secession effort.

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And therefore that's wrong. And I mean, have you undergone some of that?

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And I mean, are there other objections to that I haven't mentioned that have become potent? Yeah, yeah.

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Of course, we've heard some of those things. And, you know, we we don't view ourself as a secessionist movement.

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We're a self -determination movement. The people in Eastern Oregon are not trying to break away from the union or start their own thing.

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What we're saying is, you know, we think it would make more sense for everybody if we just got our state government from Idaho instead of Oregon and the people in Oregon aren't out marching in the streets and demanding anything.

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They're saying we're saying this is a political pathway and there's a political pathway to make this happen.

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So how can we get our elected leaders to move this forward and enact the wishes of the people of our part of the state and knowing that the people on the west side of the state also understand why we want to do this and how it could make sense for everybody involved?

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So but but have we heard that? Of course. And you're always going to have naysayers who who say the worst things.

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We've gotten used to this as as kind of, you know, right leaning people of you get called all sorts of names, you know, racist, this, blah, blah, whatever.

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And, you know, so, of course, we hear that. But but people see through that and people understand, again, if you've lived in Oregon for any amount of time and this is probably true of other states as well.

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I actually I did a radio show in upstate New York last year and they were having the same conversation.

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How do we get away from New York City? Like this doesn't represent us. They have a different way of life, different values.

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So this is happening all over the country, you know, that you have this this conversation happening.

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We believe that this is an idea that can make sense. And there is a status quo bias.

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And that's not my term. That was a term that a commentator, Tom Woods, gave me.

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But it's true. It's been this way forever. Oregon has always looked a certain way on a map. And so people get stuck on that.

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But what we're saying is let's use the tools that are available to us. We have a lot of political tension and a lot of political frustration and people at each other's throats because they because they're cold, their worldviews and the way they want to govern their communities is getting so divergent and it's getting intolerable to each other.

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So let's use the political tools that we have available. And border relocation is one of those. You know, we change imaginary lines all the time.

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A border is just an imaginary line. It goes where it makes sense. And every 10 years we redistrict and we say, you know what, we're going to move this line and try to group this similar people so they have better representation.

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This is something that happens. Counties grows. They're not counties, but cities grow. You know, borders change.

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Imaginary lines change. Let's use this process to better group people to similarly minded people and lower that political tension and allow people to to get the kind of government that makes sense for them.

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Well, it seems to me that the motive here is peace, really. It's just that you won't have this friction.

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You won't have conflict. The other thing is that you're recognizing something that already exists.

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It's not like you're actually creating anything new. It's just a recognition that this is a different people on this side of the

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Cascades. So we should have a different government because our interests, our needs, our values, everything is so different.

20:28

You mentioned to me before we started recording that you you're a Christian. Many of the people in leadership of the movement are

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Christians and that the area is, I would say, primarily evangelical.

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I'm sure you probably have some Mormons and other other groups in there as well. But because the audience that you're talking to right now is primarily made up,

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I would say, of evangelical Christians. What is the I don't know that there's a special argument, but but we often hear

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Romans 13 objections and things like that where I don't even know if that would come into play here.

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But I could see a potential path where you could see a Christian saying, you know, this seems seditious.

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This seems like this is against what was set up.

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I think you just mentioned Tom Woods phrase and the status quo bias.

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And and what's the I mean, I don't know if there's anything different you have to say to Christians, but how can this be something that actually helps preserve the church freedom to worship those kinds of things?

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Yeah, well, first of all, I would say, you know, again, you said it, John, and you're exactly right.

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The greater Idaho movement did not create this division, but we're a response to the division that's been there for a long time.

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And the way the two cultures are drifting apart, we're coming along saying, like, hey, we see this and we know what everybody's feeling on the ground.

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We know that our cultures are getting further apart. And what's tolerable in in left leaning

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America is not tolerable in right leaning America and vice versa. And so we're coming along as a peaceful political solution.

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We're not trying to overthrow the state of Oregon or we're saying we have elected leaders and we have this process and we have this tool.

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Let's use it to get better governance for people and to lower the political temperature and to make people's lives better.

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And, you know, another thing, being on a Christian show, you know, it's important for people to understand that in states like Oregon, that there are some ideas that are really for most evangelical

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Christian people, they find way out there and crazy and anti -biblical and anti -Christian worldview.

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And in the state of Oregon, we are at the forefront of our state government of pushing those things on to, you know, into communities, whether that's abortion on demand up to moment of birth, whether that's transgenderism and all that sexuality teaching in the classroom and in public schools, that stuff is at the forefront in Western Oregon.

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And we're one of the states that's leading that charge to push that into communities. And again, from a

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Christian perspective, those things are not tolerable to our families, to our communities. And that's what that's what we're talking about is things like that, is that we will not this does not work for us and we cannot live like this and we will not tolerate these things being forced on us.

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They go against our values and our belief system. And we need to figure this out because it's it's got real world ramifications and and.

23:49

It needs it needs a solution. Yeah, I was there in Portland not maybe two years ago doing a filming for a documentary on the monument issue, and I just thought it was tristig.

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Portland was one of the worst places I went because not only did they rip out monuments, there was a monument in a graveyard that involved it was to all wars, but it involved

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Confederate soldiers who had, I guess, migrated to Oregon after the war. They didn't they didn't end with that.

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It was like everything. Lincoln was gone. Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, they even tried to destroy this moose statue, which

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I don't understand the moose thing, but it was just it was chaos. And I was shocked a little.

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And I'm originally from L .A. and it's pretty bad in L .A., but I would say in Portland we had actually the guy

24:36

I was filming with, we had a little like contest. We were seeing if we could spot the American flag and federal buildings didn't count and we couldn't find it.

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We found transgender flags everywhere, BLM flags. But it was clear to us that and we had been in Alabama the day before doing filming.

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It was clear to us this was in such a different culture that they these two places cannot belong in the same country or else you get war.

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We don't I don't understand how you can't because their visions are so totally different. So what you're talking about is really,

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I think, protecting families against harmful ideas and policies. It's about making sure that you're detached financially.

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I even think of that principle of being unequally yoked. That's obviously applied to marriage, but that wasn't the original intent.

25:27

It was it was really more about personal relationships and being compromised spiritually. But on you're talking about massive groups of people here and eastern

25:36

Oregon is pretty compromised if they are if their their future is tied in with western

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Oregon. So, I mean, I'm obviously with you. I'm singing. I'm preaching to the choir here. But I think moving forward, the thing that's going to be difficult is, well,

25:54

I'll just ask you this. What's the pathway look like? Because because you spelled out you're going to you have all these votes.

25:59

Then you go to the legislature with the information. I mean, what's your prediction? Do you think this is actually going to work or and obviously you can't say no.

26:08

But like, where are we looking at, 20 years down the road? Like, how does this all play out?

26:14

Yeah, so so I don't think it's that. So, John, I would not be involved in this movement. I'm a small business owner. My wife and I are foster parents and we have eight kids and we have plenty to do.

26:24

And I would not be involved in this movement if I didn't, A, think it was a really good idea and B, think that it was possible.

26:31

And so to that end, the process for moving a state line is to get two state legislatures talking and get them to agree to move the state line.

26:41

So we've gone directly to the people over the last three and a half years. And the people have told us voters have said, yes, we want this to happen.

26:49

So last year we made the next step forward, which was the Idaho House introduced a memorial inviting the

26:57

Oregon legislature to begin talks about the border, about moving the border. This was a formal piece of legislation.

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It was a memorial. It passed the Idaho House. It got to the Idaho Senate. We had a lot of support in the

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Senate. We were told we had the votes in the Senate, but they wanted to wait and see if Oregon would do anything first before they took it up.

27:16

So we had a memorial that was also introduced in the Oregon legislature. So we have elected leaders that are hearing the people and saying, yes, this is what people want.

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This is a good idea. This is a solution that makes sense. Let's move this ball forward. We had our memorial introduced on the

27:31

Senate side in the state of Oregon. And the leadership there, the

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Senate president refused to move the bill, refused to give it a hearing, refused to move it into committee.

27:42

So that was this last legislative session. But that was huge progress. We basically know now that the state of Idaho elected leaders, the legislature in the state of Idaho, are ready to have this conversation.

27:53

They have looked at the proposal. They've heard what the people are saying and they see how this is a win for the state of Idaho, which it is a big win for the state of Idaho.

28:01

Land, resources, like minded voters, tax dollars, room to grow pushes the laws of Oregon.

28:11

So Oregon has crazy liberal drug laws where you can use open drugs, possess any kind of hard drugs and use them openly.

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And people in Idaho don't want that law right up at their doorstep. They don't want that law 45 minutes from Boise, where the main population center is.

28:30

So moving the border pushes that law back over to the Willamette Valley, pushes it 250 miles away from the state of Idaho.

28:36

So the state of Idaho understands the people in Idaho and the legislature there, they see the benefits.

28:42

They understand why this makes sense. They're ready to have that conversation. So our job now is we got to get the

28:47

Oregon legislature to want to have the conversation as well. And that's where we're at in the process. We meet with Democratic lawmakers and Republican lawmakers all the time and trying to educate, talk about the benefits, how this could benefit both states, both sides of the mountains.

29:04

We just had our first meeting. So Idaho had this formal invitation to the state of Oregon that Oregon did not reciprocate with a reformal invitation back.

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But we had our first time of Oregon legislators meeting with Idaho legislators just happened last week in Baker, Oregon, where we had legislators from both states sit down and say,

29:27

OK, what's the next steps for this? How can we move this forward and how can we advocate for what the people are clearly clearly saying they want?

29:36

So this will happen, John, as soon as 51 percent of the state legislature in Oregon is ready to have the conversation.

29:44

And so I believe that could be any time that could be this year in the next legislative session.

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You know, if as soon as 51 percent of the legislators believe this is a conversation worth having, the conversation can begin.

29:59

And then it's a matter of having hearings, having some reports done and some, you know, looking at all the various details of what would have to happen to move a border.

30:08

But there's no reason this needs to take 20 years. The popular support's there. As soon as the legislative support is there, it can happen and it can move quickly when it does.

30:18

No, that sounds great. I didn't realize you guys were that close. I did not know that Idaho had voted or passed a memorial like that.

30:25

So good job. How big of a group? I mean, you guys must be organized.

30:33

I mean, do you have like it sounds like you have some major players as far as state legislatures and so forth involved already.

30:40

Well, you know, resources. What do you need? Absolutely. So we're a grassroots organization, so we don't have big corporate sponsorship.

30:48

Our donations are individual donations from people who want to see this happen. So, you know, we have a dedicated group on the leadership team that, you know, works on this year round and full time, you know, as much full time as it can while having other jobs that actually pay the bills.

31:07

And we have dedicated volunteers all throughout eastern Oregon who go around and collect signatures and, you know, knock on doors and talk to their neighbors about this.

31:17

So but what do we need? We need allies as far as we need groups and commentators and politicians and all of the above to come alongside us and say, hey, this isn't a crackpot idea.

31:32

This is actually an idea that's good, that makes sense and that people are want to have happen.

31:39

So so we need those people to come alongside us. And, you know, we have gotten all when I first started in this three and a half years ago, people just kind of laughed at us and they were like, you know, whatever, you guys are crazy.

31:52

This will never happen. You know, you're wasting your time. I had a very prominent politician tell me, Matt, don't waste your time on this.

31:58

It'll never happen. Three and a half years later. People believe it's possible and people understand that this can happen, but we need people to come alongside us and help move this forward.

32:11

And of course, we always need financial support. We always need donations at greater Idaho dot org because things cost money to get through.

32:19

Legislatures cost money. You know, you need lobbyists who know the way that the system works and know how to progress bills forward.

32:27

So we can always use donations. We can always use people sign up for our emails, joining our

32:32

Twitter and just spreading the word and getting the word out there that this is an idea.

32:38

It absolutely is doable. It absolutely makes sense. And it absolutely is something that people want. Well, this is something that I think people in other states are interested in.

32:48

And there's no reason that you can't have an organization like this form in, say, Virginia. There was a discussion

32:54

I remember when I lived there maybe two or three years ago with the governor of West Virginia. And this,

32:59

I think it was Jerry Falwell Jr., who's been since kind of disgraced. But at the time they were they were discussing on a radio show.

33:06

Wouldn't it be great if Western Virginia joined West Virginia because they're culturally so similar and politically similar and, you know, in every way.

33:16

So, I mean, there's no reason you can't have organizations like this in other states. And I think if you guys are successful with this, then that's going to set a precedent that will make it possible, will open a path for people in California and Washington and other places to consider similar measures.

33:33

I'm all for it. I think it's a great it's a great thing. I mean, if I suppose it's sad in a way, if you live if you're conservative and you live on the western side of the state, then you're probably you know, it's a sad thing to see other fellow conservatives become part of Idaho.

33:52

But it sounds like the power disparity is so great anyway. There's just it really isn't anything you're missing as far as there's not like a counterbalance that was able to form any kind of resistance against what the

34:06

West wanted. So, yeah, yeah. And, you know, again, I really believe most people understand and believe that people should have a right to have a say of what kind of government they have and not have government forced on them.

34:22

That doesn't make sense for them and that they don't want and goes against their values. Most people agree with that.

34:27

And when we ask people in Western Oregon, conservative or or, you know, left leaning, they say their answer is if they say they want to something different, we ought to just let them go.

34:39

And most people, that's that's the way they feel. If people are not happy in an association or relationship, we don't hold them against their will.

34:45

We let it go because it's the right thing to do. And that's how most people still as politically divided as we are on almost everything, people still agree for the most part on that and understand that what we want in Eastern Oregon may not be what they want.

35:01

And that's OK, you know, and they understand the reciprocalness that they wouldn't want the people in Eastern Oregon telling them in Portland how to live their lives.

35:12

And and so it makes sense. Well, tell you what, as you get closer to this goal,

35:18

I'm sure the property values are going to go up in your side of the state as people anticipate a movement to Idaho.

35:27

I'm sure the taxes change, all kinds of things change, and you may have refugees in a way flooding there to escape the western part of the state.

35:36

I mean, that's just my prediction. But absolutely. There's been an economic economic analysis that was done out of Moscow, Idaho, by a group called

35:43

Points Consulting. And they looked at all these things and they said, what would happen if this actually, you know, if the greater Idaho folks are successful and actually get this border moved, what would happen to these

35:51

Eastern Oregon counties? And exactly what you're talking about is what would happen is you'd have this economic surge because you'd have a better regulatory environment.

35:59

You'd have lower taxes and you'd have all these people in western Oregon that moving six hours east to Boise, you know, is maybe a bit too much.

36:09

But moving two hours east to eastern Oregon is now doable to get the kind of government that they want that makes sense for them.

36:15

So we think, again, it would be a boon for eastern Oregon. It would be a boon for western

36:20

Oregon. It certainly would be a boon for Idaho as well. It's a win, win, win solution. Well, I encourage everyone, listen and go to the greater

36:27

Idaho dot org, greater Idaho dot org. There's a take action tab and it'll you can get email updates, volunteer.

36:35

You can donate to the movement. And so I'm thankful for your work,

36:41

Matt. I know that with everything you have going on, I'm sure this is a lot, but it's appreciated by the people in your state and even people beyond like myself who believe in what you're doing and want to see it happen.