For the sec­ond straight decen­ni­al redis­trict­ing cycle, the Pacif­ic North­west appears set to gain a new con­gres­sion­al dis­trict, which will slight­ly increase the region’s clout in the Unit­ed States House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives begin­ning in Jan­u­ary of 2023.

The Unit­ed States Cen­sus Bureau revealed today that Ore­gon has expe­ri­enced pop­u­la­tion growth suf­fi­cient to mer­it the allo­ca­tion of a sixth con­gres­sion­al dis­trict, one more than the five it cur­rent­ly has.

Mon­tana will also gain a Unit­ed States House seat, which will mean it will have dis­tricts instead of hav­ing an at-large rep­re­sen­ta­tive as it has for decades.

States gain­ing House seats for 2022 include Ore­gon, Mon­tana, Col­orado, Texas, Flori­da, and North Carolina

That would result in an eigh­teen-mem­ber House del­e­ga­tion for the region in the 118th Con­gress. For at least ten years, the U.S. House would then include ten mem­bers from Wash­ing­ton, six from Ore­gon, and two from Idaho.

Repub­li­cans would very much like for this new dis­trict to be friend­ly turf.

Ore­gon’s cur­rent del­e­ga­tion to Con­gress con­sists of four Demo­c­ra­t­ic Unit­ed States Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and two Demo­c­ra­t­ic Unit­ed States Senators.

Of the state’s cur­rent five dis­trict map, only one dis­trict is rep­re­sent­ed by a Repub­li­can: the 2nd, which is a solid­ly Repub­li­can dis­trict span­ning east­ern and cen­tral Ore­gon. It is far and away the largest con­gres­sion­al dis­trict by size in the entire Pacif­ic North­west, with a land area of 179,856.98 kilometers.

It’s also the sec­ond largest by size in the entire coun­try, after New Mex­i­co’s 2nd Dis­trict, not count­ing four of the five states that are too small to have mul­ti­ple House dis­tricts, and thus have at-large Unit­ed States Representatives.

Ore­gon Democ­rats have agreed to allow the com­mis­sion that draws the 2022–2030 maps to be split even­ly between Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans, giv­ing the Par­ty of Trump more of a say in where the bound­aries go.

Wash­ing­ton State has been using a bipar­ti­san com­mis­sion sys­tem for decades, but this year’s com­mis­sion will have the same num­ber of con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts to work with that the pre­vi­ous com­mis­sion had, instead of a new one like Oregon.

Wash­ing­ton gained a tenth con­gres­sion­al dis­trict fol­low­ing the 2010 cen­sus; that dis­trict cur­rent­ly is locat­ed in Wash­ing­ton State’s South Sound region and is rep­re­sent­ed by Mar­i­lyn Strick­land, Den­ny Heck­’s suc­ces­sor. (Heck is now Wash­ing­ton State’s Lieu­tenant Governor.)

“It is excit­ing that we will gain an addi­tion­al seat in Con­gress and Ore­go­ni­ans’ voic­es will be bet­ter rep­re­sent­ed in Wash­ing­ton D.C.,” Demo­c­ra­t­ic State Sen­a­tor Kath­leen Tay­lor said in remarks report­ed by The Asso­ci­at­ed Press.

Tay­lor serves as the Ore­gon State Sen­ate’s Redis­trict­ing Chair.

Ore­gon Democ­rats nat­u­ral­ly want a map that gives them five winnable dis­tricts, which would allow the Beaver State to help sus­tain the House­’s cur­rent Demo­c­ra­t­ic major­i­ty in the 2022 midterms. The par­ty reached out quick­ly to its sup­port­ers with an urgent fundrais­ing appeal, explaining:

The stakes of the 2022 midterm elec­tions just got even higher.

After the Cen­sus Bureau com­pletes the cen­sus every ten years, they use the results to re-cal­cu­late how many Con­gres­sion­al Dis­tricts each state is enti­tled to. Today, we learned that Ore­gon will be gain­ing a new Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict for the first time in near­ly forty years!

This is a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty for Ore­go­ni­ans to elect anoth­er Demo­c­rat to our Con­gres­sion­al Del­e­ga­tion – but we know nation­al Repub­li­cans will throw every­thing they can at the race for Ore­gon’s new Sixth Dis­trict while try­ing to flip at least one or more of our cur­rent Demo­c­ra­t­ic seats.

It won’t be an easy task, but we know that so much is pos­si­ble with Ore­gon Democ­rats like you by our side. Will you donate to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty of Ore­gon and help elect Democ­rats to Ore­gon’s soon-to-be six-per­son Con­gres­sion­al Delegation?

It is unlike­ly that either of Ida­ho’s con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts will be com­pet­i­tive in 2022, and Wash­ing­ton seems like­ly to have at most one or two com­pet­i­tive­ly drawn dis­tricts. There­fore, Ore­gon will present Democ­rats in the Pacif­ic North­west with the best oppor­tu­ni­ty for pick­ing up a seat. Exclud­ing Alas­ka and Mon­tana, the region’s cur­rent dis­tricts could be char­ac­ter­ized as falling into four buckets:

Utter­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic (CPVI above ten for D’s)

• Wash­ing­ton’s 2nd
• Wash­ing­ton’s 7th
• Wash­ing­ton’s 9th
• Ore­gon’s 1st
• Ore­gon’s 3rd

Reli­ably Demo­c­ra­t­ic (Favor­able CPVI for D’s, but below ten)

• Wash­ing­ton’s 1st
• Wash­ing­ton’s 6th
• Wash­ing­ton’s 10th

Swing/Competitive (CPVI of five or less)

• Wash­ing­ton’s 8th (Demo­c­ra­t­ic representation)
• Wash­ing­ton’s 3rd (Repub­li­can representation)
• Ore­gon’s 4th (Demo­c­ra­t­ic representation)
• Ore­gon’s 5th (Demo­c­ra­t­ic representation)

Solid­ly Repub­li­can (Favor­able CPVI for R’s of more than five)

• Ore­gon’s 2nd
• Wash­ing­ton’s 4th
• Wash­ing­ton’s 5th
• Ida­ho’s 1st
• Ida­ho’s 2nd

CPVI means Cook Par­ti­san Vot­ing Index; see this Wikipedia entry for an expla­na­tion, and see Cook’s web­site for the com­plete cur­rent index.

As men­tioned above, it’s unlike­ly that any changes to Ida­ho’s map will yield a dis­trict that Democ­rats could win (although it’s not total­ly out the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ty; Democ­rats did cap­ture Ida­ho’s 1st as recent­ly as 2008.)

How­ev­er, the man­ner in which Ore­gon and Wash­ing­ton’s maps are drawn will mat­ter a great deal. The opti­mal con­fig­u­ra­tion for Democ­rats would prob­a­bly be a map with thir­teen winnable dis­tricts: eight in Wash­ing­ton and five in Oregon.

For Repub­li­cans, the opti­mal con­fig­u­ra­tion is prob­a­bly a map with eight winnable dis­tricts: four in Wash­ing­ton, two in Ore­gon, and then both of Idaho’s.

This is a real­ly big polit­i­cal devel­op­ment for Ore­gon, con­sid­er­ing that the state has­n’t got­ten a new seat in Con­gress in four decades.

For Mon­tana, gain­ing back the seat lost in the 1990 reap­por­tion­ment is also a big deal. Here’s the back­sto­ry on that, cour­tesy of Wikipedia:

From state­hood in 1889, until the cre­ation of geo­graph­ic dis­tricts in 1919, Mon­tana was rep­re­sent­ed in the Unit­ed States House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives by mem­bers elect­ed at-large, that is, requir­ing vot­ing by all the state population.

From 1913 to 1919, there were two seats, still elect­ed at-large; the top two fin­ish­ers were award­ed the seats. After that time, two rep­re­sen­ta­tives were elect­ed from two geo­graph­ic dis­tricts of rough­ly equal pop­u­la­tion, from the east and the west of the state.

In the reap­por­tion­ment fol­low­ing the 1990 cen­sus, Mon­tana lost one of its two seats. Its remain­ing mem­ber was again elect­ed at-large.

Begin­ning in the 2022 midterms, every state in the greater Pacif­ic North­west will have dis­tricts except for Alas­ka. The five states (mean­ing, the three core Pacif­ic North­west states plus Mon­tana and Alas­ka) will send a total of thir­ty-one peo­ple to the Unit­ed States Con­gress: twen­ty-one rep­re­sen­ta­tives and ten senators.

We will have addi­tion­al com­men­tary and analy­sis on what this con­se­quen­tial reap­por­tion­ment means for our region in the weeks to come.