Call it a big blue wave, a blunami, a near-total takeover… whatever you call it, last week’s election was a big victory for the Democratic party locally. It may have come as a surprise nationally or to those in Kansas or Texas to see their states move blue — but here in Deschutes County, the tsunami completed a shift to the left that has been in the works for years.
No longer would anyone say that Bend and Deschutes County are purple; they are decidedly blue. The Bend City Council completed its takeover during the last election, and now, over at the Deschutes County Board of County Commissioners, every single person who will serve on the soon-to-be-expanded commission is also affiliated with the Democrats.
But what does it mean to live or to serve in region that no longer has a plurality in the governmental decision-making process?
It can be easy to get drunk on power — to take the majority’s support for progressive causes and enact immediate sweeping change. But serving in government means responding to all voters whether they are of your political persuasion or whether they are one of the many disenfranchised voters in the county. Every elected official has to operate on their own values — the ones that caused the majority to vote for them in the first place. But as it pertains to the entire electorate, can those same elected officials aim to be a voice for all of them, so that the region doesn’t move forward in a vacuum of progressive ideas?
We don’t mean that Oregon should relitigate people’s abortion rights or walk back the limits our voters have set on access to guns — but that doesn’t mean “the other side” doesn’t have important things to add to the discourse.
When we have one party in power, either at the local, state or national level, what suffers is conversation. During an election, we get a lot of it. Then, when one party sits around the meeting room together, the discussions that might run counter to that party’s goals disappear from the public discourse; no longer part of a public record. It becomes very easy to do the people’s work behind closed doors.
We want to see the same level of scrutiny and accountability that happened during the election to continue when it counts — when one party is in power and has the ability to make sweeping changes.
In the Oregon governor’s race, Christine Drazan’s message was not compelling enough to garner a majority of votes, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t bring up some valid points — one of them being the abysmal state of education in our state. Drazan brought up issues around the length of the school year, attendance, truancy and more. These were potent threads before the Silver Rail tragedy, and we hope they don’t get ignored in the months and years to come. Ensuring the health, safety and futures of Oregon’s young people should be a key priority.
We’ve seen what can happen when the party in power gains a supermajority. Remember the Republican legislators’ run for the border? In the legislature, legislation on abortion rights and guns got us Republican walkouts and threats to shunt half the state over to Idaho. In these cases, it isn’t necessarily the subject matter that has us cautious; it’s the decrease in discourse that has one side feeling unheard and at the end of its rope.
Right now, the election results have a lot of people riding high. But it’s the work that really counts, and that work is for the entire community, not just the ones who voted for you.
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