Alberta is moving toward a referendum<\/a> in October asking: Do you want to stay in Canada, or have a separate, binding referendum to secede?<\/p>\nThe people Mr. Griffiths interviews often sound remarkably similar, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether they\u2019re libertarian or conservative or liberal,\u201d he said, they complain that government is \u201cin their face, it\u2019s dysfunctional and it\u2019s distant.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the most successful of those efforts is, like Mr. Engelson\u2019s, based in the Northwest, but on the opposite end of the political spectrum. The Greater Idaho movement, a six-year-old campaign to move a large swath of rural, conservative Oregon into neighboring Idaho, has won support in 13 county ballot measures and turned a once-fringe idea into a subject of state capital debate.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur system is not quite functioning the way it\u2019s supposed to,\u201d said Matt McCaw, a spokesman for Greater Idaho.<\/p>\n
Greater Idaho proponents argue that their movement reflects frustrations that date back to Oregon\u2019s earliest days. At the 1857 meeting to draft Oregon\u2019s founding document, 59 of the 60 delegates came from west of the Cascade Mountains.<\/p>\n
Today, eastern Oregon makes up roughly two-thirds of the state\u2019s land mass but only 10 to 15 percent of its population. Lawmakers from Portland and the Interstate 5 corridor dominate policy debates and have pushed through gun laws, environmental regulations and tax changes that many in rural Oregon oppose.<\/p>\n
As western Oregon transitioned from an economy built on timber, farming and manufacturing to one driven by technology and services, the disconnect has grown.<\/p>\n
Updated\u00a0<\/p>\n
June 14, 2026, 4:36 p.m. ET<\/p>\n
\u201cThey just don\u2019t understand us on the other side of the mountains,\u201d said Dan Joyce, the county judge in Malheur County, Ore., whose voters were among the earliest and strongest supporters of Greater Idaho.<\/p>\n
Semir Dzebo, a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University who worked on a 2025 study on Greater Idaho, said public polling conducted through the study showed that the effort was less a partisan fight than an economic one.<\/p>\n
In other parts of the world, efforts to redraw boundaries are often rooted in longstanding ethnic, linguistic or national identities tied to particular places, such as Scotland in the United Kingdom or Catalonia in Spain. Since the Civil War, America has felt \u201cinoculated\u201d against separatist movements, Mr. Dzebo said, \u201cbecause it rests on a civic understanding of nationalism, that there\u2019s no particular ethnicity that is \u2018American.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
But as electoral politics have become more polarized, and as the gap between the rich and everyone else has grown, the sense of a shared American identity has eroded.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat propels these movements is when that sense of feeling different really comes with economic consequences,\u201d Mr. Dzebo said.<\/p>\n
In that regard, the Greater Idaho movement and the Cascadia secession effort are cousins. Mr. McCaw doesn\u2019t think elected leaders in the Oregon capital represent him. Mr. Engelson feels the same about Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
Cascadians argue that people are often bound more closely by geography, ecology and regional economies than by national borders, particularly when the borders stretch so far in every direction. Mr. Engelson said Washington and Oregon progressives could get more value from their tax dollars if they formed their own smaller political unit and paid for priorities such as universal health care and free college tuition.<\/p>\n
A number of states are already engaging in a form of \u201csoft secession,\u201d by conducting multistate public health efforts during the Covid pandemic or forming compacts to address climate change.<\/p>\n
But none of the secessionist movements are close to achieving their goals.<\/p>\n
The Constitution provides a mechanism for changing state boundaries with the approval of legislatures in both affected states and Congress. But that tends to go only one direction. Neither Virginia nor Illinois has responded to the overtures of its neighbors.<\/p>\n
Oregon Democrats have declined to meet with proponents of Greater Idaho, and neither President Trump nor Oregon\u2019s lone Republican congressman, Cliff Bentz, has answered calls for help. And voters in two of the counties that initially embraced the idea have since backtracked.<\/p>\n
The Cascadia movement faces an even larger obstacle. In the 1869 case Texas v. White, the Supreme Court ruled that the nation was \u201cindestructible\u201d and that states could not unilaterally secede. The court left open the possibility that a state could leave through \u201crevolution\u201d or with the consent of the other states, but rejected the idea that a state could simply vote its way out.<\/p>\n
Hugh Spitzer, a retired University of Washington law professor who began studying separatist movements in law school, laid out a possible path through a treaty negotiated by the president and ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. But that would take decades and require momentum driven by more than a single political moment.<\/p>\n
Mr. Engelson said the second Trump administration had convinced him that conversations about separation could no longer remain theoretical.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re in an abusive relationship with the federal government,\u201d he said. \u201cDivorce is a valid response.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The revolution begins with a poetry reading. Last month, a journalist turned organizer named Andrew Engelson invited friends…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266847,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[103193,1452,47837,27524,9,11,10,21607,103192,15074,1069,1876,25436],"class_list":["post-266846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-cascadia","tag-donald-j","tag-federal-state-relations-us","tag-idaho","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-oregon","tag-secession-and-independence-movements","tag-states-us","tag-trump","tag-united-states-politics-and-government","tag-washington-state"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}