Secession Fan Fiction Gaining Popularity on the Right

A scheme to redraw state lines passed the Idaho House.

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Idaho wants to become an absolute unit

A strange proposal is working its way through the Idaho state legislature that would have that state envelop more than a dozen of Oregon’s most conservative eastern counties—in effect, shifting the border between the states 200-plus miles to the west. While last Wednesday’s vote in the Idaho House approving this “Greater Idaho” idea is nonbinding, it does legitimize the movement that has long been promoting the plan.

Source: Greater Idaho

This shift of something like 60,000 square miles from Oregon to Idaho would be one of the most significant transfers of land from state to state in American history.

Note that the Idaho House vote on this largely partisan-motivated plan for shifting territory—making red Idaho redder and blue Oregon bluer—comes at the same time that Marjorie Taylor Greene has called for a “national divorce” in which red states and blue states go their separate ways. Meanwhile, the favorability numbers among Republican voters for secession have risen in recent years. On the right, secession talk is popular and only getting more so.

“To adjust the cultural differences between the two areas, I fully understand what they’re trying to do and certainly sympathize with the Oregonians who are trying to move”

—Idaho Sen. Jim Risch

These kinds of proposals are nothing new. They’re designed to quench the far right’s thirst for secession by allowing a blue state’s most conservative regions to branch off and do their own thing. Some other recent examples include: