Her regret over voting for the resolution isn’t really about its substance, she said, or about Trump. “I support President Trump,” she said, adding that she believes those who voted for his impeachment were wrong. Honl isn’t sure about the false-flag claim, which she barely paid attention to ahead of the vote. “I probably should have looked at the resolution as a whole instead of focusing on one section,” she said. When I asked if she believed that the people who stormed the Capitol were Trump supporters or leftists who had infiltrated the rally, she thought about it for several seconds. “I believe it was probably both,” she said.
Elected Republicans in Oregon were aghast that the state party’s leadership would formally embrace an obvious falsehood about the Capitol riot and liken it to the Nazi takeover of Germany. Days later, Christine Drazan, the Republican leader in the state House of Representatives, secured the support of her entire caucus for a statement repudiating the resolution…
In no state has the GOP fallen further over the past decade than in Oregon, which as recently as 2004 was a battleground in presidential contests. Republicans don’t hold any statewide offices and have just a single seat in Congress, while Democrats have won supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature. A population boom fueled by the tech industry has pushed Portland and its suburbs to the left, and pockets of Central Oregon around the city of Bend have drawn an influx of liberals attracted to the area’s outdoor lifestyle, says Jim Moore, a political scientist at Oregon’s Pacific University. Moore’s voting district, outside Portland, illustrates the leftward shift: A decade ago, a precinct in his neighborhood backed the Democratic gubernatorial candidate by less than 1 percent; last year, Biden defeated Trump in the same precinct, 65 percent to 35 percent.
