Yes we did!

Oregon Progressives Win Campaign to Preserve Public Services By Raising Taxes on Corporations and the Wealthy

Last week all eyes were on the special Senate election in Massachusetts, where the results were touted as heralding an earthquake in political realignment in favor of the Tea Party movement, etc. What a difference a week makes! When the ballots from Oregon’s special election were tallied last night, Oregon voters approved two measures to preserve vital public services by increasing taxes on the wealthy and on corporations.

Oregon’s vote underscores a lesson that the more perceptive commentators (e.g., “friend of the Center” Celinda Lake) and others emphasized after Massachusetts: that both Republicans and Democrats ignore public outrage at having been cast destitute by the economic collapse at their peril.

The Tea Party crowd, Republicans in Congress and Blue Dog Democrats have been using a pseudo-populist line to actually defeat attempts to hold Wall Street and major corporations accountable, seeking to continue their long-term agenda of undermining the role of government altogether. But Oregon voters showed that people value strong public services, enough to increase taxes on those best able to pay them.

This is a remarkable development, and it was achieved thanks to an “all hands on deck” campaign spearheaded by Our Oregon. The campaign assembled the largest progressive coalition in the state’s history, with 250 community organizations, labor unions, small business leaders, and elected leaders. In the lead up to the vote, campaign allies (including VOTE Project groups) registered some 40,000 voters. And on top of hard hitting media, the Get Out the Vote operation was truly massive in scale, knocking on over 300,000 doors and making a million phone calls – an astonishing achievement, given that the total votes cast were around 1.2 million.

Unlike Massachusetts, where progressive base voters largely stayed at home, Oregon’s mobilization was remarkably effective. As a result, the measures passed by a surprisingly wide margin, and Oregonians voted to raise income taxes for the first time since the 1930s.