Reinvention and Reinvestment in Regional Separatism: How Rural Conservatives Organize in the Western United States

Corinne Rushing, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

In 2020, conservatives living primarily in Eastern Oregon founded the Greater Idaho movement which seeks to merge the rural counties of Eastern Oregon with the state of Idaho. This would allow residents to enjoy a conservative state government that aligns more closely with their county-level voting history. Greater Idaho emerged despite the presence of several analogous regional separatist movements with similar political ideologies, constituencies, and territorial claims (e.g. the proposed states of Jefferson and Liberty). This paper seeks to answer two questions: first, why did the Greater Idaho movement emerge amidst a landscape of competing, mutually exclusive regional separatist movements? Second, what explains the affinity between rural conservatives in the American West and regional separatism as a strategy for political transformation? Through the close analysis of 46 Oregonian town halls on the Greater Idaho proposal from February 2021 to August 2023, I argue that the Greater Idaho movement reinvents regional separatism while still reinvesting in the strategy of regional separation. The effort has innovated on earlier strategies of regional separatism through a growing moderation of goals and insistence on “politically correct” forms of separatism. However, the moderation of the movement is still grounded in far-right nationalistic and authoritarian principles: that land should be bordered to enclose territorially-based groups and that those with more land should have a greater say in policy. I propose that studies of rural American politics should contend with the idea that rural communities see their lands as the basis of their political power.

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 Presented in Session 188. Social Movements Across the World