For the third time in the past decade, Oregon Republicans went to bed on election night thinking they might have finally ended Democratic dominance of statewide races.

But like a recurring bad dream, they awoke Wednesday to see the ballots from heavily Democratic Multnomah County seal a close victory for Democrat John Kitzhaber over Republican Chris Dudley in the governor's race.

"No matter who the Republican is, there is going to be a huge spread there," Bob Repp, a West Linn attorney and Republican volunteer, said with a sigh. "There just seems to be a real rigid dogmatism that has set in in Multnomah County."

Repp's disappointment was shared widely among Republican activists who thought Dudley, a former Portland Trail Blazer with a moderate tone on many issues, could change the political dynamic in Oregon's most populous county.

But Dudley picked up less than 28 percent of the county vote. Republican Sen. Gordon Smith didn't do any better in his narrow re-election loss in 2008, and Republican Kevin Mannix did only slightly better in his close defeat in the 2002 governor's race.

The county, home to the state's largest city and a fifth of the state's voters, has become the symbol of Democratic political dominance in Oregon. Several other counties are just as rigidly partisan -- Dudley won five counties by more than 70 percent -- but none carries anywhere near the weight or attention of the county that is at the heart of the state's one major urban region.

Election 2010

The continual thumping has left Republicans wondering whether they can become competitive in statewide offices in Oregon.

"For a Republican, in this political climate, running a good race, to come up short in this year -- that's discouraging," said Dan Lavey, a Portland consultant who was one of Dudley's top advisers. He added that it's enough to give any Republican pause about running statewide in Oregon.

Josh Kardon, a consultant from Portland who worked on Kitzhaber's campaign, said Republicans are right to fret.

"The problem they face is, they have to whip up their base to get their numbers to be competitive," said Kardon, who was chief of staff to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. "But as soon as they do that, the Multnomah County base is easy to whip up. ... Their fundamental problem is they are not going to change Multnomah County."

That may be. But Multnomah County hasn't always been so lopsided.

About three decades ago, Portland was a center of heavy manufacturing, and its professional class often served as the lawyers, bankers and accountants to the state's dominant timber industry. The county was more Democratic than the rest of the state, but not markedly so.

In 1986, for example, Neil Goldschmidt won the first of what is now an unbroken string of Democratic victories in governor's races. He took 57 percent of the vote in Multnomah County, just 5 percentage points above his statewide percentage.

The rest of the state was also less polarized. Crook County, in eastern Oregon, was nationally famous as a political bellwether. For 110 years, until 1992, it always voted for the winning presidential candidate.

Now, flash forward to Tuesday's election. Kitzhaber won more than 70 percent of the Multnomah County vote, 21 percentage points above what he scored statewide. And the idea of Crook County, which gave 70 percent of its votes to Dudley, as anything other than reliably Republican is now laughable.

Bill Bishop said he has seen this around the country. A veteran Texas journalist, Bishop wrote "The Big Sort," a 2008 book that explained how Americans were increasingly segregating themselves politically.

"People began to sort themselves according to their lifestyles," said Bishop, and political parties became more partisan and divided along such hot-button issues as gay rights and abortion.

Cities became havens for more culturally liberal people, while social conservatives often sought out the outlying suburbs. Portland no longer relied as much on the timber industry, and the working-class bungalows on the city's east side have become increasingly more likely to be filled by a software designer than a welder.

Bishop recalled talking with one demographer who joked that he could now tell a Democratic neighborhood from a Republican neighborhood by how close the houses are to each other.

Although the changes were gradual, in Oregon it felt like the political big sort happened almost overnight. In 1990, in the midst of a heated campaign for governor, the federal government put the spotted owl on the endangered species list and began sharply curtailing logging on public lands in the state.

Democratic candidate Barbara Roberts said the state needed to adjust to the new reality. Republican Dave Frohnmayer joined most of his party in vowing to fight the federal action. Democrats found their support plummeting in timber towns and rural areas around the state. Roberts depended heavily on Multnomah County that year, with her 67,000-vote margin in the county slightly exceeding the size of her statewide win.

Since then, Democrats have become increasingly adept at turning out the vote in Multnomah County, as well as in other major Democratic strongholds such as Eugene, Corvallis and Ashland.

Greg Strimple, a Boise-based pollster who worked for Dudley, said he finds these Oregon Democrats harder to peel off than in other states.

"Oregon has a unique breed of lifestyle Democrat that is very different than most Democratic constituencies in the country," he said. He worked on New Jersey Republican Chris Christie's campaign for governor in 2009 and said they were able to move Democrats more readily on tax and budget issues.

But Democratic voters in Oregon, he said, were firmer in their party allegiance, perhaps because of their greater emphasis on social and environmental issues.

Of course, some analysts say too much significance is placed on the idea of a state sharply divided by geography.

Ethan Seltzer, an urban studies professor at Portland State University, notes that Dudley received more actual votes, nearly 75,000, in Multnomah County than he did in all but two other counties.

In fact, Dudley pulled more votes out of Multnomah than he did in 17 of the 18 counties east of the Cascades.

"Geography is a lousy proxy for votes," said Seltzer, arguing that the maps showing a sea of counties colored red because Dudley won more votes in them leaves an unfair impression that Kitzhaber didn't win a legitimate majority.

Whatever the case, there's no doubt that Multnomah County makes up for in population what it lacks in wide open spaces. Take Precinct 3002, a triangular-shaped chunk of Portland bounded by Northwest 12th Avenue, West Burnside Street and the Willamette River.

This piece of cityscape is no more than a quarter of a square mile, yet has more than 4,200 registered voters. That's about the same number of voters as in all of Harney County, which sits in Oregon's high desert country and covers an area larger than the state of New Jersey.

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