David Sarasohn in the Oregonian/OregonLive had a nice little piece about what happened differently in Oregon in the mid-terms.
Once there was a little blue island.
In the midst of the vast national red wave that was the 2014 election, the little blue atoll overwhelmingly re-elected its Democratic senator despite $3 million in TV spending by the Koch brothers, was the only state in the country to increase Democratic control in both houses of its legislature and voted to legalize marijuana.
He goes on from there to explore why Oregon was different.
I'm sorry that the nation has gone mad, but I'm grateful for my little faraway blue island, where we sent even more Democrats to the State Legislature than we had last term, re-elected a Democratic governor to his fourth (!) term of office, legalized marajuana, rejected the Koch funded Republican Senate candidate (Wehby) for Jeff Merkley, and where (according to Sarasohn, unlike almost all other states) a majority of white people voted for Obama twice.
Some of us moved to Oregon to get away. Some of us were born here and stay here because it is far enough away. When the nuclear war comes will they even bother to drop a bomb on Oregon?
Oregon is not a progressive heaven. There are plenty of rabid right wingers here. But on balance, this far away, forgotten island is somehow resisting the tide of indifference and hatred and big money that brought about the most recent election results.
It is good to live in a place that marches to a different drummer. My sympathies to the rest of you. :-)
(What's that? You say the world and its evils will catch up with us even here? Maybe, but they'll have to find us first.)