West
Territorial 'tug of war' rages out west as blue state residents say enough is enough
Oregonians who are fed up with the blue state’s policies are seeking to relocate the Beaver State’s border to neighboring Idaho, where the red state policies “actually match their values.”
The Greater Idaho Movement’s Executive Director, Matt McCaw, told Fox News Digital that the movement to shift Oregon’s border 200 miles west was created to bridge the growing “tug of war” in the Beaver State.
“The state of Oregon is divided geographically by the Cascade Mountain Range and that geographic divide is also a huge cultural divide,” McCaw said. “So, on the west side of Oregon you have a different climate, it’s a different economy, it’s a different culture and more urban. It’s a very different place than the east side, where there are agricultural people who are very conservative and traditional.”
“You have these two very different groups of people in Oregon that try to play tug of war over state government,” he said.
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The Greater Idaho Movement seeks to shift the Idaho border west and move the Oregon border 200 miles west. (Greater Idaho Movement)
Matt McCaw, the executive director of the Greater Idaho Movement, discussed with Fox News Digital the grassroots movement to shift Oregon’s border. (Fox News Digital)
The political “tug of war” in Oregon has created a dividing conflict in the western state – aggravated by residents who have different values and needs from their elected officials.
“Eastern Oregonians are very different from western Oregonians,” McCaw said. “And you can take almost any issue that is a political hot topic, whether that’s immigration or taxes or abortion or gun rights or drug criminalization or decriminalization, you can take almost any issue, and what the people of Eastern Oregon want for their communities is different from what the people of Western Oregon want.”
The Greater Idaho Movement seeks to shift Oregon’s border and join the more conservative Idaho. (Greater Idaho Movement)
The Greater Idaho Movement hopes to bridge the gap by shifting Oregon’s border.
“Why don’t we find a long-term solution to allow people who are different to get different policies for their communities that make sense for them? That will lower political tension, it will lower political conflict. And it’s what people repeatedly say they want out of their politics,” McCaw said.
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“People are not looking for partisan bickering,” he said. “What most people want are bipartisan solutions that create win-wins for everybody involved. That’s what our solution does, that’s what Greater Idaho does.”
“It creates a situation where the people in eastern Oregon get the government that they want and what the people in western Oregon get the government that they want and vote for,” McCaw added. “And all that political tension that comes from sharing the same state goes away.”
The western side of Oregon is rainier and denser in population, while the state’s eastern side has a drier climate and is more rural. (Greater Idaho Movement)
The executive director of the Greater Idaho Movement explained that the “urban rural divide” has been in Oregon “since the beginning.”
“Since this state was created, you were always going to have this difference between the east side and the west side. And a lot of that is just straight up geography. The west side of Oregon has a completely different geography and climate than the east side of Oregon, and people are going to make their livings a different way.”
Many residents in eastern Oregon were soured by Oregon state’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. (Greater Idaho Movement)
McCaw said that the difference between the west and east sides of Oregon were only exacerbated during the coronavirus pandemic and helped “supercharge” their movement.
“During COVID, the state of Oregon was one of the most extreme. They closed businesses across the state, they closed churches across the state, they closed schools, they imposed mask mandates and later vaccine mandates,” McCaw said. “This was all state policy handed down through the government institutions like the Oregon Health Authority, which made these policies for the entire state.”
“It was very heavy-handed, and here in eastern Oregon, people [here] did not want those policies,” he said.
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“You had just this amazing amount of conflict and frustration out here, tension, because these policies were being forced on the east side of the state that we didn’t want. And all along, just to our east in our neighboring state, Idaho, you had a completely different government response from the state,” McCaw said.
McCaw said that many residents in eastern Oregon saw the pandemic as a wake-up call for residents to want politicians who reflect the community’s values.
“And those policies that happened during COVID were so impactful and so negative that I think that it kind of supercharged this movement,” he said. “It made people realize that the government can have a massive impact on my life in a really negative way, so we need to make sure that that government matches our values, matches our community’s values, so that the next time something like this comes along, we know our government response is going to be the kind of response that our community wants.”
The Greater Idaho Movement argues that a border is an “invisible line.” (Greater Idaho Movement)
“The people shouldn’t be serving this invisible line. The invisible line should serve the people,” McCaw said, referring to the border.
“This is an idea that is not crazy, we move invisible lines all the time in our country to get better representation for people,” he explained. “We redistrict every ten years, and we change that every ten years. Nobody blinks an eye about that.”
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McCaw argued that moving Oregon’s border would “actually make sense.”
“Let’s take this invisible line. Let’s move it to where it actually makes sense, where it actually would represent the people and group similar peoples together who want the same kind of government. And let’s use it to lower political tension, solve problems rather than make problems worse,” he said.
Matt McCaw told Fox News Digital that the Greater Idaho Movement has gained steam since its creation four years ago. (Greater Idaho Movement)
McCaw said that since the Genesis of the movement, just four years ago, it has gained traction from residents and local officials.
“We have gone to 13 counties in eastern Oregon and asked voters directly, ‘Do you want your elected leaders to pursue making this border change happen?’” McCaw said. “We’ve won in all 13 of those eastern Oregon counties, so we are looking at moving, in total, 17 full or partial counties into Idaho.”
“The people of Eastern Oregon want to have this conversation, and the people of Eastern Oregon deserve to have their elected leaders have this conversation on their behalf,” he said.
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Montana
Montana Department of Agriculture focusing on innovation in 2026
HELENA — You probably have goals and plans for 2026—the Montana Department of Agriculture does too.
“We’re really focusing on innovative agricultural practices,” Montana Department of Agriculture director Jillien Streit said.
It’s no secret that agriculture—farming and ranching—is not easy. There are long days, planning, monitoring crops and livestock, and other challenges beyond farmers’ and ranchers’ control.
(WATCH: Montana Department of Agriculture focusing on innovation in 2026)
Montana Department of Agriculture focusing on innovation in 2026
“We have very low commodity prices across the board,” Streit said. “We still have very high input prices across the board, and we have really high prices when it comes to our equipment, and so, it’s a really tough year.”
But innovation, including new practices, partnerships and technology use, can help navigate some of those challenges.
“We can’t make more time and we can’t make more land, so we need to start putting together innovative practices that help us maximize what our time and land can do,” Streit said.
Practices range from using technology like autonomous tractors and virtual fencing—allowing rangers to contain and move cattle right from their phones—to regenerative farming and ranching.
“It is bringing cattle back into farming operations to be able to work with cover cropping practices to invigorate the soil for new soil health benefits,” Streit said.
The Montana Department of Agriculture is working to help producers learn, share, and collaborate on new ideas to work in their operations.
The department will share stories of practices that work from farms and ranches across the state. Also, within the next year or so, Streit said the department is hoping to roll out technology to help producers collaborate.
“(It’s) providing a communication platform where people can get together and really help each other out by utilizing each other’s assets,” she said.
While not easy, agriculture is still one of Montana’s largest industries, and Streit said innovating and sharing ideas across the state can keep it going long into the future.
Nevada
Nevada debuts public option amid federal health care shifts
More than 10,000 people have enrolled in Nevada’s new public option health plans, which debuted last fall with the expectation that they would bring lower prices to the health insurance market.
Those preliminary numbers from the open enrollment period that ended in January are less than a third of what state officials had projected. Nevada is the third state so far to launch a public option plan, along with Colorado and Washington state. The idea is to offer lower-cost plans to consumers to expand health care access.
But researchers said plans like these are unlikely to fill the gaps left by sweeping federal changes, including the expiration of enhanced subsidies for plans bought on Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
The public option gained attention in the late 2000s when Congress considered but ultimately rejected creating a health plan funded and run by the government that would compete with private carriers in the market. The programs in Washington state, Colorado, and Nevada don’t go that far — they aren’t government-run but are private-public partnerships that compete with private insurance.
In recent years, states have considered creating public option plans to make health coverage more affordable and to reduce the number of uninsured people. Washington was the first state to launch a program, in 2021, and Colorado followed in 2023.
Washington and Colorado’s programs have run into challenges, including a lack of participation from clinicians, hospitals, and other care providers, as well as insurers’ inability to meet rate reduction benchmarks or lower premiums compared with other plans offered on the market.
Nevada law requires that the carriers of the public option plans — Battle Born State Plans, named after a state motto — lower premium costs compared with a benchmark “silver” plan in the marketplace by 15% over the next four years.
But that amount might not make much difference to consumers with rising premium payments from the loss of the ACA’s enhanced tax credits, said Keith Mueller, director of the Rural Policy Research Institute.
“That’s not a lot of money,” Mueller said.
Three of the eight insurers on the state’s exchange, Nevada Health Link, offered the state plans during the open enrollment period.
Insurance companies plan to meet the lower premium cost requirement in Nevada by cutting broker fees and commissions, which prompted opposition from insurance brokers in the state. In response, Nevada marketplace officials told state lawmakers in January that they will give a flat-fee reimbursement to brokers.
The public option has faced opposition among state leaders. In 2024, a state judge dismissed a lawsuit, brought by a Nevada state senator and a group that advocates for lower taxes, that challenged the public option law as unconstitutional. They have appealed to the state Supreme Court.
Federal Policy Impacts
Recent federal changes create more obstacles.
Nevada is consistently among the states with the largest populations of people who do not have health insurance coverage. Last year, nearly 95,000 people in the state received the enhanced ACA tax credits, averaging $465 in savings per month, according to KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
But the enhanced tax credits expired at the end of the year, and it appears unlikely that lawmakers will bring them back. Nationwide ACA enrollment has decreased by more than 1 million people so far this year, down from record-high enrollment of 24 million last year.
About 4 million people are expected to lose health coverage from the expiration of the tax credits, according to the Congressional Budget Office. An additional 3 million are projected to lose coverage because of other policy changes affecting the marketplace.
Justin Giovannelli, an associate research professor at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, said the changes to the ACA in the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last summer, will make it more difficult for people to keep their coverage. These changes include more frequent enrollment paperwork to verify income and other personal information, a shortened enrollment window, and an end to automatic reenrollment.
In Nevada, the changes would amount to an estimated 100,000 people losing coverage, according to KFF.
“All of that makes getting coverage on Nevada Health Link harder and more expensive than it would be otherwise,” Giovannelli said.
State officials projected ahead of open enrollment that about 35,000 people would purchase the public option plans. Of the 104,000 people who had purchased a plan on the state marketplace as of mid-January, 10,762 had enrolled in one of the public option plans, according to Nevada Health Link.
Katie Charleson, communications officer for the state health exchange, said the original enrollment estimate was based on market conditions before the recent increases in customers’ premium costs. She said that the public option plans gave people facing higher costs more choices.
“We expect enrollment in Battle Born State Plans to grow over time as awareness increases and as Nevadans continue seeking quality coverage options that help reduce costs,” Charleson said.
According to KFF, nationally the enhanced subsidies saved enrollees an average of $705 annually in 2024, and enrollees would save an estimated $1,016 in premium payments on average in 2026 if the subsidies were still in place. Without the subsidies, people enrolled in the ACA marketplace could be seeing their premium costs more than double.
Insights From Washington and Colorado
Washington and Colorado are not planning to alter their programs due to the expiration of the tax credits, according to government officials in those states.
Other states that had recently considered creating public options have backtracked. Minnesota officials put off approving a public option in 2024, citing funding concerns. Proposals to create public options in Maine and New Mexico also sputtered.
Washington initially saw meager enrollment in its Cascade Select public option plans; only 1% of state marketplace enrollees chose a public option plan in 2021. But that changed after lawmakers required hospitals to contract with at least one public option plan by 2023. Last year the state reported that 94,000 customers enrolled, accounting for 30% of all customers on the state marketplace. The public option plans were the lowest-premium silver plans in 31 of Washington’s 39 counties in 2024.
A 2025 study found that since Colorado implemented its public option, called the Colorado Option, coverage through the ACA marketplace has become more affordable for enrollees who received subsidies but more expensive for enrollees who did not.
Colorado requires all insurers offering coverage through its marketplace to include a public option that follows state guidelines. The state set premium reduction targets of 5% a year for three years beginning in 2023. Starting this year, premium costs are not allowed to outpace medical inflation.
Though the insurers offering the public option did not meet the premium reduction targets, enrollment in the Colorado Option has increased every year it has been available. Last year, the state saw record enrollment in its marketplace, with 47% of customers purchasing a public option plan.
Giovannelli said states are continuing to try to make health insurance more affordable and accessible, even if federal changes reduce the impact of those efforts.
“States are reacting and trying to continue to do right by their residents,” Giovannelli said, “but you can’t plug all those gaps.”
Are you struggling to afford your health insurance? Have you decided to forgo coverage? Click here to contact KFF Health News and share your story.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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