I'd rather see Eastern Oregon and Washington split off, potentially as a compromise in order to bring in Puerto Rico and DC as states without messing up the Senate.

I'm going to put on my tinfoil hat for a minute. Currently, we are seeing such a huge divide between the two ruling parties that the political climate has become similar to that of pre-civil war America. But, instead of a divide between slave and free states, there's a more local divide between rural areas and cities. One that has become so bad that, as a non-partisan person from a rural area living in a city, I have lost friendships with die hard Democrats and Republicans due to my pro-gun and pro-choice stances. Something that, before 2016, I couldn't have imagined that someone would completely cut me out of their life just because I don't agree with them on hot button issues.

And this is reflected in both our state and national legislatures. The parties are continuously refusing to vote together just because they always want to be against what the other party is doing, instead of trying to make our country a better place. Additionally, the senates and houses of representatives continue to propose legislation and push appointments just to spite the other. We see this with the Kavanaugh appointment, where the senate forced a terrible Justice through just to spite the Democratic party. We also see this with H.R 7115, a deceptively named bill that would not do anything to stop 3D printed guns, but will make any semi-automatic rifle an "assault weapon" and completely destroy home gun smithing.

Eventually (we're talking 30-50 years here, with global warming maybe making this divide worse), we might see the federal government, as we know it, collapse.

Unless we can either rectify this divide with more moderate legislatures or a alternative voting system, we're only going to see a more hostile political climate, regardless of the president.

Which is why it's important that, at the state level, we start bridging this gap by voting for more moderate candidates and parties, working on interstate infrastructure, and building deeper connections with other areas in Cascadia. The east coast has always pushed us out of the picture, so we should make it easier to unite should that day of evil come.