Baker County doesn’t have an rural-urban political divide to match the chasm that separates Oregon in many electoral matters.

But the county’s political predilections have some minor gaps.

Donald Trump handily won the county in the Nov. 5 general election, with nearly 73% of the votes.

Baker County voters have favored the Republican ticket in every presidential election since 1968, when Richard Nixon got 52% of the votes to Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 40%.

(Republicans didn’t overtake Democrats in the number of registered voters in the county, however, until the 1996 election.)

Nixon’s win in 1968 did not kick off decades of utter dominance by Republicans in Baker County. Although the GOP candidate has taken the county in each of the 13 subsequent elections, the margins we’ve become accustomed to in the past couple decades, with the Republican generally garnering at least 70% of the county’s votes, are relatively recent phenomena.

In 1976, for instance, Republican Gerald Ford, the incumbent who replaced Nixon when Nixon resigned in 1974, nipped Democrat Jimmy Carter in Baker County by the minuscule margin of 31 votes.

In the previous election, in 1972, Democrat George McGovern, who lost in a national landslide to Nixon, polled 33% in Baker County compared with Nixon’s 55% (George Wallace got 8%). McGovern’s performance was better, though, than either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama managed in Baker County.

Trump’s support in 2024, although it was robust in each of the county’s 17 precincts, did vary by as much as 29 percentage points.

Differences between precincts played a decisive role, though, elsewhere on the ballot.

The Pine Eagle School District’s property tax levy, which would have raised $5.4 million for school improvements in Halfway, failed, just as it did in the May election.

But there was a significant change between the May and November results.

The May measure, which would have allowed the district to sell $11.7 million in bonds, lost in each of the three precincts that are part of the district — Pine Valley, Eagle Valley and Irondyke (which is at the far eastern edge of the county, in and around Oxbow).

Overall, 60% of voters rejected the measure in May.

The levy on the November ballot lost by a smaller margin, with 54% opposed.

But there was a major change.

In November, voters in the school district’s biggest precinct — Pine Valley, which includes Halfway — supported the measure.

The margin, though, was so slight — 51% in favor, 326 to 316 votes — that it couldn’t overcome the opposition from voters on the west side of the Halfway Grade. In the Eagle Valley precinct, 63% of voters — 263 to 156 ­— turned down the school district levy.

Irondyke was a wash, with 29 votes in favor of the measure and 29 opposed.

This is not the first time voters in Eagle and Pine valleys have disagreed about their schools.

According to the late James R. Evans’ indispensable history of schools in Baker County, “Gold Dust and Chalk Dust,” during the 1950s residents in the valleys argued about the proposal, under pressure from a new state law, to combine the two separate school districts, one in each valley.

“History indicates fist fights and that irate partisans retaliated against leaders by breaking water ditches and flooding hayfields, molesting the management of cattle, and destroying farm machinery,” Evans wrote in his book, published in 1981. “Vestiges of the feeling remain 20 years after, and probably will remain during the lifetime of the partisans.”

On July 1, 1960, the two districts were combined into one — aptly named Pine Eagle — which remains today.

The transition wasn’t immediate, though.

In 1968, students from Eagle Valley High — the Eagles, naturally, clad in uniforms of green and gold — joined their counterparts from Halfway High — the Wolves (a mascot that would not work in this era of cattle depredation), wearing black and white.

The school remained Halfway Union High until 1977 when it became Pine Eagle High School. The mascot is the Spartans, and the school colors are red, white and blue.

An elementary school stayed open in Richland until 2007, but today all Pine Eagle students attend classes in Halfway.

As for the presidential race, although Trump polled at least 65% in every Baker County precinct, there were notable differences among them.

Trump was particularly popular in the Durkee Precinct, where the Trump/Vance ticket got 70 of the 73 votes cast — 96%.

(Harris/Walz got the three other votes.)

Trump garnered almost as much support in the Hereford Precinct, with 72 of the 78 votes. That’s 92%.

In the aforementioned Irondyke Precinct, the president-elect pulled in a comparatively modest 65% of the vote (39 of 60). Harris got 19 votes in that precinct.

Trump’s lowest rate of support, though, was in one of the five precincts that make up Baker City. In Precinct 2, Trump got 64% of the votes — 608 of 947 votes. Harris received 307 votes, the most her ticket drew in any precinct.

Precinct 2’s boundaries are the city limits on the west, H Street on the north, and Ash Street on the east. Its southern boundary follows Broadway Street from Ash Street west to the railroad tracks, then follows the tracks northwest to B Street, and from there west to the city limits.

Trump did substantially better, with 73% of the votes, in Precinct 5, which takes in most of the eastern one-third of Baker City, generally east of Ash Street and Highway 30.

Elsewhere in Baker City, Trump got 71% of the votes in Precinct 4 (southwest corner, south of Estes Street and west of Highway 30), 69% in Precinct 1 (north of H Street, west of Ash Street) and 67% in Precinct 3 (west of Ash, north of Estes and south of Broadway).

A little more than 55% of the votes cast were from voters living in Baker City.

In the five Baker City precincts, Trump received 69% of the votes, Harris 27% (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had about 1.8%).

Other than in the Irondyke Precinct, Trump had a higher level of support in precincts outside Baker City than the 69% he received inside the city precincts.

As with the school measure, voters in Eagle Valley and Pine Valley differed in their support for the Trump ticket, although voters in both precincts solidly supported the Republican.

Trump got 82% of voters in the Eagle Valley Precinct, 70% in Pine Valley.

There was less spread, generally, in the rest of the rural precincts, where Trump’s support was 81% in Haines and Keating, 79% in Unity, and 78% in Sumpter and Huntington.

Trump received 81% of votes in Precinct 13, which basically surrounds the Baker City limits but is separate from the five city precincts. Precinct 13 extends north past the Medical Springs Highway, east to near the Interpretive Center, and south to around Stices Gulch.

In the Poca-Wing Precinct, which includes most of the west side of the Baker Valley, Trump got 72% of the votes.

Poca-Wing had the most votes cast — 825 — among all precincts outside Baker City. Vote totals in city precincts ranged from 934 in Precinct 1 to 1,275 in Precinct 5.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald. Contact him at 541-518-2088 or jjacoby@bakercityherald.com.