On September 19th, we asked the question: “What is the Cascadia political movement that you would like to see?”

Over the next two days more than 200 Cascadians joined us to share what the Cascadia Political Movement was for them, and what they thought was most important as we move into 2020. Below is a brief overview of your answers.

Question 1: What should be the goal of a Cascadia Political Movement?

When asked, “What should be the goal of a Cascadia Political Movement?” the most popular answer was promoting Bioregionalism as a fundamental shift from capitalism or nationalism, followed by Independence and Promoting Policies that shift us into a more local, resilient and bioregional framework. The answers were fairly evenly split between the top four choices, with the last place - supporting local businesses showing itself to be the least popular by quite a bit.

Participants were given the option to check one of five different options, and could select as many options as they liked.

Question 2: What are the most important things for us to work towards in the next three months?

The question “What are the most important things for us to work towards in the next three months?” was an open text field and participants could answer in whatever way they saw fit.

To create a simple graphic that conveyed the overall sentiment, we generated a word cloud, and then compiled the most frequent answers. The top five answers are a summary that we created, rather than exact sentences that were listed and were Independence, Unsure, Climate Change, Regional Interdependence and Fighting Trump.

Question 3: What are the most important political institutions to build?

For the third question, Cascadians were asked “What are the most important things for us to work towards in the next three months?”. The answer, Build Grassroots Coalitions was the clear winner, with a sizable number of people also opting for an Independence campaign and PAC, while the idea of a non-profit think tank to generate policy and research was least popular.

Question 4: Do you understand Cascadia enough to share the idea with others?

For question 4 “Do you understand Cascadia enough to share with others?” we were interested in how confident people felt about their understanding of Cascadia.

Cascadia even as a name for the Pacific North West Rim, can be a lot to take in, plus the history of the movement, and encapsulating philosophy of bioregionalism. Compared with the past, the understanding for both the term of Cascadia, and or bioregionalism has both grown exponentially, though there is a lot of work still to be done.

Question 5: Do you support the idea of Cascadia as an independence movement?

Cascadians are clearly in favor of independence, and the idea of Cascadia as a bioregional independence movement.

For the question “Do you support the idea of Cascadia as an independence movement?” more than 88% of members said YES, while just 11% said no. This number reflects similar polls in the past and from our annual State of Cascadia, the latest of which showed a resounding 95% said they would vote YES for independence if given the option on a referendum.

Question 6: Would your support for Cascadia increase if…

The next question “Would your support for Cascadia increase if…?” was a sentiment analysis asked in three different parts. In each case, we asked people on a 1-10 scale if their support for Cascadia would increase (with 1 being NO, not at all) if Biden is elected, Trump is elected, or the election is contested.

Interestingly, the highest percentage of people said that their support for Cascadia would increase if Trump was elected (8.6), even more than if there was a contested election (8.2), while people felt less concerned if Biden was elected (6.1).

Demographics of Our Movement 1: What words do you use to describe yourself?

This word cloud actually represents two separate questions - on both gender and personal identity. Rather than checkboxes, or a dropdown, we let people define themselves, and collated the data together.

For gender, there were more men then women, but an interesting note is the number of people who identified as non-binary, gender non-conforming and trans Cascadians were nearly 17% of respondents.

For personal identity, White / CIS was the largest way that people identified themselves, with the next being Queer / or Gay, Indigenous, Jewish and finally Cascadian. There were many, many, other answers in here, PNW Autistic, German, P.O.C., Irish, Mixed, Pagan / Wiccan, Washingtonian, Human, Muslim, Sunni, European, Pansexual, Middle Aged, West Coast, Thinker, just a few among them.

This range helps represent a diverse and vibrant community and movement, and the wordcloud does the best job really capturing this diversity.

Demographics of Our Movement 2: What is your political identity?

For the question “How do you define your political identity?” Cascadians were given 6 different options, Progressive, Democrat, Republican, Anarchist, Green, Libertarian OR were able to list “Other:” and write in a separate answer. More than 40 different types of political affinity were listed, representing a wide breadth of the Cascadian movement.

The top self identification was “Progressive” at 28.1% of the vote, while Democrat, Independent and anarchist all listed well. It should be noted that while green was given as an option, Socialist was not - and that was our bad. Socialist - Democratic Socialist and other combinations made up a large percentage of responses, and would have probably been much higher if listed as an option. Our apologies for that.

Demographics of Our Movement 3: What is your age?

What is your age? The Cascadia movement again showed itself to be quite diverse, spread between many different age ranges. In order of largest percentage to least:

29-38: 33.7%
39-48: 25.8%
48-64 17.4%
19-28 15.3%
65+: 6.3%
Under 18: 1.6%

Thank you for your interest in Cascadia!

As always, thank you for your support and taking the time to dig into the data with us. If you support our work, you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Reddit.

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