The campaign promoting Oregon’s Measure 118 on the Nov. 5 ballot, which would have imposed a new corporate tax to give residents a $1,600 annual payment, failed mightily in one respect but succeeded in another.

These contrasting results were not coincidental.

Indeed, the success happened only because the measure took such a thorough whipping by the electorate.

Measure 118 stands out for two related reasons.

First, it is a rare example of voters in Northeastern Oregon (and other rural regions) agreeing with their counterparts in the metropolitan counties where most of the state’s voters live.

But what surprised me most isn’t that a majority of voters in each of the state’s 36 counties rejected the measure, which could have exacerbated the inflation that has plagued the country over the past few years.

I was stunned because the measure was nearly as unpopular in the Portland metro area as it was in the hinterlands.

Examples of such electoral unanimity are about as rare in Oregon as blizzards at the beach.

The Cascade Mountains, which divide the state into quite dissimilar climatic regions, stand as a political barrier as well.

When it comes to weather, the mountains’ effect has a straightforward scientific explanation.

Moisture-laden storms that sweep into Oregon from the North Pacific expectorate most of their liquid load when they climb the Cascades. The air cools as it rises, and the colder the air the less moisture it can hold in vapor form — which is to say, clouds.

Once the air has crossed the Cascade crest, it has dropped much of its moisture as rain or snow. As the air descends the east slopes it warms, which means it can keep most of its shrunken volume of water.

The considerable rain shadow cast by the Cascades is responsible for the dramatic difference in vegetation between the west and east sides. The transition from the lush rainforests to the arid sagebrush steppe is stark, in places happening over a span of 10 or fewer miles.

The mountains aren’t directly responsible, of course, for the political divide.

Nor is that divide anything like as distinct as the physical one.

Oregon’s political chasm is better described in demographic rather than geographic terms — urban versus rural, in the most common phrase.

Even in ostensibly urban counties in the Portland area, such as Clackamas and Washington, residents in rural precincts tend to vote much as their counterparts do in Eastern Oregon.

But these rural voters, who as a rule favor Republican candidates and conservative issues, are a minority in those counties.

The effect is most obvious in races such as the presidential campaign.

Statewide, the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz ticket garnered 55% of votes.

The Democratic duo got a majority of votes in just nine of the 36 counties, but that list includes each of the top four counties in population — Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas and Lane. Those four counties are home to 52% of Oregon’s nearly 4.3 million residents.

But even among those four counties there are substantial differences, electorally speaking.

Multnomah, the most populous and by far the most urban, is also the most reliably Democratic county. Harris/Walz polled almost 79% in Multnomah, which has close to 20% of Oregon’s nearly 3 million registered voters. Benton County, with nearly 68% supporting the Democratic ticket, was a distant second in its preference for the Democrats.

The urban-rural difference is more conspicuous in Clackamas and Lane counties, both of which are much less urban than Multnomah. Harris/Walz got 53% of the votes in Clackamas County, 59% in Lane.

Republicans Donald Trump and JD Vance won every county east of the Cascades except Deschutes.

Yet even though the predominantly rural counties east of the Cascades (again excepting Deschutes) are accurately described as Republican strongholds, the GOP ticket wasn’t quite as popular in most of those rural counties as Harris/Walz were in Multnomah County.

Compared with Harris/Walz’s 78.6% in Multnomah, Trump/Vance won a higher percentage in only one county — Lake, at 81.3%.

In Northeastern Oregon the GOP pair won every county handily, including 73% in Baker, 78.5% in Grant, 72% in Morrow, 67% in Umatilla, 68% in Union and 66% in Wallowa.

But enough about the yawning differences among Oregon’s electorate.

Let’s look at Measure 118.

Voters hated it.

Everywhere they hated it.

The measure failed spectacularly in all 36 counties.

Statewide it went down 78% to 22%.

What surprised me most, though, was that the level of voter disdain for the measure didn’t vary much, even between counties or regions where the difference elsewhere on the ballot, such as the presidential race, was comparatively huge.

At a county level, opposition to Measure 118 ranged from a high of 89.3% in Sherman County to a low of 72.9% in Multnomah.

The left-leaning predilections of Multnomah and the three other most populous counties — Washington, Clackamas and Lane — showed up in the results for Measure 118, a proposal that reflects progressive preferences for shifting dollars from businesses to individuals.

But the effect was tiny compared with results from the presidential race.

In Multnomah, for instance, voters rejected Measure 118 at a slightly lower rate than statewide — 72.9% in the county compared with 78% overall.

But in the presidential race, Multnomah voters favored Harris/Walz at a 78.6% clip, far above the statewide result of 55%.

The difference is greater still when comparing Multnomah with most rural counties.

In Baker County, for instance, 86.1% of voters opposed Measure 118. That’s 13.2 percentage points higher than in Multnomah County.

Yet in the presidential race, the preference for Harris/Walz was 78.6% in Multnomah County, and 24% in Baker County — a difference of 54.6 percentage points, more than four times as wide as the margin for Measure 118.

Measure 118 is an electoral anomaly, to be sure.

I’m certain that the statewide abhorrence for the measure does not portend a trend toward something approaching unanimity among Oregon voters.

The presidential race results show how farfetched that notion is.

But it’s still possible to find a topic that most Oregon voters agree on. That the Measure 118 campaign managed that feat is, I suspect, of little consolation to its leaders.