Oregon has six congressional districts. 4 are pretty blue; one’s swingy and one is deep red. Dan Ruby thinks there’s a narrow path to flip the red one— OR-02, which basically takes up almost three-quarters of the state and wants to secede and join Idaho (or the Confederacy if that gets started again). And he’s on that path. A little context: Biden won 36.6% of the district’s vote in 2020 and the PVI is R+15. Cliff Bentz first won the district in 2016 and no Democrat has ever gotten to 40% against him.
Bentz, who voted to not accept the legitimate, certified results from Arizona and Pennsylvania after Trump’s attempted coup, doesn’t make a spectacle out of himself the way Marjorie Traitor Greene, Gaetz and Boebert do… but he votes with them almost always. He voted against the PACT act for Veterans health benefits twice and although he tries taking credit for the projects in Oregon resulting from the CHIPS Act, he stuck with MAGA orthodoxy and voted against it. He hasn’t updated his campaign website since his 2020 primary and his top issues remain:
2nd Amendment
Dismantling national environmental protections
Dismantling protections for wolves and wildlife
Opposing dam removal and equitable water use policies
Opposing healthcare
Opposing social security
Dismantling pro-choice rights
Denying climate change and eliminating emissions regulations
Militarized anti-immigration policies
On the other hand, Dan Ruby, who comes from a background in new media art and punk rock and a career in space science education that mutated into addressing climate change and community health and now works in equitable housing, couldn’t be more different from Bentz. A progressive who believes in democracy, he was elected to school board in 2023 and jumped into politics headfirst because, he told me, “someone has to keep democracy alive in Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District.” He lives in Ashland and said he “enjoys working on teams to solve complex puzzles, the newest of which is how to help people thrive through removing barriers to housing, transportation, health, education, employment belonging, and environment. One of those difficult problems he talked with me about last week is how to address the affordable housing crisis— which is as much a crisis in rural counties as it is in urban centers. Please spend some time considering what he has to say— and if you’d like to see him replace Bentz, you can chip in here on a page dedicated to progressives running in districts Trump won in 2020.
This Is How Progressives Win In Red Districts
by Dan Ruby
I’m running for US House of Representatives in one of the toughest parts in the country: Oregon’s 2nd Congressional district covers 71% of the state geographically but contains only 17% of the population, includes 20 diverse rural counties, leaned 35 points Republican in the last election, and has only swung 10 points further right with redistricting since. As far as uphill battles go, this one is a nearly sheer cliff. So why do it? The majority of people in our district are struggling, and we can do better.
Since the last presidential election and over the course of a global pandemic, we’ve been neglected. Wildfires exacerbated by human-caused climate change devastated some of our communities and continue to grow as a threat to others. Simmering mental health and substance use challenges were sharpened by COVID into a full-blown crisis, and the resources to manage or extinguish are nowhere in sight. We deserve, like all humans, the opportunity to thrive and become resilient and ready for the future of new challenges and opportunities we’ll face.
My career is built on public service, veering wildly between science education, community health, and points in between. I’ve charted a broad map of skills and understanding of what it takes to help folks thrive by removing barriers across the interconnected vital conditions for well-being. Near the top of that list is humane housing: people need a stable place to live in order to do well in school, perform at their job, maintain their health, and raise a family.
According to the United Way, between 35% and 65% of the households in our district are not making ends meet; they’re employed, but have limited assets and low income. A chunk of those are below the poverty level, but most folks are surviving. We don’t qualify for benefits, but we’re living month-to-month, paycheck-to-paycheck. In Oregon, 75% of renters and 24% of owners fall into this category, with not enough money after housing expenses to pay for necessary living costs.
So how did we get here, and how do we progress forward? The answer clearly does not lie in ignoring the worsening problem–our incumbent has not updated his website in four years, and does not mention housing on his radar of issues. The answer is neither simple nor easy, and it won’t be found through fighting a divisive culture war that stratifies young and old, rich and poor, and the eastern side of the state from the rest.
While our governor prioritizes housing in her agenda, the approaches we’ve seen are urban-centric, created by and for Portland. By the time state funding trickles down to our wonderful but woefully under-equipped Community-Based Organizations, there’s not enough left over to make meaningful headway. So we’re left to our own devices and support from the federal government. Senator Merkeley is a strong advocate for policies with big impact, but he doesn’t have an ally in the House to advance the efforts or develop innovative models and projects that could be replicated nationally through the earmark process.
Merkeley is leading a national charge to stop the bleeding of housing stock to predatory investors; this is a problem that affects us critically on a national level, but is especially acute in vulnerable rural areas like Oregon’s 2nd district. Blackrock and Blackstone are the biggest and worst offenders, buying up apartment buildings, mobile home parks, and older single-family homes, and selling or renting them back to working families at untenable rates. They’re also leading the development of new construction that puts the dream of adequate housing out of reach for a growing majority of our labor force. Perhaps most disturbing, the highest number of folks becoming homeless in my communities are seniors, living on fixed income but with rising medical and housing costs as landlords raise rents beyond affordable. In my local schools, we see a rapid rise in homeless students. Unsurprisingly, health and education outcomes for people living out of their cars is not great. We have to do better.
Another contributor is wildfires that wipe out whole communities–in 2020, the two towns neighboring mine experienced 2500 homes burned, mostly of vulnerable populations–seniors and/or people on low income or in poverty. Cities are rebounding slowly through new construction, but without thoughtful incentives from the federal government, developers have no way to build attainable or below-market-rate housing, and the market far outpaces income growth. As a senior director of strategic partnership for a federally-qualified health center that provided housing with wraparound services to fire survivors, I learned quickly what works (and what doesn’t) as we collaboratively brainstormed and creatively tried new things, ongoing iteration as we find what fits us best.
Finally, Oregon has remnants of outdated land use laws from the 1970s created to preserve forests and farmland for logging, farming, and ranching (not, primarily, to protect the environment). Our legislature moved in 2024 to begin changing these in consideration of the need for housing, but meanwhile those natural resource lands have been bought up surreptitiously over decades by the same investors that are disrupting our housing.
The solution lies in homegrown innovation and working together, regardless of political affiliation, augmented with governmental agency resources. In January, I co-founded a non-profit with my school board colleagues as an outgrowth of a committee to curb declining enrollment; what we discovered is that families with school-aged children just aren’t able to live and work in the district, and are leaving for places they can survive and thrive in. The biggest lever available for us to pull was in housing, and so we’re combining district resources with city government, county and Coordinated-Care Organizations (through Medicaid), and state programs to design a replicable vision for attainable homes. We posit that housing is healthcare, and a human right; if we want students to do well in school, we need to care for not just them onsite but cultivate a healthy community in a bigger context.
While diving into this deep pool, it dawned on us that we don’t need to limit our vision of people thriving to just the few thousand students in our purview–where there are gaps, we can roll up our sleeves and listen to constituents. We can harness our community colleges, our community-based health centers, our nonprofits, our faith organizations, agencies, and unions to make sure we are aiding people on the individual level and adapting on a systemic level to be compassionate, nimble, and person-centric instead of geared for corporate profit.
We have models for bits from around the country–workforce housing for teachers from California, joint multi-partner public-private ventures across the west, and radical programs that house people from a lens of improved quality-of-life for all community members and lower cost burden on the economy. We can make it worth local developers’ while to build firewise housing that fits our communities; for rural Oregon, this looks radically different than it does for urban metro areas, and relies on expansion of land trusts. There have been successful programs forwarded by progressive Democrats to provide aid for the end users–renters and owners–most recently in bipartisan legislation to help veterans stay in their homes and avoid foreclosure, and to enable first-time homebuyers. We need more of this, and much of the work hinges on leading from the Federal level.
People deserve a home regardless of how they vote, and our leaders want to build the strongest communities we can, regardless of our party affiliation. This is where my hope lies; that with the issues we face in our daily lives, not just with housing, but with the unique challenges for behavioral health, transportation, K-12 and CTE education, and transportation in our district, I can fill the piece of the puzzle we’ve been missing as a responsive member of Congress that represents the whole of our vast and varied district, not just a narrow band of deep-pocketed ranchers from the fringe.
As we accelerate toward November, I am keenly aware of the exponential threats we face on a national level with threats to our access to long standing reproductive rights, body autonomy, medical privacy; the dangers of a corrupt supreme court unwilling to provide the key role of checking and balancing an extreme executive, and the potential loss of protections and gains made over decades for people of color, women, and LGBTQI+ folks. I look forward to the uphill battle over the next few months. The stars can align, and the majority of folks that are struggling in my district deserve that. They can’t align without your help, though, and I need all the support I can get to get people from 18-45 and non-affiliated voters to turn up to the polls for the first time ever, because now more than ever it matters. Together we can not only survive, but thrive, and be ready for a future we make bright.
Is Ruby running as a Democrat or Independent? Was there a primary?