SALEM — It’s bigger than some states, includes two time zones and is a bright red Republican stronghold in a deeply blue Democratic state.

Oregon’s CD2 — shorthand for the 2nd Congressional District — has been on electoral autopilot the past two decades, sending Rep. Greg Walden, R-Hood River, to Washington, D.C. 11 straight times.

Something that hasn’t happened this century will occur Nov. 3. There will be no CD2 incumbent on the ballot — Walden is retiring at the end of the session. Republican Cliff Bentz, a former state senator from Ontario, emerged as the winner from a scrum of 11 candidates in the May 19 GOP primary. He’ll face writer and political strategist Alex Spenser of Klamath Falls, winner of the Democratic primary.

Odds are the Republican will take the oath of office next Jan. 3 when the the 117th United States Congress convenes.

“Cliff Bentz is as close to a sure thing as you can get,” said longtime Oregon election analyst Jim Moore, a politics and government professor at Pacific University.

A more than 40,000 Republican voter registration edge over Democrats, combined with Spenser’s lack of name recognition and campaign funds, is enough for Bentz to win the district, Moore said, and the 203,000 nonaffiliated registered voters “break the same way as whatever the Republican-Democratic split goes.”

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Spenser, 55, said she knows she has a tough task to get to Capitol Hill. But 2020 is different: an unprecedented election year of pandemic, record unemployment, and a “divisive” President Donald Trump at the top of the ticket.

“There’s going to be a blue tsunami,” she said.

Spenser said she wants to tap into the large number of nonaffiliated voters, along with Republicans who can no longer support the party’s agenda under Trump. She sees water as one of the keys that will resonate with district voters. She supports a $450 million plan to restore the Klamath River by removing four hydroelectric dams in Oregon and California. Wind farms can provide electricity and also help with irrigation, Spenser said. She wants a more efficient and equitable way to distribute water in Eastern Oregon.

“You have 90% of the water going to irrigation and 40% of that is lost through evaporation,” she said. “Meanwhile, wells are running low in Harney County. At the bottom is arsenic — we’re going to poison these people.”

The Cook Voting Index rates districts by their propensity to back one party or the other in presidential races. CD2 is “R+11” — meaning it is expected to give the Republican nominee 11% more of the district’s vote than the national average. In 2016, the district gave nearly 55% of its vote to Trump, while Democrat Hillary Clinton won 35%. In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney received 56% of the vote compared to 40% for President Barack Obama.

Herding RepublicansVoters across the sparsely populated 70,000-square-mile district have solidly backed Republican for the past 40 years. Successive reapportionments have added reliably conservative areas to CD2, with Democrats largely content to put the largest concentration of the state’s Republicans into CD2. The move has enabled Democrats to win and hold the other four House seats in Oregon.

One of the ironies is among the most politically flexible in the country — just not in a way that helps Democrats.

Nate Silver, an analyst of election data, showed Oregon’s CD is the 25th most politically “elastic” of the nation’s 435 congressional districts. Silver, editor of the political website FiveThirtyEight.com — named for the total of Senate and House seats in the country — measures how sensitive each House district is to changes in the national political mood. An elastic district will show big shifts in voter preferences. Inelastic districts tend to stay in a much smaller range whatever the immediate political situation.

Voter sentiment in CD2 can be moved a great deal — but the end result, a Republican victory, is the same. Walden won the seat by over 70% of the vote in 2014 and 2016, but received “only” 56% of the vote in 2018. In most districts, a swing of 14% would likely bring victory to the other party. But in CD2, it means Republican victories range from blow-outs to comfortable wins.

Staking out the middle groundDuring the recent Republican primary, the candidates often emphasized their allegiance to Trump. The best known candidate, former Rep. Knute Buehler, R-Bend, fought the view of some Republicans that he was too moderate in the Legislature and during his unsuccessful 2018 bid for governor. Bentz was strong in the eastern portion of the district. Former Rep. Jason Atkinson of Central Point has support in the Medford/Grants Pass area. Jimmy Crumpacker, who moved to Deschutes County from Portland at the end of last year, won the endorsement of Oregon Right-to-Life and pitched a high-volume ad campaign aimed at knocking Buehler off.

On primary election night, the fragmented vote handed the nomination to Bentz, who won with 32%.

Like Walden, Bentz put in years as a state lawmaker representing Eastern Oregon in the House and Senate, where he was known as somewhat of a wonk on transportation issues. While supporting Trump, Bentz didn’t make it a centerpiece of his campaign — in a group of candidates trying to grab the right side of the political spectrum, Bentz represented a conservative middle ground and emphasized his family’s long history in the district, his conservative voting record and stuck much of the time to regional issues, such as federal land use, water, and agriculture.

Moore said if Bentz can get past Spenser in the fall, from then on he will have the most powerful weapon in politics — incumbency. At age 68, Bentz is five years older than Walden. He’s would be unlikely to match Walden’s 22 years if elected. But barring scandal, illness or a drastic shift in district boundries, Bentz would likely get to pick when it is time for him to step down.

“He could have the district as long as he wants it,” Moore said, including after new district boundaries are drawn to account for the 2020 census.