Two years ago, one of the nation’s biggest political upsets took place here amid the radiant greenery of the Pacific Northwest. A new mom, the 34-year-old owner of an auto repair shop, made a run for Congress with zero help from national Democrats and nabbed a seat Republicans had held for more than a decade.
Now that seat is central to the fight for control of the House.
The incumbent, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, is among the least likely Democrats you’ll find in Congress.
She trashes the Biden administration’s record on immigration and won’t endorse Kamala Harris for president. She resides down a gravel road in a house she and her husband built. She exalts those who work with their hands — plumbers, mechanics, electricians — and belittles the highbrows who populate Washington, speaking the put-upon language of people ignored or disdained because of where they live or how they labor.
“It makes my skin crawl,” she told a small gathering at a strip-mall bar and grill, “when I hear a politician get up there and they say, ‘My dad was just a janitor. I’m the first person in my family to go to college.’” What does that sound like to everyone else in the room who didn’t go to college?”
(Her degree in economics from Portland’s prestigious Reed College goes unmentioned.)
Columnist Mark Z. Barabak joins candidates for various offices as they hit the campaign trail in this momentous election year.
Still, Gluesenkamp Perez’s willingness to buck her party and her fluency in grievance politics are the reason she stands a chance in this southwest corner of Washington state, in a district that twice voted for Donald Trump and will surely do so again Nov. 5. She’s one of the few rural Democrats left in Congress and one of just five House Democrats seeking reelection in pro-Trump districts. All are endangered species.
Her Republican opponent, whom Gluesenkamp Perez barely defeated two years ago, is an unreconstructed MAGA warrior, who hangs with the Proud Boys and white nationalists and parrots Trump’s blather about a stolen 2020 election and Jan. 6 martyrs. He moved to the district less than a year before launching his candidacy.
But given the district’s Republican lean, the rematch appears to be a toss-up at a time control of the House may come down to just a handful of seats.
“A bunch of people who didn’t vote in 2022 in the midterm will be voting this time around,” said Mark Stephan, who teaches political science at Washington State University in Vancouver, population roughly 200,000, which is the closest thing the district has to a large city. “Enough that it could go either direction.”
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With the campaign heading into the homestretch, Gluesenkamp Perez recently embarked on a RV tour of the 3rd Congressional District, down twisting two-lane roads, past farmland and forests daubed with red, yellow and orange. Her husband, Dean, the couple’s 3-year-old son, Ciro, and the family’s German shepherd, Uma Furman, came along for the ride.
Six days, 20 stops, many in wide spots with just a few thousand residents. It’s in those rural reaches the campaign will be decided.
At the end of Day One, after visiting two small taverns for “Pints with Perez” events, it was time for some family fun. So the RV bee-lined to a chainsaw museum in Amboy, where the couple spent nearly an hour browsing the floor-to-ceiling display, eyes wide with delight.
“This is super cool,” exulted Dean, an auto mechanic who does the repair work at the family-run garage.
“Yes, this is amazing,” the congresswoman agreed.
Gluesenkamp Perez was born and raised in Texas, but her family has deep roots in Washington state, going back generations on her mother’s side. (Gluesenkamp Perez’s great-great grandfather helped quarry the stone used to build the state Capitol.) She spent childhood summers with family in Bellingham, playing in the woods and developing an abiding love of nature.
There are no political reds or blues in the forest, she tells audiences.
Gluesenkamp Perez’s father, an immigrant from Mexico, pastored in an evangelical church in Houston. When Perez stopped going to services, her parents stopped paying for college, so she worked three jobs to pay her way through Reed. One was in a factory making iPhone cases.
As she bids for reelection, Gluesenkamp Perez’s main sales pitch is her blue-collar self.
Someone who appreciates hard labor and thrills to the sight of heavy machinery. Who scrounged to build her home and start a small business, struggled to meet a payroll and was forced to deal with clueless bureaucrats. In short, someone who shares her constituents’ skepticism toward big government and antipathy for far-off Washington, D.C.
Recounting an oversight hearing on Capitol Hill, Gluesenkamp Perez describes looking over the witnesses with their fusty manner and fancy pedigrees and wondering if any had ever turned a wrench.
“It’s wild to me to see these D.C. staffer bros in bow ties making decisions,” she said, calling for national codification of abortion rights to nullify the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. “They don’t know what the f—.” Her voice trailed off, the crowd at another saloon stop erupting in laughter at her indecorous F-bomb.
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Gluesenkamp Perez’s Republican opponent, Joe Kent, is trying to nationalize the race, turning the contest into a ratification of Trump, his pugnacious personality and belligerent policies. She’s trying to rise above party labels — even as national Democrats and their allies pour millions into her campaign — and focus almost entirely on the whys and wherefores of the 3rd District.
The congressional seat can’t be surrendered to “a political hack,” she told a few score at a roadhouse grill in Amboy, done up with cobwebs and skeletons for Halloween. “We have got to have a seat that’s based on local issues … not something that’s imported from a think tank or political action committee, but here. Us. We are the solution.”
Her platform is all practicality: making farm loans more accessible; better insulating mobile homes to save energy; giving people the right to choose where to repair broken appliances and the like, rather than having to ship them back to the manufacturer.
Why she asked, should tax-deferred 529 savings accounts only pay for college tuition, books and such? “We needs a tax code that honors the trades,” she said, allowing write-offs for the kinds of equipment used by loggers, plumbers and electricians.
In Washington, Gluesenkamp Perez has had no compunction separating herself from her party. A vote study by CQ Roll Call found her the second-most likely House Democrat to break ranks.
She backed a resolution rebuking Harris for her role in the administration’s border policy and was one of just four Democrats supporting a defense bill that would have limited abortion access, transgender care and diversity training for military personnel. She opposes an assault-weapons ban — though Gluesenkamp Perez would raise the age for purchasing one from 18 to 21 — and was one of just two House Democrats to oppose a student-debt relief plan proposed by the Biden administration.
The latter drew a flood of scathing reviews of the family’s auto repair shop — “Worst car care Ive been to,” one Yelp reviewer wrote online — in a purposeful left-wing campaign of retribution. Much of the trolling came from outside the district.
At home, Democrats like Howard Marshack are more understanding.
“She isn’t as liberal as I am,” said Marshack, who was seeing his congresswoman in person for the first time at a Rotary Club luncheon in Vancouver. As he spoke, a steady rain pattered on the promenade facing Portland, just across the Columbia River.
“I can’t help but think that a significant amount of her stances are genuine and possibly some are because she needs to represent her district,” said Marshack, 75, a retired family law attorney “That’s OK, given the options I have … I can’t stand her opponent.”
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The words “Trump” and “Harris” never pass Gluesenkamp Perez’s lips, if she can possibly manage.
But in this ferociously inflamed political season, discussion of the fight for the White House is unavoidable. Drawn in, Gluesenkamp Perez appears less than sure-footed, pausing and carefully choosing her words, as though verbally picking her way through a political minefield — which she is.
In Longview, the district’s second-largest city (population not quite 40,000), she spoke to a friendly audience of about 50 residents gathered in a curtained-off section of another bar and grill. Several wanted to know her thoughts about the two presidential antagonists.
One woman asked what she should say to Trump-supporting neighbors who fail, she suggested, to realize how he’ll hurt their interests if elected. Gluesenkamp Perez’s roundabout response — about respecting people who do manual labor, building community — petered out in a small sigh. “It’s a wild political climate,” she said.
A man wondered what the congresswoman thought of Harris’ proposal for a $25,000 tax credit for first-time home-buyers. Another long and winding answer followed — about affordability, regulations, building her own home, the virtues of shop class — before Gluesenkamp Perez finally expressed concern the proposal could merely end up boosting housing costs.
The refusal to embrace Harris in a district the Democrat seems destined to lose is hardly surprising. “What I say is not going to change anyone’s vote in my community,” she said as she left the Shamrock grill and prepared to roll to her next stop.
At least not in the presidential race. But it could make a big difference in her coin-flip race for reelection.
Gluesenkamp Perez may be a freshman member of Congress — and an improbable one, at that. But she’s no political naif.