Initial results from Southwest Washington’s 3rd Congressional District show Democratic incumbent Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Skamania, leading Republican Joe Kent by about 11,800 votes as of Tuesday night.
“If we win again, it will show the rest of the country that it is possible to take a different path,” Perez said at the Democrats’ election night party at the Hilton Vancouver Washington.
Perez had 155,231 votes, or 51.78 percent of the total ballots cast across the 3rd District. Kent was trailing with 143,433 votes or 47.84 percent.
In Clark County, Perez was leading by a larger margin — 56.50 percent, or 110,365 votes, to Kent’s 43.13 percent, or 84,260 votes.
The next batch of election results will be released Wednesday afternoon. There are about 70,000 ballots left to be counted in Clark County, the most populous county in the 3rd District.
The race is one of the most closely watched in the country and may have an effect on which party holds the majority in the House of Representatives. The 3rd District encompasses Clark, Cowlitz, Lewis, Pacific, Skamania and Wahkiakum counties, as well as a sliver of Thurston County.
In 2022, Perez surpassed Kent by just 2,629 votes, flipping a seat long held by Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who was ousted in the primary.
Perez co-owns a Portland auto-repair shop with her husband and lives in rural Skamania County.
During the campaign, she has pointed to her bipartisan voting record to amass a constituent base of Democrats and Republicans alike. In addition to her support for classic Democratic issues including climate change and reproductive health, her priorities include securing the border, supporting small businesses and boosting American manufacturing.
Perez denounced the Oct. 28 arson attacks on ballot boxes in Vancouver and Portland that damaged or destroyed more than 500 ballots in Clark County. The attacks put an even brighter spotlight on the tight race in Washington’s 3rd District.
“I’m proud to say that Southwest Washington is not a place where we allow extremism to go unchallenged,” Perez said.
Kent attended an election night party with other Republican candidates at Cloverlane Mercantile & Event Center in Brush Prairie. Before the party, Kent went to the Clark County Elections Office where he encouraged people bundled up against the cold to stay in line to vote as the queue wrapped around the block.
“We’ll see,” Kent said at the party. “We’re down by about 4 percent right now, so don’t have too much fun tonight. We have to cure ballots tomorrow.”
Kent, a former Green Beret and Yacolt resident, joined Donald Trump’s campaign as a foreign affairs adviser in 2020. He lauded Trump’s foreign policy after an Islamic State suicide bomber killed his wife in 2019 in Syria while she served as a Navy cryptologic technician.
The Republican largely ran a similar campaign to his effort in 2022, focusing on “America first” rhetoric and emphasizing the need to address border security, immigration, unnecessary government spending and inflation.
Abortion was the only major difference between his campaigns. In 2022, Kent said he supported a national abortion ban. Now, he says abortion is a state issue and that he’ll oppose any new federal abortion legislation.
Clark County election results will be certified Nov. 26. The Secretary of State will certify results across the state Dec. 5.
