People over party: Reelected U.S. Rep. Perez bucks election trend with focus on working-class issues

‘Living the same life’

Perez is an anomaly in Congress. Although she graduated from Reed College, a prestigious private college in Portland, she staked out a career in the trades. She and her husband own a Portland auto-repair shop and built their own home in rural Skamania County.

She opposed President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and opposed limitations on transgender athletes playing on women’s sports teams. She’s pro-abortion rights and pro-gun rights.

Politico, the political news website, initially titled its profile of her “The Identity Crisis of Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.”

“They’re confused about who I am. I’ve never been confused about who I am,” Perez said about Politico. “We’re all complex humans, and they don’t really understand Southwest Washington. But I do.”

But experts say bipartisanship and moderate campaigns aren’t enough to solve Democrats’ problems. The Democratic party has already moved toward the center since 2020 when the U.S. faced another Trump presidency, said Victor Menaldo, a University of Washington political science professor.

Instead, Democrats need to work on shaking their elitist image, Menaldo said, and run more candidates to whom working-class voters can relate.

Perez said the view of who is considered a “qualified” candidate needs to change.

“I think there are a lot of people like me out there who don’t view themselves as particularly partisan, who want to work for their community,” she said.

‘Normal person’

Many, including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, attributed Democrats’ losses to falling out of touch with the working class, which generally refers to people living on modest to low incomes and working in manual labor or service jobs that don’t require a college degree.

College-educated people are most often Democrats. But people without college degrees, who often make less money and feel downturns in the economy more strongly, tend to swing between whichever candidate they perceive will protect their jobs and lower the cost of living, Moore said.

“This has been an ongoing issue for the Democrats for about the past 20 years, and they still haven’t figured it out,” Moore said. “It’s not that the working class is going to the Republicans. It’s just not sticking with the Democrats, which is why we go back and forth.”

Throughout much of Perez’s campaign, she specifically focused on issues important to working people, such as maintaining good jobs and lowering costs for housing and health care.

Democrats have historically focused on those issues, Menaldo said.

“The problem is the reputation, I feel, for being socially disconnected, representing coastal elites, representing the ivory tower, representing the media, not speaking in the language of everyday kitchen-table ways of communicating,” Menaldo said.

Although Democrats have scooped up college-educated voters, as well as those in coastal cities and urban areas, many other voters feel alienated by the party — especially as political correctness has shifted vocabularies, Menaldo said.

“They’re living in bubbles that speak their own language,” he said.

Perez, on the other hand, speaks simply and clearly, often mentioning she’s facing many of the same issues as her constituents. Other publications have mentioned she drinks whiskey sodas and beer. And conversations with her sound just like that — conversations and not speeches.

“She can speak like a regular person,” Menaldo said.

Some Democratic talking points — such as climate-change initiatives, college-debt forgiveness and social-justice issues — may not resonate with people who are most concerned about affording groceries and gas after inflation drove consumer prices up 21.4 percent since 2020, according to Bankrate.

“The issues (Perez) is talking about aren’t all these really academic, abstruse issues that are all about the concerns of graduate students at the University of Washington,” Menaldo said. “She just seems like a genuine, normal person who can speak to normal people about normal things.”

Menaldo compared Perez to U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat who also flipped his seat from a Republican in 2022. The senator can be seen wearing hoodies and shorts. He often swears and lays into “the establishment,” casting himself as the “normal” person in a sea of suits, as does Perez.

“They’re going to lead the Democrats out of the wilderness,” Menaldo said. “I think your representative, she should be at the top of the list for the presidency in four years.”