At her Vancouver campaign headquarters on Election Day, U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez phones voters whose ballots were damaged in the ballot box fire at Fisher’s Landing to encourage them to participate in the election. (Amanda Cowan/The Columbian)Photo Gallery
Democrats faced heavy losses nationwide on Election Day, with many districts turning away from the party as Republican Donald Trump won another term as president.
Experts say Democratic leaders should take pointers from U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Skamania, who established herself as a nonestablishment candidate more focused on working-class issues than party lines.
For the second time she defeated her Trump-endorsed Republican opponent, Joe Kent of Yacolt, even as a majority of her 3rd Congressional District voted for Trump.
“I know people want to see things go a different direction in our country, and I want that too,” Perez said.
‘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 supported allowing transgender athletes to play 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.”
Perez has embedded the culture of Southwest Washington into her image. She often wears red-plaid flannel with jeans, reminiscent of a lumberjack, or all denim with her sleeves literally rolled up. On social media, she frequently posts photos of herself with her young son in her arms.
“I think most Americans are really tired of politics,” she said. “They want people that are loyal to them and that see the world the way they do and are living the same life.”
“I’m not here to play a political game,” she said. “I’m not a slick politician. I’ve never been interested in having the party line, and I think people respect that honesty.”
Moving to the middle
It would make sense that, like Perez, other Democrats would take a more moderate approach to attract voters who have drifted right. However, that’s not so easy in other states, said Jim Moore, associate professor of political science at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore. Candidates who lean into their party’s values the most tend to win in other states’ primaries.
Washington, however, has an open Top 2 primary system, where all candidates from all parties appear on the same ballot. The top two candidates — regardless of their party — then move on to the general election. As a result, a moderate candidate like Perez can slip through the primary.
Perez further cemented herself as a moderate by refraining from endorsing a presidential candidate this election, Moore said. She seemed to criticize Harris in a New York Times interview last week for apparently ignoring her after she pointed out garlands made of plastic instead of fresh greens at Harris’ Christmas party.
“I said, ‘Madam Vice President, we grow those where I live.’ She just walked away from me. There was kind of an eye roll, maybe. My thinking was, it does matter to people where I live,” Perez told the New York Times.
While Perez distanced herself from White House politics, she successfully defined her opponent as a far-right, “MAGA Trump person,” Moore said.
Kent was a foreign affairs adviser for Trump’s campaign in 2020 and received an endorsement from Trump in 2022.
Kent aligning himself with Trump so deeply was a mistake, Moore said, given that Perez’s campaign appealed to the working class.
“He had to break beyond the working class and get some of the Democrats to come over, and there’s no way they would do that because he was so identified with Trump,” Moore said.
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.”
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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.”
This story was made possible by Community Funded Journalism, a project from The Columbian and the Local Media Foundation. Top donors include the Ed and Dollie Lynch Fund, Patricia, David and Jacob Nierenberg, Connie and Lee Kearney, Steve and Jan Oliva, The Cowlitz Tribal Foundation and the Mason E. Nolan Charitable Fund. The Columbian controls all content. For more information, visit columbian.com/cfj.
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