This House Democrat Keeps Winning in Trump Country. Here’s What She Knows.
Michelle Goldberg
Nov. 22, 2024
nytimes.com
paywall bypassed
I first met Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in 2022, when she was running what was widely seen as a long-shot Democratic campaign for Congress in a solidly Republican, heavily rural part of Washington State. Shortly before the election, the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight estimated her chance of victory at a mere 2 percent. But she won, defeating a burgeoning star of the MAGA movement named Joe Kent.
Gluesenkamp Perez, whose father immigrated from Mexico, ran an auto shop with her husband and lived in a house they’d built themselves. Her campaign emphasized both her blue-collar bona fides and her support for abortion rights, and she was frank in her denunciations of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. After her victory, many Democrats hoped she’d found the secret to connecting with the sort of working-class, small-town voters the party has been hemorrhaging.
But if many on the left were delighted by her victory, they were disappointed by how often she broke with her party once she was in office. Gluesenkamp Perez voted to scrap Joe Biden’s plan for student debt relief. She supported a Republican bill to bar the use of public lands to house migrants and a resolution censuring her colleague Rashida Tlaib for her anti-Israel rhetoric. Anger at her got so intense that Politico wondered if “flak from progressives” could “eat into her razor-thin margin” in this year’s election.
It didn’t. In a largely brutal year for Democrats, Gluesenkamp Perez, again facing Kent, won re-election even as Trump once again carried her district. Her defiant moderation and intensely local focus paid off, leading to another round of glowing press.
Now, Gluesenkamp Perez is using some of her political capital in an unexpected way, teaming up with Maine’s Jared Golden, another Democrat who triumphed in a Trump district, to propose a task force to consider far-reaching electoral reforms. Among their ideas are several previously championed by progressives, including expanding the House of Representatives and adopting ranked-choice voting, which lets voters list candidates in order of preference, so that multiple candidates can run for the same seat without acting as spoilers. I spoke to her about what Democrats can do to win more districts like hers, and why she thinks Congress needs radical change. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What do you think Democrats can learn from your re-election?
I think people like me, people in rural communities, we don’t want people to talk for us. We want to speak for ourselves. We want to have our values and priorities reflected in D.C. We don’t want to see D.C. keep inflicting and replacing our culture and priorities.
What does that mean specifically? What values are we talking about?
Well, we believe in making and fixing things. We feel pride in knowing how to make things and making things that last, having a relationship with our woods and our rivers and oceans, that’s not just a terrarium or a recreational asset, but one of dependence and love and stewardship.
Wildfire is one of the largest emitters of CO2 in my state. That’s a lot of timber that should have been harvested and built into houses to create abundance in the housing market and fund our schools. An entire county went down to a four-day school week in large part because of falling revenue from timber, and a school that my son would maybe hypothetically go to is talking about doing the same thing. Meanwhile, we’ve seen actual timber products being replaced with petroleum-based products.
Is the problem you’re talking about one of competition or overregulation?
It’s both. Every time a timber sale is held up in litigation for, you know, seven years, it means that the mom-and-pop operator can’t make their truck payment and they go bankrupt.
Having been in D.C. for two years, where do you see the disconnect between the people making the rules and the people in your community?
Without a very local perspective and a very diverse set of experiences at the legislative table, staffers who have not worked in the trades cannot anticipate the way these regulations will be implemented by a licenser or a regulator.
You know, I convened a meeting about the I-5 bridge replacement, and I was thinking that I would not have even been invited to this two years ago, or even likely read that it happened. If you’re working a couple of jobs and trying to make it to pick up your kid after day care, you don’t have time to attend a lot of these and be heard. It points to the urgency of having a different set of experiences baked into the process.
I’ve heard you say that there’s no “one weird trick” that will end the Democratic Party’s woes. But it seems like maybe the closest thing to one weird trick would just be recruiting more working- and middle-class people to run for office.
Yes. I don’t think more lawyers running for office is the solution here.
Given that you won in a Trump district, you must have won some percentage of Trump voters. When you talk to people who voted for both you and Donald Trump, what do they tell you? Where is the center of that Venn diagram?
Probably cost of living and border security.
Was it just that they felt like you both cared about those issues? Or did they feel like you both had solutions?
It has been a priority for me. The world I’m living in, I’m going to the grocery store and seeing people take stuff out of their cart. Fentanyl is just running rampant. A lot of us felt like Joe Biden’s administration did not take it seriously, and there was a very, very late pivot on the border.
I think there are voters who see Trump and I as real people who are candid. They don’t agree with us about everything, but they have a sense that I’m telling them what I actually think and am listening to them with curiosity and honesty.
I hear what you’re saying about Biden’s late pivot on the border. But what should he have been doing differently in terms of inflation, given that it spiked globally in response to the pandemic?
A lot of people were trying to talk people out of their lived experience. Like, there’s no spreadsheet that’s going to talk somebody out of watching the cost of eggs go up. And I had people asking me, “How do we explain to these people that the economy is great?” I’m like, why would they do that?
So what do you say to people? Obviously listening and empathy is the first part. But is that enough?
Well, you need to have the votes to back it up that you’re responding to them. I’ve heard people say, but Kamala Harris did try to talk about border security more than Biden did. But I think the two didn’t have the track record on these issues in the eyes of most Americans. People did not believe the late pivot. They weren’t seen as eager to solve these problems or prioritizing them, which I was asking them to do repeatedly, early on, as soon as I was sworn in. That left a real vulnerability that their opponents hammered them on to very real effect.
When I saw you on the campaign trail in 2022, I heard you speak about bread-and-butter issues like the cost of day care, the right-to-repair and support for trade schools. But I also remember you talking about two issues that were at the center of Harris’s campaign: abortion and democracy. You spoke about Trump’s “march toward fascism.” Why do you think that message resonated for you in your district when you were first elected, and then seems to have fallen so flat on the national scale in 2024?
It was picked up, and that’s why we saw Trump pivot.
What do you mean?
He told everybody abortion was a states’ rights issue. He saw weakness and responded to it.
OK, you mean he pivoted on abortion. Do you still think he’s marching us toward fascism?
I think one of the dangerous things about that line of questioning is that democracy is not based on a binary vote for president. It is a muscle in normal, ordinary Americans who are showing up to volunteer at school, who are helping their neighbors out, who have a relationship with their community. It is all of these ways that we live our lives. And so when you say it’s just about one person, I think you damage the long-term muscle to resist a drift.
You’ve been forthright in support of the rights of trans people, which Joe Kent tried to use against you, especially when it came to things like trans women in sports. How did you navigate an issue that proved so difficult for Democrats nationally?
I do not think that is why Democrats lost the presidential race. He tried to come for me on it and it did not work.
Because it wasn’t a priority for your voters?
That’s right. In town halls and things like that, people are talking about, like, Spirit Lake and flooding in the Chehalis River Valley. I think views are nuanced on this, and there is some electoral liability for Democrats, but it’s not an Achilles’ heel.
I’m very intrigued by this new select committee that you and Jared Golden are proposing, which would explore ideas like expanding the House, ranked-choice voting, multimember districts and open primaries. If enacted, some of them, like ranked-choice voting, would probably allow for the emergence of third parties, since candidates could run without acting as spoilers. Multimember districts, in which each district gets several representatives who are elected proportionally, would give a voice to Democrats in solidly red districts and Republicans in solidly blue ones. What is it about your experience in Congress that has convinced you to take on these reforms?
I think 90 percent of Americans really do agree about 90 percent of the issues, and instead we are allowing 10 things to push us into camps that are not going to build a coalition that could actually pass laws. So power continues to accrue to the most senior members and the least representative districts.The framework here is that it is a bipartisan, equally divided commission that is thinking in large terms about what will deliver the most utility, not something just for a particular area. If we want more normal, working-class people here, we need electoral systems that open the door to more people participating.
I think rural America has not been well served by single-party control, and I also think our current system means that the most bipartisan members in the middle are also the ones who have to fight for their lives every election. That’s a lot of energy, right? It’s exhausting. It’s hard on your family, and it eliminates the deal makers.
You live in a community where Trump won. How many people in your district do you think voted for him because they want him to do the things he promised, like set up immigrant detention camps and use the Justice Department to take revenge on his enemies? And how many do you think voted for him because they don’t believe he’ll do those things?
When you’re fixing a car, right, I would much rather have it make the same noise predictably. Like, it always clunks when I turn left. Whatever it is, a predictable problem is much better than an unpredictable one. And so that confidence that this person is not trying to make themselves acceptable to you. They’re not putting out celebrity surrogates. They’re just showing up, and you can take it or leave it.
It sounds like you’re saying that people felt like Trump offered voters a strange sort of stability. How do you think Democrats could do the same?
A veteran from the younger generation could do a lot to change the image of the Democratic Party. Someone that doesn’t mind upsetting people in the party, that doesn’t mind the elite professionals being mad at them, that knows and respects working people in rural communities. Someone who all the Americans who voted for Trump don’t feel like looks down on them. There are people who voted for Trump who would absolutely vote for Democrats in the future. I don’t know that we know who those people are yet, who those candidates are. But I can speak to the type of person who I think would be more popular in my district, who could maybe even win it. I know it’s not going to be a lawyer. |
