The Democrat who won in Trump country

The Democratic Party struggled in the 2024 elections, losing control of the Senate and the presidency, and failing to regain the House. The party is still assessing what went wrong in those defeats — but one bright spot is in southwestern Washington, where Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez pulled out a win in Trump country for the second election in a row.

In 2024, Gluesenkamp Perez, a moderate Democrat and member of the House’s Blue Dog Coalition, defeated her 2022 opponent in a rematch and widened her margin of victory in the process. She credits her win to her working-class, rural roots and authentic connection to her home district, as well as a focus on issues with bipartisan support, such as “right to repair” laws.

Gluesenkamp Perez and her husband live in unincorporated Skamania County, a wooded region with a population of about 12,000. She co-owns an auto repair and machine shop with her husband, Dean, which he still runs.

Gluesenkamp Perez sat down with Today, Explained to discuss her win, where she thinks her party went wrong, and what she hopes to focus on in the next Congress. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tell me a bit more about yourself.

I live in a really rural part of a rural county. We get our internet from a radio tower. We get our water from a well. My family’s been in Washington state for generations. My dad immigrated here from Mexico and met my mom at Western Washington University. I’m just incredibly honored to have a heritage of people who believe in making things that last and who understand the value and the necessity of what we have in Washington state and southwest Washington and a loyalty to a place that is so necessary, and that we’re increasingly alienated from culturally.

What inspired you to go into politics?

I was not inspired by politics. My predecessor was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. And I knew everybody that had her yard signs up like clockwork. And they started putting up this guy Joe Kent’s yard signs. And I started watching his YouTube and was like, “This guy’s got good hair and bad ideas.” I remember watching a Republican primary candidate forum on YouTube and somebody asked all of the candidates to name just three lakes in southwest Washington, and he couldn’t do it. If you’re not doing this because what we have is precious and worth fighting for, why are you doing it? Having a political agenda imported from somewhere else that is so far from our values and our community and our priorities…

Let’s talk about the place. Washington’s Third is a swing district. It was held by a Republican for 12 years before you won in 2022. Donald Trump backed your opponent, Joe Kent, in a big way. Why do you think you won?

What we want in southwest Washington is to see our priorities and our culture reflected in Washington, DC. We don’t want a national agenda or a culture from somewhere else, imported and replacing our community, our values, our priorities. And so just a real focus on what my community needs, what our values are, who we are. You know, the district went for Trump by 7 points in 2016. And last time I won by two votes in each precinct. And this time we were able to point to my record. I’m in the top 3 percent of most bipartisan voting members of the US House and I’m not here to play partisan football. I’m here because I see and value what we have, and I know it’s worth fighting for. I’ve never felt entitled to people’s votes. I’m not here for an agenda from a think tank somewhere.

Why do you think bipartisanship played so well back in Washington Third District? What were you pointing to exactly?

I was talking to the director of one of our largest labor and delivery wards, and she told me that right now 40 percent of the babies born in her hospital have at least one parent addicted to fentanyl. Forty percent — this is generational carnage and it’s everywhere. People want to stop the flow of fentanyl. I think a lot of us have felt like if this was a thing in the lives of people with more money and influence, it would have been addressed sooner.

And so [you’re talking about] immigration, right?

We’re talking about border security. For so long they’ve been married, but together there’s two issues: immigration and border security. And we’re saying we cannot wait for a perfect immigration policy to have a secure border to stop the flow of fentanyl. And so that was a big point for me.

You know, on the student student loan forgiveness, I looked at the data. My district only holds 3 percent of the federally issued debt. This was a regressive tax policy. If you support progressive tax strategies, you should do that consistently, not just when there’s party favors. And I had people protest our auto shop.

Just to clarify, you voted against President Biden’s student debt relief. People looked at you and said, “You’re a Democrat, how dare you?” Talk to me about how that affected you back home.

They were really aggressive on our online reviews. We take real pride in the quality of work we do. People were just bombing it who’d never been customers. But I was hearing from my community, “We don’t want the trades to be considered an afterthought. We don’t want to be second fiddle” — really challenging the idea that academic intelligence is the thing that we should be supporting. We want a level playing field for the trades, for all of the forms of intelligence. We want good jobs that don’t require a college degree. We want honors-level shop class in junior high. Those are the things that reflect our values and our priorities. And so that’s how I vote.

This is where the pushback comes in, when you’re in national office and you vote on something that affects everybody in the country. Not many people in your district ended up in a lot of college debt. But all across the United States, many, many, many young people did. You’re in national office. You don’t just vote for this little corner of Washington because your vote — as one of 435 — affects the whole country. How do you respond to that?

My job is to represent my community. And I think the way that you arrive at good policy is by having everyone show up at the table with the unique perspectives of their community and loyalty there. And that is how you end up with better policy in the end. You don’t get good legislation without having people who are driving trucks and changing diapers and turning wrenches at the table — not as an afterthought, but in the inception of the legislation. There are ways that that proposal could have been much more progressive. You know, things like Pell Grants or focusing on the bigger, systemic issue of why college tuition has increased 481 percent since I was born. That’s the systemic solution that I think we need to be considering and evaluating, like how are we going to provide a level playing field for everyone?

Let’s talk nationally. There’s another two years to look forward to, in which Democrats will be in the minority in both the House and the Senate. They lost the presidency. How do you think the party moves forward? People are looking at you as the face of a new kind of Democratic politics. Whether you like that or not, people say, “We should look at this gal because she seems to be saying something. She won in a Trump district. She seems to be saying something that people who voted for Donald Trump can get behind.” Where do the Democrats go?

Well, again, look, I’m not a strategist, but I think 90 percent of Americans agree about 90 percent of the issues. And they have found the 10 things we disagree about to drive a stake through the heart of our community.

Pick anything. Anything that’s in the national ads and instead, say, it is not partisan to want to be able to fix your own car; “right to repair” laws are not partisan; wanting to own a home, not partisan. One of the things I really love about living where I live — we don’t have trash service. So every six weeks, we go to the dump and take our stuff, and so you have to see everything you bought. There is nowhere else, right? You should have to see all of the tiny little yogurt cups you bought, and have accountability, and not have an idea of the woods as a terrarium or as something that’s just a recreational asset, but as something that is living, breathing and relevant. I think we’re consuming like half the lumber per capita that we were in the ’70s. And the reality is a lot of that has been replaced by petroleum-based products. By thinking about things in this hyper-local way, by seeing the trash that you bought, you are able to arrive at a better national and global solution.

Do you think that’s what Republicans did in 2024? Because whether you support Donald Trump or you’re a critic of his, one thing that you can say he successfully did is he turned local issues national. Springfield, Ohio, was struggling with an influx of immigrants. There is no reason that somebody in Maine or Florida or Texas should have cared at all about Springfield, Ohio. That was a local issue. Donald Trump took that little local issue, made it a national issue. Some analysts say that is what helped him win. It seems counter to what you’re saying, which is that a local issue is a local issue, and we shouldn’t make it national because it won’t let us win.

People want to be heard. I had a lot of people, colleagues, saying, “How do we get people to understand that the economy’s actually great?”

This was a Democratic line.

Don’t do that. People are putting their groceries on a credit card. You go to Albertsons or whatever, your grocery store, and you feel like you’re in a game of chicken with the CEO. Nobody cares about your spreadsheets. I don’t know that any political party is doing this very well. But I think there’s a lot of work to be done on conveying cultural respect and regard for the people that are building our country, that are growing our food, that are keeping the wheels on the bus and conveying that respect sincerely and thinking and listening with curiosity. That is how we get our country back, how we build community again.

We are all very lonely and feeling isolated. Some people think it’s their civic duty to unfriend somebody on Facebook [over how they voted] — that is such an impoverished view of the world. It’s isolating, and it’s lonely. I think getting back to a place where we are finding nonpolitical ways of conveying our values — that’s progress, that is how you grow the field of people who feel real, that is how you build a coalition that can actually pass useful legislation.

Do you think there’s a kind of snobbery within the Democratic Party where maybe the heroes that the party is choosing are the wrong heroes?

It feels like everybody [in Washington, DC] is under 40 and has at least two degrees. And, you know, that’s not what the country looks like. That’s not what the value system is everywhere. There are fewer than five members of Congress who actually have a child in day care. That’s why there’s not a sense of urgency around the affordability crisis. I was talking to a constituent. She works in child care. She told me she is not legally allowed to peel a banana or an orange, [because] that is considered food prep. They are not a licensed food prep facility. So they can open a bag of chips [but] can’t peel a banana. And I went round and round and round for like four months and I had my office talking to local regulators and licensors and elected officials. And they kept saying, “She’s dumb, she doesn’t understand the rules.”

Does she understand the rules?

Yes. Their licensors said they would need six more sinks before they were legally allowed to be engaged in food prep. And I don’t think this is a small thing. I have a toddler. I know how durable food preferences are. So I introduced a bill that creates a positive right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables. It says, if your state is taking federal dollars for child care, you will not infringe on the right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables. And this is the long work of building strong local agriculture and national health.

It is also, if we’re being honest, in a tradition that more closely hews to what Republicans think. You’re pointing to overregulation and you’re saying this is ridiculous. And I can imagine Democrats saying, but what about listeria? Every time you turn on the news these days, there is listeria in something, there’s E. coli in something, you’re going to give it to the kids. How do you square the party that you’re in and the historical positions that it’s taken on things like regulation?

I don’t know if it’s necessarily partisan. Parents know that food preferences and children are very durable, so my experience as a young mom is what’s driving that, not a partisan agenda. But I think that this is absolutely one of the reasons that there’s one licensed day care facility in my entire county. Think about the overhead of installing six different sinks.

Do you look at legislation like that legislation as something that bridges a partisan divide? The thing that you’re looking at for the next two years is Democrats either work with Republicans or get nothing done. And I’m wondering if what you’re saying here is that, if we have some compromise ideas, at least we can get some things done.

Yeah, I think these issues are too urgent to be delayed. We have got to find some common ground here to work and deliver value to our communities. And so I think there’s a lot of work that can be done that is not partisan. That’s good for the country.