Marie Gluesenkamp Perez squeaked out one of the biggest political upsets of 2022 when the then-34-year-old auto shop owner flipped southwest Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, which had voted Republican for more than a decade.
Whether the first-term Democrat can hold on to her seat in a mostly rural district that went for Trump by four points in 2020 is another story – and one that could make or break any chance Democrats might have to retake the U.S. House, where Republicans currently hold a narrow eight-seat majority.
She faces a likely rematch with Joe Kent, a rising star in the MAGA movement, whom she previously beat by less than 1%. Although she has outraised Kent by nearly double in the primary, pulling in $7 million including independent committees, a June poll conducted by the Northwest Progressive Institute found the two in a dead heat.
Also in the race is Republican Leslie Lewallen, who has raised more than $800,000 and was endorsed by Vancouver newspaper The Columbian, but remains a longshot to advance given Kent’s endorsement from Donald Trump and the state Republican Party.
Although Washington is hardly a battleground state for the presidential election, it is in the heart of the battle for the U.S. House, with open seats in the 5th and 6th Congressional Districts in Spokane County and on the coast, the 4th in central Washington and the 8th in eastern King County.
Gluesenkamp Perez, a resident of rural Skamania County who lives in a house with her husband that the two built themselves, has garnered national attention and local credibility by emphasizing her blue-collar bona-fides in a district where fewer than three in 10 residents have a college degree. But her unconventional votes to advance Republican restrictions on the rights of asylum seekers and block student debt relief, despite being largely symbolic, have angered liberals within her party.
“I’m really proud of my independence,” Gluesenkamp Perez told Cascade PBS. “One of the reasons I ran for this seat is I was really tired of Fox News dictating to me and my community what a Democrat is. I wanted to stand up and say, ‘No, we are rural also, we work in trades, we’re from here. We’re not just coastal elites in bow ties.’”
A special forces veteran who did 11 combat tours, Kent has become a rising star in Trump’s party and a popular pundit on Fox News, but his fondness for conspiracy theories and ties to white supremacist groups and Nazi sympathizers have alienated more traditional Republicans, including major donors, who view him as too extreme to win. At a recent event, Kent answered a question about homelessness with a unified theory of liberal lawlessness, calling for the federal government to defund so-called “sanctuary states” like Washington.
“There’s loose drug control laws, police have very little ability to actually go out and arrest people, it’s infested with Soros prosecutors and DAs that let criminals out of jail.”
A unique district
Washington’s 3rd district includes all of Clark, Cowlitz, Skamania, Lewis, Pacific and Wahkiakum counties and a chunk of Thurston County. It includes the fast-growing Portland suburb of Vancouver (population 200,000), Washington’s fourth-largest city, along with large swathes of farmland, coastal fishing and former logging towns and the Chehalis, Shoalwater Bay and Cowlitz tribal reservations.
Voters here have typically elected moderates with an independent streak.
In the 2000s, it was Democrat Brian Baird, who caught flak for supporting an Iraq troop surge and took the rare step of visiting Gaza. And in the 2010s, Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted against efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and wrote in former House Speaker Paul Ryan on her 2016 ballot. Her insubordination ultimately cost her the seat after she voted to impeach Donald Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Now Lewallen, a Camas City Council member and former King County prosecutor, is hoping to appeal to conservative voters nervous about Kent’s extremism. While she largely aligns with Kent politically, she has pitched herself as more experienced and electable.
Lewallen, who said she does not believe the 2020 election was stolen, called Kent a “performative politician” who engages in “angertainment” and prioritizes personal fame over the interests of the district. She said his comments about limiting legal immigration show he doesn’t understand the needs of businesses in Washington.
“I think what folks want is, they want and they deserve a representative who knows the issues, that’s been working to address these issues,” Lewallen said. “Joe Kent is re-litigating the past ... he’s building his brand, and he’s more concerned about winding up on television.”
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, with her husband Dean, addresses a crowd of supporters after winning the 3rd Congressional District seat in 2022. (Kristina Barker for Cascade PBS)
An unlikely win
Gluesenkamp Perez grew up in Texas and moved to the Northwest to attend Portland’s Reed College, where she studied economics. She caucused for Bernie Sanders in 2016. She was a political newcomer with no elected experience besides two failed bids for local office when she noticed Kent picking up steam in the 2022 primary and looked him up on YouTube.
“And I was like, holy shit, this guy is so far out of line.”
Enough Herrera Beutler voters – and major donors – agreed.
As the Democratic party’s base has gotten wealthier and more educated, Gluesenkamp Perez has marketed herself as a plainspoken candidate who can win back the types of rural, white, working-class voters the party has hemorrhaged in recent years. Her surprise 2022 victory – achieved largely without a flood of money or institutional Democratic party backing – seemed to support that vision.
“In my view, the antidote to that kind of extremism is not explaining things to people with a spreadsheet and talking down to them and belittling them,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “It is respect, it is mutual regard.”
In D.C., Gluesenkamp Perez has embraced her role as an outsider. She keeps a six-foot chainsaw in her office, a tribute to her grandfather who worked as a logger. She is often photographed wearing flannel shirts, and her campaign website shows her in her Portland auto shop wearing an embroidered mechanic’s uniform.
Asked about the proudest accomplishment of her first term, Gluesenkamp Perez pointed to her independent voting record, citing a Georgetown University analysis that ranked her as the 12th most bipartisan member of the House of Representatives. She also cited a bill she introduced to make it easier to repair appliances, known as “right to repair,” and another she co-sponsored to expand tribes’ and counties’ access to a federal forest management program, which passed the House last fall.
Rematch
Kent grew up in Portland and now lives in the small Clark County town of Yacolt, Wash.
He spent two decades in the military and later the CIA, becoming critical of America’s military adventures after his wife, a Navy cryptologist, was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria. That tragedy escalated a growing skepticism of the military apparatus, and Trump’s criticisms resonated with him.
“There are no weapons of mass destruction here, these guys are full of it,” Kent previously told Cascade PBS, reflecting on the Iraq War. “When he went after the Bushes and he went after the Cheneys, I was like, ‘Well, that’s my guy.’”
Kent blames what he calls the “administrative state” for Trump’s failure to pull out of Afghanistan. He is broadly critical of American intervention abroad, not just in the Middle East wars but even financial support for Ukraine.
Kent wants to abolish the Department of Education, deport every undocumented immigrant, and cut trillions from the federal budget.
He has said he is fully opposed to all abortion, which he has compared to slavery, and would support a national ban. But he more recently backtracked, telling KUOW that he would defer to states in light of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
Joe Kent at a rally opposing Senate Bill 5599, which expanded an existing law that allows organizations providing services to unsheltered youth to delay notifying a parent or guardian if there is a compelling reason not to, such as abuse or neglect, at the Capitol in Olympia in April 2023. (Amanda Snyder/Cascade PBS)
Border battles
Since arriving in Congress, Gluesenkamp Perez has sought to distance herself from Democratic leadership, bucking the party line on major issues.
She voted for Republican efforts to block Biden’s student debt relief plan, telling Cascade PBS it would help Washington less than many other states and that she believed society should place more value on non-academic types of education.
Gluesenkamp Perez also teamed up with Republicans on a bill that sought to automatically expel asylum seekers at the border “without further hearing or review” as well as reinstate Trump’s 2018 ”Remain in Mexico” policy, which kept asylum seekers out while they awaited U.S. court dates.
Supporters from across the spectrum have praised her unpredictable votes and willingness to break with her own party as a values-driven independent streak. Critics, especially on the left, see a calculated pivot rightward to absorb Republican criticism by capitulating to their agenda.
In an interview with Cascade PBS, Gluesenkamp Perez defended her immigration proposals as overdue actions to combat fentanyl overdoses. She tried to distinguish her bills from Trump’s policies by incorrectly claiming that the “Remain in Mexico” policy, formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, predated Trump. (While a 1996 law authorized such removals, Trump's use of that authority was unique). She added that her policies are not motivated by “racial animus” as Trump’s were and said she would not support more extreme policies like a full border closure or separating families at the border if Trump wins.
“It’s not about some draconian operation,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “The suffering and pain that fentanyl trafficking has caused can’t wait, and it doesn’t need to wait for the perfect immigration policy.”
Kent, meanwhile, has gone much further, calling for mass deportations and broad limits on legal immigration.
“The only immigration I’m a fan of, or have, or don’t have an issue with, is if people want to marry foreigners, because that number is so low and that leads to more family formations,” Kent said at a March 2022 town hall in Onalaska. (Kent’s lawyers later threatened the Centralia Chronicle with a lawsuit for reporting on his comments.)
At a recent town hall event in Castle Rock, Kent laid out a plan to send the military down to “seal” the border, build a wall, and make it impossible for undocumented immigrants to work or receive government benefits in hopes that they will leave voluntarily.
“I think we need to really cull the herd, get the economic migrants out of here and then focus our law enforcement resources on the people who are not self-deporting,” Kent said. “We’re actually pretty good at hunting down humans, we got fairly proficient at that in the war on terror.”
Extremist ties + conspiracy theories
Kent has struggled to distance himself from white supremacists, and has repeated false claims that the 2020 election was rigged and that COVID-19 was a “scam.” He recently suggested that the Secret Service was “in on” the Trump assassination attempt.
The Western States Center, an organization that tracks extremism, ranked Kent number one, above Ammon Bundy, on its list of “bigoted and anti-democracy candidates” in 2022.
His campaign paid a member of the Proud Boys for consulting services, according to The Associated Press. And he has appeared at campaign events with and praised Joey Gibson, founder of Patriot Prayer. A Multnomah County judge in 2022 acquitted Gibson on a riot charge for his role in a street brawl outside a Portland bar in 2019.
Longtime campaign advisor Matt Braynard organized a poorly attended 2021 rally and fundraiser in support of Jan. 6 rioters, portraying them as “political prisoners.”
And Kent was forced to denounce Nick Fuentes – a Holocaust-denying Gen Z influencer who admires Vladimir Putin and rose to prominence after attending the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville – after it came out that the two had met to discuss working together the previous year.
“Phantom job”
During Kent’s 2022 campaign, he made confusing statements about his employment that fueled speculation that he was being paid to campaign, which would violate federal election laws.
Kent repeatedly said he worked for a Virginia-based consulting company called “American Enterprise Solutions.” After The Daily Beast reported that they could not find any evidence that such a company existed, Kent then backtracked and said he misstated the company’s name, which was actually “Advanced Enterprise Solutions.” Braynard, his campaign consultant, took responsibility for the mistake, saying he also wrote the wrong name on FEC filings.
In 2022, Kent’s former campaign advisor told Oregon Public Broadcasting that he never saw Kent work any hours at what he called a “phantom job.”
David Nirenberg, a major Republican donor who supported Gluesenkamp Perez, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. The body’s six leaders dismissed the complaint for lack of evidence after Advance Enterprise Solutions CEO Sean Reed produced an offer letter dated 2019 and Kent’s W-2 tax forms.
Cascade PBS spoke to Kent after a recent campaign event. Asked what he was doing to support himself financially, Kent did not mention a day job.
“I just wrote a book,” Kent said. “You can look it up and check the sales.”