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 emigrated 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.
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