Joe Kent vs Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: A year covering the race that exposes America’s toxic political divide
The battle for Washington’s third congressional district that offers a snapshot of the state of the nation. Andrew Buncombe had a front-row seat
In an office above the auto repair shop she owns with her husband, Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez is worrying about a stack of bills.
Later that day, the 34-year-old’s victory in the state of Washington’s third congressional district will be formally certified, officially marking her against-the-odds win over Joe Kent, a Trump-backed “America First” hardliner who believed he should be going to Congress, to push for Joe Biden’s impeachment.
In January, Perez will start in the House of Representatives, a new arrival amid a large field of “freshmen”. She will endure the eight-hour commute transporting her from one Washington to the other, and plunge into the Arc-light of a national political scene that has rarely felt so toxic and torn.
But for now, amid the smells of engine oil and the clatter of machinery, she is worrying about the mundane, paying those bills and trying to arrange childcare. Perhaps it is this that underscores the reality of her win, as much as any statement from the secretary of state.
“It’s the honour of a lifetime,” says Perez, a black duvet jacket zipped up on a slate grey afternoon. “It’s also something I take very seriously. So, it’s a huge responsibility.”
Perez’s victory over Kent, 42, a former US special forces green beret, represented many things. To Perez’s supporters, it marked a rare win for a dirt-under-the-fingernails working-class tradesperson in a legislature largely filled by former lawyers, or “professional” politicians.
Similarly, while she says her own polls always suggested she was going to win, it was a David-against-Goliath victory as measured by the pollster class, the FiveThirtyEights and Cook Political Reports of this world. Early on, they predicted the Republican would emerge victorious and barely shifted that assessment until he was defeated.
And because Trump had endorsed Kent to take on incumbent GOP congresswoman, Jaime Herrera-Beutler, one of 10 Republican “traitors” in the lower chamber who voted for his impeachment in the aftermath of 6 January, it was an opportunity to view up close the enduring influence – or otherwise – of the former president. In short, Washington’s third congressional district, located 150 miles south of Seattle, was a political Petri dish, all but demanding one pull up a seat and watch the experiment.
In January, I decided to cover the race as much as I could, to speak to the candidates, and their supporters. I wanted to know what was driving the people seeking elected office, as well as the motivation of those whose votes they were courting.
This is an account of that 12 months:
Winter
“The vast majority of our manufacturing base was shipped overseas to China, to our number one geostrategic foe,” Joe Kent tells the audience. “All of this benefited the permanent ruling class, whether in the government or whether on Wall Street. It didn’t benefit the American people.”
The speaker is not Bernie Sanders, but Joe Kent. Kent actually voted for Sanders in the 2016 primaries, a move he later claimed was intended to set up Trump, with an easier-to-beat opponent in the general election. The pair are utter opposites in many ways. Yet, in regard to the belief globalisation has devastated the American worker, there is little difference between the two men.
This damp evening, Kent is one of several speakers addressing the Skamania County Republican Party in the south of the district, close to the Columbia River. They are seeking endorsements for offices ranging from the local sheriff to members of Congress. Also present is Heidi St John, a Christian author who is among the hopefuls for Congress, despite having initially said she would drop out if one of those challenging Herrera-Beutler received Trump’s backing.
St John is friendly and smiles as she shakes hands. But neither she nor her campaign will speak to me all year. They will not give an interview, respond to allegations from other candidates, or explain why she chose to stay in the race.
Tucker Carlson appears particularly enamoured when Kent pops up to propose all but ending immigration for 20 years and reinvesting in US manufacturing
Kent is trim and neat, dressed in a checked shirt, jacket and jeans. He addresses the audience fluently, perhaps the benefit of appearing so often on Fox News or other conservative networks, where he has become an “America First” darling.
Tucker Carlson appears particularly enamoured when Kent pops up to propose all but ending immigration for 20 years, reinvesting in US manufacturing, and reducing the US’s overseas military engagements. Kent, who has not been vaccinated against Covid-19, has also been a champion of “medical freedom”, an opponent of medical lockdowns imposed by Washington governor Jay Inslee. He is also a supporter of gun rights, with almost no caveats.
Kent also repeats Trump’s false claim the 2020 election was not fair and termed those arrested after 6 January as “political prisoners”. Earlier in the day, he charms attendees at a lunch for the Republicans of Lewis County, in Chehalis. He tells the interconnected stories of how his wife, Sharon, a Naval cryptographer, was killed by an Isis bomb in Syria, and how he first met Trump.
Kent says Trump was present at Dover Airforce Base in Delaware, where he and other families had gone to receive their loved ones’ remains. He assumed the president would most likely just offer his condolences and move on. As it was, they spoke for 10 minutes, with Trump showing genuine interest. Kent says he took a chance.
“I told him, ‘hey look, you don’t know who I am. But I’m a guy who’s been fighting these wars my entire adult life,” Kent tells the meeting. “And you’re getting this right. But you’re being thwarted at the mid to senior levels in a way that I have never seen before’.”
Kent says was deployed in Africa when his wife was killed. “On the way home, I said ‘I have to put this kind of life behind me. I want to come back to work where I was born and raised’. I never intended to get involved in politics.”
When he returned to the Pacific Northwest, the Trump administration kept in touch and he wrote papers on foreign policy. There was an anticipation that if Trump was reelected, Kent would take a job in the administration.
In the first of several interviews, Kent tells The Independent after the pandemic and its attendant lockdowns, and the demonstrations for racial justice following the murder of Georgia Floyd – protests he says were “chaos” – he felt the “country was heading in a horrible direction”.
After Herrera-Beutler voted in favour of impeachment, he acted. “I was like, ‘well, I can sit here and complain about it. Or I can go try and do something about it’.” Kent seems like a smart guy, someone who spent two decades working with groups such as the CIA, and surrounded by people who needed to be able to assess intelligence and facts. How can he support Trump’s claim the election had been “stolen”? He insists there were irregularities with the vote.
“I’m pretty confident in what I’ve seen, the election was rigged or stolen, however you want to put it, and Joe Biden did not get 270 electoral votes,” he says. “The way I’ll always caveat that, though, is that I believe that, and I want to prove it, I want there to be a venue. I think when I get to Congress, we need to have a full congressional inquiry.”
Spring
Washington state has 10 congressional seats, two of which – the fourth and fifth – have long been reliably Republican. For much of the 20th century, the third – which includes the counties of Lewis, Pacific, Wahkiakum, Cowlitz, Clark, and Skamania – was solidly Democratic.
When Republican Linda Smith won the seat in 1994, part of a red wave that swept the country, she was the first member of the GOP to hold it in 34 years. Shifting demographics, along with a 2010 redistricting, has made it steadily more red than purple.
For a number of years it was a bellwether. In 2000 and 2004 it was narrowly won by George W Bush, only to be flipped by Barack Obama in 2008. Mitt Romney carried the district in 2016, and Trump won it twice, although his four-point margin of victory over Biden in 2020, was half what he enjoyed over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The district is 90 per cent white, and has a population of 781,241. The average household income is $71,000. Its geographic borders are the Cascade mountains, the Columbia River, and the Pacific Ocean.
In 2010, Herrera-Beutler won the seat and was reelected five times. While Trump carried the district by four points in 2020, her winning margin was 13 per cent. Perez is not the first Democrat to challenge Herrera-Beutler.
In the spring, a dozen candidates – Republicans, Democrats and independents – are getting ready for the open “jungle” primary held in August, in which the top candidates proceed to a November run-off regardless of party affiliation.
Democrat Brent Hennrich, who once worked for Dolby Cinemas, threw his name in after Herrera-Beutler was last reelected in 2020. Democrats had hoped their candidate, college professor Carolyn Long, could make traction yet she failed to do so twice in succession. Hennrich says he wants better healthcare access, and better jobs. He says Herrera-Beutler was correct to vote for Trump’s impeachment, but that she is too extreme.
Because of the number of candidates, and because Hennrich works hard to raise awareness of the race, he comes first in an early poll – ahead of Kent, Herrera Beutler, St John, and another Republican, Heidi Kraft. He says the poll result comes as a jolt and acknowledges his lack of political experience. “I see it as a blessing and a curse,” he says. “I say my biggest piece of baggage in this run, is that I don’t have any baggage.”
His front-runner status earns him an invitation to debate Kent on the The Lars Larson Show, a conservative talk radio programme run out of Portland, just across the Columbia River from Vancouver, Washington.
All candidates struggle to raise money. But partly because most of Hennrich campaigning is conducted online as a result of the pandemic, he fails to match the sums being raised by the other hopefuls. When Perez announces she is also running as a Democrat, Hennrich decides to pull out rather than to split support, something the anti-Herrera-Beutler Republicans accuse each other of.
It’s a sunny Friday evening when Hennrich telephones to explain why is dropping out. He sounds broken. The bottom line, he says, is that flipping the seat is more important than him being the person who wins it. He urges his supporters to start backing Perez.
“All Dem’s PLEASE UNITE BEHIND HER! I know the math. WE CAN #FlipWA03! Please follow & amplify her message,” he tweets. “I am sorry to have let anyone down. I can assure you it is a weight I care about. But democracy is on the line.”
Jaime Herrera-Beutler says voting for Trump’s impeachment was one of the hardest things she did as a politician. The 44-year-old, raised in Ridgefield, Washington, voted in line with Trump in about 80 per cent of instances. After 6 January, she believed something had to be done.
Her decision, she says, was cemented after a conversation with minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who told fellow Republicans he had telephoned the president as his supporters were storming the building where many were sheltering.
Republicans overwhelmingly opposed impeachment, and those elected politicians whose place of work had come under attack that day, quickly found reasons to move on
McCarthy urged Trump to call them off, but the president claimed, falsely, it was members of Antifa creating the chaos. McCarthy told his members when he informed Trump some of the rioters were his supporters, he had replied: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
McCarthy was among a slew of Republicans who then condemned Trump for his role in inciting the attack that left five people dead.
“The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” McCarthy said on the floor of the House. “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.”
However, he did not back Democrats’ efforts to impeach him, for a second time. Herrera-Beutler - who also declined to comment to The Independent – was among 10 members of the House, and one in the Senate, who did.
In a statement, she said: “The president of the United States incited a riot aiming to halt the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next. That riot led to five deaths. People everywhere watched in disbelief as the centre of American democracy was assaulted.”
The reaction from Trump was immediate. After leaving DC, he flew to Mar-a-Lago to nurse the wounds of his defeat by Biden. He also hosted a rapidly supplicant McCarthy, who put aside his words on the House floor and said the former president would remain essential to the Republicans’ strategy. Trump set about enacting revenge.
He vowed to back challengers against each of the 10, the highest-profile of which was Liz Cheney, who rapidly lost her position as third-ranking Republican in the House.
Two of the 10 were here in Washington state – Herrera-Beutler in the third district, and Dan Newhouse in the fourth, an even redder seat which was last occupied by Democrats in 1992. In the final calculation, of those who did not retire from politics, just two managed to overcome their Trump-backed primary challengers and win reelection – Newhouse, and David Valadao, in California’s 21 district.
It was extraordinary to see the way the issue of impeachment shook the Republican Party. For a brief few days, when the likes of Mitch McConnell, Cheney and Mitt Romney denounced him and even the ever-opportunistic Lindsey Graham said he had “never been so humiliated and embarrassed for the country”, it seemed Trump might be held accountable.
Yet, Republicans overwhelmingly opposed impeachment, and those elected politicians whose place of work had come under attack that day, quickly found reasons to move on. They calculated, correctly, that even out of power, Trump would retain deep influence over a portion of the Republican base, and decided with a handful of exceptions, that was more important.
This cowardice or cynicism, or “real politik”, would presage those hopefuls who would continue to champion Trump’s false claims the 2020 election had been rigged, as they contested the 2022 midterms.
Across the nation, from Kari Lake in Arizona, to Herschel Walker in Georgia, and to Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, hardline “America First” candidates endorsed by Trump, echoed his lies about the election. While many won their primaries, few succeeded in the general election.
“Trump has become an albatross around the necks of many Republicans, especially if they are avid Trump backers, such as Joe Kent,” says Larry Sabato, Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia.
“It’s impossible to feel the slightest sympathy for Republican officeholders, the vast majority of whom went right along with Trump’s antics and refused to speak out against him, when he was lying, insulting people, and embarrassing America across the world.”
Summer
When Perez enters the race, she places her auto-repair shop both literally and figuratively at the centre of her campaign.
The first photograph on her website shows her in a navy coverall, standing against the backdrop of a genuine workshop. Those who know their vehicles will be able to spot a 1980s-era BMW, a Land Cruiser, and a Toyota RAV4.
And she talks about the workshop all the time, as a way to connect to voters as both a small business owner struggling like all of America with the pandemic-triggered hold up on parts and supplies, and as someone proud of their background. Her husband, Dean Gluesenkamp, after whom the workshop is named, still works there every day.
“My husband and I are the proud owners of an auto repair shop and we love our jobs, but it’s not easy to run a small business in America right now,” her website says. “We need political leadership that respects the trades and understands the challenges facing small businesses.”
As Perez points out, there are very few people with her background in Congress. She says when people talk about diversity in politics, they need to include people of differing economic backgrounds. She says she wants to help create more “skilled workers and cheaper degrees”.
While political candidates often have to lean towards their base of support during primary elections, traditionally they move more towards the centre for the general election
Often young people can feel pressure to pursue a course of study that does not really suit them. They might prefer a career in the trades if they could see it would be enough to raise a family.
“We’ve never had a Congress made up of working-class people,” says John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation, a left-leaning magazine and author of several books, including The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism.
He says at the time of the nation’s founding, those involved in politics were elites – plantation owners, and wealthy businessmen. Over time, as they continued their business interests, those positions were ceded to a professional class of lawyers and political operatives. With a few exceptions, there have been no working-class people elected in numbers to either chamber.
In the 1890s, the People’s Party, which had the backing of the farming community, put up local and federal candidates, but with little success.
Nichols says to find the clearest parallel to Perez, one has to go back to 1964, when John Abner Race, a crane operator for Giddings & Lewis, located in Wisconsin, won a seat in the House as a Democrat. He was partly carried on the coattails of Lyndon Johnson, who was elected to the presidency in a landslide. Race served just one term, was defeated when he ran for reelection, and died in 1983 at the age of 69.
According to Nichols, Perez “stands out as somebody who has decided to take on the whole system. She’s taken on a system that has very few entry points for working-class folks. She has, through a unique set of circumstances, pulled something off where she’s viable. That’s quite a story. That is quite a rare thing in our politics. It’s too rare. It’s one of the reasons, frankly, people feel so disconnected from our politics, because they don’t very often see people like them.”
The so-called “jungle” primary coincides with a heatwave. The western parts of Washington state, have traditionally enjoyed temperate summers, and winters where snow and ice is not usual, except up the mountains.
But winters are getting colder and summers hotter. Whereas homebuilders tended not to install things like air conditioning, it has now become routine in new-built properties. In the summer of 2021, Seattle hit a new record, or at least one dating back to 1894, when they started collecting measurements, when it hit 42C (108F) on 28 June. Portland set a new record the same day, when it reached 46C (114F).
Perez supports policies to counter the climate crisis – including Biden’s bill that invests $430bn in green-energy jobs – and lowering the cost of prescription medicine. “Climate change is real and affects all of us,” she says in one of the debates.
Kent opposes the measure, saying he will not support “going down the same path that Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Jay Inslee have taken us down with so-called ‘green energy,’ because the green energy is produced in countries that hate us, like communist China”. He adds: “We have to be energy independent.”
This summer feels almost as brutal as last. A few days before the primary, I drive over the mountains to the cities of Yakima and Moses Lake, where the incumbent, Newhouse, has his Trump-backed challenger (and election denier) Loren Culp. Culp tells me Trump’s backing was a major boost.
“They know that I’m a fighter. They know that I stand up for their rights,” he says of the voters. “So having President Trump’s endorsement was the icing on the cake.”
In Yakima, the car dashboard says the temperature is 110F. But it feels like nothing less than an oven. Doug White, the Democratic candidate, is seated near a fan at a long table, making call after call to potential voters.
“I’ve got the strongest campaign that’s been run in this district in 30 years,” he says. “I raise more money than my Republican challengers. I think we’re going to win.”
In the third, there are nine people on the ballot – Perez, Kent, Herrera-Beutler, St John, Kraft, and a handful of others. In the days ahead of the primary, Kent accuses St John of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a political action committee, or PAC, controlled by pro-establishment Republicans. The logic is, that by dividing the GOP opponents against Herrera-Beutler by keeping more of them in the race longer, rather than simply putting money into her coffers, they can shore up the incumbent’s position. She does not address his assertions.
Primary day is 2 August. The first results come in at around 5pm. The first batch shows Perez in first place on 32 points, Herrera Beutler second with 25 per cent, Kent in third on 20 points, and St John in fourth on 15 points.
That is just the initial release. Because of early and postal voting, final results can take days to come in. While Perez never loses her first-place spot, Kent gradually closes the gap on Herrera Beutler.
A week after polling day, Kent has 0.5 per cent lead over Herrera Beutler, and the Associated Press say that he and Perez will advance to the general election showdown in November. In a concession speech, Herrera-Beutler does not specifically mention Kent, the events of 6 January, or her decision to vote for impeachment. Yet she says: “I’m proud that I always told the truth, stuck to my principles, and did what I knew to be best for our country.”
Autumn
While political candidates often have to lean towards their base of support during primary elections, traditionally they move more towards the centre for the general election. Comments intended as red meat made for a Maga-breathing crowd in the spring can be explained and smoothed over so as not to scare off more moderate Republicans.
For Democrats, it is the same. A person who seeks to press their progressive credentials to primary voters, quickly works to assure the electorate they will not turn into a wild-eyed communist if elected.
In the third, things are rather different. Perez always stresses she is centrist and less interested in party affliction. She seeks to present herself as a sane voice and says Kent is too extreme. She knows she needs to win the support of moderate Republicans who previously voted for Herrera Beutler.
She stresses local issues, points out she is a gun owner, and yet makes clear her support for access for abortion, an issue that will be critical across the country in November. Kent appears to go even more Maga. He repeats his plan to seek the impeachment of Biden and Harris, calls for the arrest of Fauci, proposes a 20-year suspension on immigration, and says there should be no regulations on firearms for any American aged 18 or older.
At their first debate, Perez accuses Kent of being more interested in appearing on TV than working for the district. “My opponent spent the last two years preparing for tonight practising on TV. I’ve spent the last two years running a small business,” she says.
Kent tells the audience: “Right now, our economy is actually being destroyed by Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, at every level.”
A few weeks before election day, Perez insists her polls show her ahead of Kent, and by some margin when people are told about their respective positions. She says the contest will be decided by voter turnout.
On a sunny day in the first week of October, I watch Perez, accompanied by a five-year-old black German shepherd, Uma Furman, as she rallies volunteers at Vancouver’s Esther Short Park. “The campaign is running on jet fuel right now. We’re really excited,” she says. Perez says her own poll gives her a 47-45 lead over Kent. Yet, once voters are given more information about Kent’s positions, her potential lead over him increases to 52 to 40.
Kent is trying to rally supporters and fill his campaign coffers. Among those donating to him is tech billionaire, Peter Thiel, who has supported a number of rightwing and libertarian candidates in recent years.
In numerous conversations with people across the district – outside grocery stores, at coffee shops, at gas stations and at the candidate’s own rallies, it is clear Kent has a lot of support. This is especially true the further one moves away from Vancouver and drives east and north. In those places, there are far more lawn signs and posters for Kent. But it is similarly true, Kent’s positions are turning off a number of Republicans whose support he needs.
One morning, a retired couple who asked to be identified as Terry and Brenda are walking through the Vancouver Farmers Market, filled with wild mushrooms, locally roasted coffee and vegetables that look as if they were picked just hours earlier.
Both are moderate Republicans who dislike Trump and voted for Herrera-Beutler in the primary. They say they will not be voting for Kent. “If we vote for Joe Kent we will just be voting for Trump,” explains Terry. Brenda adds: “We’ll be voting for Perez.”
Winter
One former supporter of Herrera-Beutler who Perez wins over is David Nierenberg, a long-time Republican donor who served as Romney’s national finance director when he ran for president in 2012.
He has been Herrera-Beutler’s biggest donor for some years, but is put off by what he terms Kent’s extremism. He says his family escaped from the Nazis in eastern Europe. Kent wants to shut down borders.
He and his wife meet Perez for lunch and are impressed. “We were intrigued by her because she is a genuine independent,” says Nierenberg. He says in just a few weeks, he and his donor network raise $4m for her campaign. “That was invested ... in media advertising that focused on educating the public in this district about the extremist and offensive positions articulated by Joe Kent throughout the campaign,” he says.
On the final weekend before polling day, I drive back to the third district, pointing the rental car back south down the I-5 interstate. It is pouring. The rain never eases. Both sides seem to think they can win.
In a Walmart parking lot, 40-year-old Nikki Danderan says she considers her politics as “America first” and will be voting for Kent. “I do like Joe Kent. I think he’ll do a good job,” she says.
At a fair to mark the Cinco-de Mayo holiday, Julie Mercado says she’s voting for Perez. “For people of colour, there is a lot of fear,” she says, claiming Trump’s election in 2016 triggered a spike in racist rhetoric and hate crimes, and that people are worried if he is elected again, there will be a repeat. There are final efforts by the candidates to urge them to vote.
“Every politician will tell you their election is the most important election in our country,” Perez tells one group, setting off to knock on doors. “Right now we’re running against a man who believes that we should have machine guns, we should have tactical nukes, there should be no difference between our military and our average citizens.”
Kent’s final weekend event is being hosted by the Skamania GOP in Stevenson, one of the places I’d seen him earlier in the year. The afternoon is clear but the forecast is for more rain later. I want to ask him about his comment on guns.
The fastest route takes me south into Oregon, and east along the southern bank of the Columbia River. The scenery is stunning, dangerously so. There’s a steel cantilever built in 1920 called Bridge of the Gods that spans the river close to the town. It’s a toll bridge requiring me to slow down to pay the $3 fee.
Kent is confident as he speaks to an audience of several dozen. He claims his own poll puts him ahead of Perez by five points. He still knows how to charm a crowd, and earns himself several warm laughs. I ask him about his recent comment on guns. Given as many as 45,000 people die every year in the US from gun violence, are his words not reckless, how does he justify them?
“The second amendment is very clear,” he says. “It’s funny, Ms Perez brings up guns but won’t seal off our southern border or help our country by stopping the fentanyl coming into our country from the Mexican drug cartels.”
On election day, the first results came in around 5pm, with Perez leaping to an early lead of 53 to 47. Kent predicts the gap will narrow, and it does as more results are counted.
Yet the gap never closes enough for the lead to change. Five days later the AP calls the race for the Democrat. The results tally 50.4 for Perez, and 49.5 for Kent. The margin is just a couple of thousand votes, but not narrow enough to trigger an automatic recount. Kent pays for one himself. (On Dec 21, Kent will announce the recount is completed, that he has accepted Perez’s victory and called her to offer his congratultions.)
In the first week of December, another day marked by grey skies and early sunsets, I drive back to the third. I want to ask Perez how she feels, how she pulled it off, and what lessons she may have for Democrats seeking to reconnect with working-class voters? I also want to see the auto-repair shop first-hand. Perez’s husband is working on a Land Cruiser.
That afternoon, the results of the race are formally certified by the Washington secretary of state. Perez says her parents are going to help look after the couple’s son, a toddler, and she has found a place to live in DC. She is excited, but a little daunted perhaps. She does not want to let anybody down.
What lies at the heart of her victory?
She believes a large chunk of people who voted for her, were people who also backed Republican Tiffany Smiley over Democrat Patty Murray in the contest for the Senate. For whatever reason, they did not want to vote for Joe Kent.
“It’s not that suddenly people are like, ‘oh I support Medicare for all’, or that people are flipping to the Democrats,” she says. “It’s that candidate quality matters. They want people who understand their values, who live like them.”
She adds: “They are tired of these ‘candidates-in-a-box’, where somebody has come up through the political machine and comes with self-funding, and has the trust fund behind them. They want a Congress that looks like America.”
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments