Poll: Southwest Washington’s 3rd District congressional race in a dead heat

In a congressional race that will likely be a rematch, the two hopefuls for Southwest Washington’s 3rd District seat appear to be locked in a dead heat.

U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican challenger Joe Kent are neck and neck among nearly 650 likely voters who live in the district, a recent poll from the Northwest Progressive Institute found.

“It is a textbook definition of a tight race that could come down to a recount,” said Andrew Villeneuve, the executive director of the left-leaning nonprofit. NPI was among the few pollsters to ascribe a fighting chance to Gluesenkamp Perez’s longshot 2022 campaign, which she eventually won.

Kent had been viewed as the clear frontrunner that cycle after he nabbed Donald Trump’s endorsement and unseated incumbent U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler in the August primary — a referendum on her vote to impeach the former president in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

Kent, a retired Green Beret and ex-CIA officer, had become a media darling on conservative talk shows while campaigning from the small town of Yacolt, Washington. He has also drawn attention after authoring a biography about his late wife, a U.S. Navy cryptologist who died in a suicide bombing in 2019.

Gluesenkamp Perez, meanwhile, fashioned herself as a middle-of-the-dirt-road Democrat from rural Skamania County. She entered the race two months before the primary, yet successfully cornered the district’s blue voters and eked out just enough support from Republicans and Independents to win by 2,629 votes.

Until then, Republicans had held the seat for more than a decade.

According to NPI’s poll, conducted June 11 and 12, Kent garnered 46% of support from the sample of likely voters. Gluesenkamp Perez had 45%. Nine percent of likely voters said they remained undecided. The poll has a 3.9% margin of error, Villeneuve said.

NPI has not released all of the data from its poll, but did note that respondents favorably viewed a number of topics that bode well for Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: reproductive rights, union organizing and police reform.

Reproductive rights garnered 57% support of likely voters. Sixty percent of respondents had favorable views of union organizing. And 64% supported the George Floyd Justice Policing Act, which aims to hold law enforcement more accountable for misconduct and abuse.

Villeneuve told OPB, however, that Kent’s stump speeches also hit on issues that trend well: resolving the fentanyl crisis and returning to local control for timber logging, mining and other natural resource industries.

“There are things that Joe Kent is talking about in his campaign that are attractive [to likely voters],” Villeneuve said.

With the primary less than two months away, voters will soon have a chance to show how popular each of the candidates are, thanks to Washington’s top-two primary system. They are raising the most money in the entire field. The third-best fundraiser is Camas City Councilor Leslie Lewallen, a Republican who had raised about $533,915.39 as of March 31.

Kent has raised $1.04 million directly, and a committee linked to his campaign has raised an additional $872,000, according to data from the Federal Elections Commission.

Gluesenkamp Perez has raised $4.15 million, data showed, with an additional $79,000 raised by a closely linked committee.

But Gluesenkamp Perez herself knows that funding isn’t everything, as she won last cycle with a piggybank that was a fraction of Kent’s. The fall election will likely have higher turnout with former President Trump and President Joe Biden on the ticket.

Mark Stephan, an associate professor of political science at the Vancouver campus of Washington State University, said that incumbents are most vulnerable during their first reelection campaign.

“It’s the sophomore slump,” Stephan said. “It’s usually that first time around when you’ve just barely gotten into office.”

Gluesenkamp Perez is actively courting Republicans and independents. Her campaign rolled out its first TV ads that talk about “taking on the Biden administration” and feature endorsements from the elected sheriffs of Thurston and Skamania counties, an independent and Republican, respectively. (In Washington state, sheriff’s offices are partisan.)

Meanwhile, she’s caught flack from some of the district’s Democrats. She joined Republicans’ attempts last year to toss Biden’s student debt relief plan and also voted in favor of a defense spending bill that, among other things, restricted abortion and transgender medical care in the military.

To Stephan, those are deviations that Democratic leaders in the district and across the country need to weigh.

“Because you keep someone from your own party in that position rather than the opposition party, right?” Stephan said.

Kent, who previously built his platform with conspiracies about COVID-19 and the 2020 election, has in recent weeks allotted more time at town halls to discussing rampant inflation, government overspending, and blaming immigration at the southern border for fentanyl.

Washington state’s primary election is slated for Aug. 6. Election officials begin mailing ballots July 19.