US Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on what her win means and what comes next

Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez defeated a challenge from Trump-identified Republican Joe Kent in Washington’s 3rd District — despite the fact that Trump won that same district. Gluesenkamp Perez told The New York Times that result was because she refused to nationalize her local race and had solid support from working class voters, whom she says her party needs to do a much better job representing. Despite a number of races around the country still too close to call, control of the U.S. House looks likely to fall. to the GOP. With that party’s control of the Senate, Donald Trump re-elected as president, and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans would have a lock on all three branches of government. Gluesenkamp Perez joins us from Washington, D.C. to tell us more about how she plans to represent her district and work across the aisle.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. She’s a Democrat who represents Washington’s 3rd Congressional District. The partly rural district went for Donald Trump in 2016, in 2020, and again last week. But Gluesenkamp Perez won her reelection anyway. She joins us now. Welcome back to the show.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Miller: What did you hear from constituents over, let’s say, the last six months about the issues that they were most focused about or most worried about?

Gluesenkamp Perez: I was talking to a constituent, who actually is the director of one of our largest hospital’s labor and delivery wards. And she told me that 40% of the babies born right now have at least one parent addicted to fentanyl. It is ravaging a lot of Southwest Washington, and my community as well.

Miller: How do you wrap your head around that single statistic? It’s a shocking number.

Gluesenkamp Perez: You always think that it’s my family, my community, my playgroups. But no, it’s everywhere, it is everywhere. And people experience it in isolation. I think that isolation festers in a way that’s less productive than talking about the reality of what it’s like to live in communities that are so impacted by this.

Miller: So let’s take that as one example, and I’m sure there are other things that you and your staff heard from constituents. But you hear that, what do you do with that as – if I could maybe split you up into two people – a campaigner, which is pretty important if you want to stay in office, and also as a lawmaker? But as a campaigner, when you hear something like that, how do you respond?

Gluesenkamp Perez: I think the first thing is that you treat people like humans, like the way you would want to be treated. It is terrible the way that it’s impacting lives. As a mom, I can’t imagine what it’s like. Some of my constituents have lost multiple family members in the same week. It is the human-scale connection.

And I think on a policy level, you take them seriously. There is a real problem here. This was one of the reasons that I was clear, I thought the Biden administration was not meeting their obligations to secure the border and end the flow of fentanyl.

Miller: You told The New York Times last week that the fundamental mistake politicians make is condescension. What are examples of that in practice? What have you seen or heard?

Gluesenkamp Perez: Some of my colleagues would be like “how do we get these people to understand that the economy is great?” Like, what are you talking about? People are putting their groceries on a credit card. There is not a spreadsheet on earth that is going to talk somebody out of their lived experience of not being able to afford rent, of working multiple jobs, of having to put stuff out of your grocery cart. You listen to them. There’s a joke – there’s lies, damned lies in statistics. You have to be talking to enough just normal people in your community to know whether these spreadsheets, these talking points are trying to blow smoke, or if they’re pointing to something real.

Miller: What’s a normal person? Who’s a normal person?

Gluesenkamp Perez: I’d like to think I’m normal. But just like at daycare dropoff, at the grocery store, I talk to my mom, talk to my neighbors, talk to people at church. And I think that’s one of the things that I’ve realized, too, is that you have to think about who’s not at the table. I think about my experience having run a small business, I wouldn’t have gotten invited to any of these meetings. And if you’re trying to make it to your kid’s doctor appointment or any of these things, it’s very difficult to make time for the political process. So that’s why it’s so important to be out, present and available. That’s why I spend so much time in my rural counties, because they’re pointing to something true that needs to be heard and needs to be fought for.

Miller: Do you feel that condescension yourself when you’re in the halls of Congress? I guess I mean, do fellow lawmakers condescend to you about being the co-owner of an auto shop?

Gluesenkamp Perez: Oh, sure. People always change it from, like “auto shop” to “small business owner.”

Miller: Because there’s something sort of noble in theory about being a small business owner, but too dirty and gritty about being the owner of an auto shop?

Gluesenkamp Perez: Yeah, they want to put a ribbon on it. I’m very proud of working in the trades. I’m really proud of fixing things. I think this is the core of pragmatic environmentalism, this is being a part of your community. There was not the anticipation I would have something substantive to say. I’m not a cardboard cut out. I have a different set of experiences.

I passed the second most number of amendments of any freshman in my whole class last year because I have a different set of experiences. I’m thinking about what a bill might do to the only grocery store in a rural community, or what it would do to our schools that have already cut down to a four-day school week because of budget shortfalls. I have a different set of perspectives and experiences. And that means that I’m not like competing for the same turf as the 80 lawyers in DC. There is a strategic advantage of having a different worldview to bring to the table.

Miller: I’m not sure if I’ve heard that metric before, being able to pass amendments. As you said, the second highest amendments as a first-time member of Congress. What do you see as the significance of that? Often, we’ve heard about bills passed, bills that you introduced or sponsored. You’re talking here about tweaks to them, changes to them. What’s significant about that?

Gluesenkamp Perez: Well, I don’t think that bills are gonna fix everything. I don’t think the government is going to fix everything. People try to pass bills because it sounds good. But that means sometimes they just make up problems because there’s no natural predator for that, because it’s a made up issue. Real work takes time. Real legislation really does take time. And building a coalition, it’ll have opponents and supporters, and it takes time to build the coalition. But thinking about how to make ideas better, how to make legislation better – I’m proud of that. This thing was coming to the floor and it was going to pass, and I got a chance to make it better, to take somebody else’s idea and kind of internalize it and chew on it, and think about how do we make it better?

Miller: It’s funny, I see that in the context of the right to repair. You’re still fixing things, in this case you’re making a bill better, as far as you’re concerned.

Gluesenkamp Perez: Yeah. I mean, that was one of the big reasons that I ran for Congress. I was realistic about the chances of actually winning the seat, but I thought I could at least elevate this issue that I see as nickel and diming the middle class out of existence. It’s making us reliant on a cheap set of goods.

Right to repair basically means that you have the right to fix your own stuff. You bought it, you can fix it. But companies like John Deere tractor, they put in their terms of service contracts that you can’t wrench on your own tractor. You have to take it to an authorized dealer. They all blitzed out at one time and there aren’t enough dealers in the whole country to get all those tractors serviced in time to cut hay, before it turns into something worthless, before it rains.

And we’ve seen it in our business. I used to do a lightbulb in a headlight for $3. Now the part is $700 for the whole assembly. It’s wiping out people’s savings accounts.

Miller: You co-sponsored a bill in 2023 focused on agricultural equipment. Another one last year focused on digital devices. Neither got out of committee. Why not?

Gluesenkamp Perez: Well, like I said, it takes time to build the coalition. And if John Deere is one of your donors, people are less likely to wanna get on board.

What is exciting to me is seeing the non-political agency, people online who do not identify as partisan, but this is personal to them, and they are flexing and building muscle to change things. So seeing this grow from the inside out, I think that’s been a real encouragement to me, and that is moving my colleagues and my advocacy on it. I can speak to it in a different way than maybe they’ve seen before.

Miller: You’ve made the argument in the past that this kind of legislation has a lot of diverse beneficiaries, and also groups that aren’t always aligned politically – rural Americans, people who work in agriculture, who build, and fix things, blue collar workers, conservationists – because less stuff is going to be wasted, used once and then after two years, thrown away. What has stalled progress so far? You’re saying that things are happening, but it’s happening slowly. What has it illustrated for you about just how our political system works?

Gluesenkamp Perez: I’ve never bought a new car in my life. We buy our cars off Craigslist. And I think that if you have not experienced it personally, if your car is always under warranty, you don’t necessarily know how much it’s impacting your community. So hearing from your community directly, that really matters to moving legislation.

Miller: I gotta say, that’s different from what you said earlier about what I heard as the lobbying power of John Deere, or Apple, or other huge multinational corporations.

Gluesenkamp Perez: There’s no one weird trick to pass legislation. My colleagues are human. There’s a lot of different things. There definitely is real lobbying. If you are driving a 1997 Toyota Corolla, maybe you don’t have the time to write your legislator. That’s the perspective I try to bring and elevate that. I’ve told colleagues, if you poll this in your district, it’ll poll at 80% approval. People really like this. But they don’t have time to write you about it necessarily.

Miller: Donald Trump won your district by nearly 3 percentage points. You beat Joe Kent by nearly 4 percentage points. My guess is, just based on the numbers, there is some slice of the electorate who voted for him and for you this time around. What do you think those voters saw in the two of you together?

Gluesenkamp Perez: Well, I think they’re looking for different things in the national than their rep, their state. I think that for me, it is about really showing up, and doing the work, and having a sense of agency. One of the things I’ve talked about is that I think rural America and the trades have suffered bitterly under single party control. If somebody feels entitled to your vote, they’re not gonna work. The number of casework successes we’ve had, I think I’ve closed 1,600 constituent cases. We’ve returned $3 million to constituents through casework, money that was owed to them by a federal agency. I take that really seriously.

I’ve never been somebody that … like my dad’s not gonna write an email and give me a job. I’ve had to hustle, and people are seeing me hustle, and really take it as an honor to get to do this work, and work diligently.

Miller: I know we’re almost out of time, but I’m just curious – at this point, it’d be a big surprise if Democrats retook the house. What would qualify as a success for you in the next two years?

Gluesenkamp Perez: I think there’s a lot of things that my community cares about that are not partisan. We want to own homes. We want good schools. We want shop class in junior high. We want to end fentanyl addiction. These are things that need to supersede politics. I’m hopeful. I’ve been in the minority these past 20 months or whatever, and it’s gonna stay that way at least for the next cycle. And my job is to just work diligently, and try to understand what it is that my neighbors are saying. What is at the root of it? What do we agree on here? How do I build that as the basis for everything else that comes after it, starting with a value that we share?

Miller: Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, thanks very much.

Gluesenkamp Perez: Thank you.

Miller: Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is a Democrat who won reelection in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District.

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