In case you missed it, Bloomberg Government is out with a new profile highlighting swing-district leaders like Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez who is focused on advocating for her district and fighting for common-sense solutions in Washington. Read more below:
Driving in a white van along the Columbia River that separates her home state of Washington from Oregon, executives from the Port of Vancouver showed the first-term Democrat how the aging docks shipping wheat and wind turbines needed tens of millions of dollars in improvements.
They knew they had an ally in Gluesenkamp Perez, who had petitioned Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for a federal maritime infrastructure grant and secured half a million dollars in earmarks in a committee-approved funding bill to expand or improve the century-old docks.
“People do not care about most of the bills that we’re passing in Congress,” Gluesenkamp Perez said in an interview at the port. “They care about effectively delivering better government that’s relevant to the things people are experiencing.”
Lawmakers such as Gluesenkamp Perez from competitive districts are honing in on local bread-and-butter items as they seek to distance themselves from the overheated and polarizing rhetoric that consumes Washington, D.C., but often alienates more independent voters who they will need to get re-elected next year.
The ability of these swing-district lawmakers, including several in the Pacific Northwest, to thread that needle will determine which party will win the majority in 2024.
They’re embracing the “all politics is local” strategy popularized by former Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.), who presided over the House during a less partisan era in the 1970s and 1980s.
“When you’re in a swingy district, you want your personality and your character to be defining the race, not the label,” said Mike Zamore, who teaches at American University’s Washington College of Law and was a chief of staff to Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).
Gluesenkamp Perez’s rural district, bounded by the Cascades and the Pacific Ocean, is home to many fiscal conservatives who pay no personal income tax in Washington or sales tax when shopping in Oregon.
In 2022, she bested Joe Kent who had defeated GOP incumbent Jaime Herrera Beutler after she voted to impeach former President Donald Trump for “incitement of insurrection” through his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Gluesenkamp Perez is banking she can beat Kent again by “staying out of crazy town” and highlighting his questioning of the 2020 election, support for limiting legal immigration, and suggesting that infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci, who led the effort to respond to Covid-19, should be charged with “murder.”
“Those are things I don’t think are top priorities or core beliefs of almost anyone in my district,” Gluesenkamp Perez said.
