Two House incumbents seek to woo the other party’s voters in Pacific Northwest swing seats

By Arit John, CNN

Ridgefield, Washington (CNN) — Dozens of families lined up outside the Clark County Fairgrounds here on a recent Saturday, their young kids eager to ride on tractors, toss balls into massive vacuum truck hoses and add new stickers to their tiny construction hats.

Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez stood before the crowd with her husband, Dean, and young son, ready to cut the caution tape-style ribbon that would signal the start of Dozer Days.

“I don’t know about you guys, but we have been talking about how many sleeps until Dozer Days for about a month,” she said into a bullhorn at the recent campaign stop. “Thank you all for being part of a culture that believes in making stuff, and being proud of who we are as the best tradespeople in the world.”

The construction-themed event is designed to introduce young children to careers as journeymen linemen fixing electrical lines or vacuum truck operators cleaning storm drains – the exact kinds of jobs Gluesenkamp Perez has advocated during her first term in Congress representing this rural district in southwest Washington, even if it has meant pushing back on Democratic efforts to cancel debt for college students.

As Gluesenkamp Perez faces a rematch against far-right Republican Joe Kent in one of the most competitive races in the country, focusing on this corner of the Evergreen State and its issues could be the key to holding on to a district that Donald Trump carried by 4 points in 2020 and is likely to win again this November.

Washington’s 3rd Congressional District is one of 21 “crossover” seats whose House representative is of the opposing party to the presidential candidate who carried the district four years ago. Those seats – five held by Democrats and 16 by Republicans – will likely determine which party controls the House, where Republicans hold a slim majority. Two of those seats are here in the Pacific Northwest: South of Gluesenkamp Perez’s district, another freshman congresswoman, Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is seeking reelection in a seat that backed Joe Biden by 8 points in 2020.

Such seats – where bipartisanship is a necessity, not a choice – have become increasingly rare. Twenty years ago, there were nearly 60 crossover districts, according to an analysis by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. In these districts, incumbents usually assert their independence from their national parties and tout their work across the aisle, as their opponents seek to nationalize the contests and urge party allegiance.

And as partisanship has increased, it’s become harder for these candidates to navigate the demands of both a November electorate that rewards bipartisanship and base voters who punish party disloyalty in primaries.

For Gluesenkamp Perez, finding that balance has involved joining a bipartisan group of lawmakers in Washington, DC, for daily CrossFit workouts to find legislative partners. It’s also meant voting against the Biden administration on key issues such as student debt cancellation, a vote that prompted outraged progressives from across the country to flood the Yelp and Google pages of her family’s auto repair shop with negative reviews.

“For me, it’s not productive to think about it as I’m asking people to make a political choice,” Gluesenkamp Perez said in an interview between campaign events. “I’m just trying to bring back power and respect to people in the trades and people in my community.”

Primary defeats

Over the past two years, voters in this region have felt the consequences of ousting centrist House incumbents.

Gluesenkamp Perez’s predecessor, Jaime Herrera Beutler, was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6, 2021. But in 2022, after representing the district for more than a decade, she lost a top-two open primary, finishing behind Gluesenkamp Perez and Kent, a retired Green Beret who had Trump’s endorsement. The Democrat went on to win the general election by 2,600 votes.

A few miles south, a similar story played out in Oregon’s 5th District, where longtime Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader, a member of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, lost his primary to progressive Jamie McLeod-Skinner. Schrader had Biden’s endorsement but had angered the left by voting against Democratic priorities such as Covid-19 relief funding and allowing Medicare to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs, which he opposed in a committee hearing prior to backing a narrower Medicare negotiation plan on the House floor.

McLeod-Skinner lost the general election to Chavez-DeRemer, the former mayor of Happy Valley, by 2 points in a district that stretches south from the Portland suburbs to Bend.

Like Gluesenkamp Perez, Chavez-DeRemer has touted her efforts in Congress to work with the party that dominates her district. The pair, who often share the same flights between Portland and DC, touted their work together on the House Agriculture Committee’s Forestry panel and in advocating border security funding and defense-only aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Chavez-DeRemer has sought to localize her race against Democratic state Rep. Janelle Bynum despite the national implications.

“Sure, it does make sense that people want to put you in a box of red or blue,” Chavez-DeRemer said of her experience running in a Democratic-leaning district. “But really, it’s just sticking to what you’ve been doing, that people trust you, and then they’ll vote for who they believe is going to best represent the district as a whole.”

Eager to avoid a 2022 general election rematch, Democrats waded into this year’s primary to back Bynum over McLeod-Skinner. Bynum previously defeated Chavez-DeRemer twice in state legislative elections around Clackamas, a Portland suburb.

“I think Democrats did realize that, ‘Whoops, Kurt Schrader wasn’t exactly the far-left guy we love with the Green New Deal and all that sort of thing,’ but they realized that they’d gone a little too far,” Schrader said. “I think Janelle is still very progressive, but a little bit less so.”

Democrats say they’re optimistic about their new candidate and believe they have more experience with the new congressional map, which changed last cycle after Oregon gained a sixth seat following the 2020 census. They are also leaning into the national implications of the race.

As part of a tour through battleground districts, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries recently held a news conference with Bynum in her Clackamas campaign office. The two were flanked by dozens of supporters, including several union members, an effort to counter Chavez-DeRemer’s endorsements from organized labor.

Bynum spoke of her own record in Salem, where she led bipartisan legislation to fund the state’s semiconductor industry and backed Oregon’s abortion protections, which were enacted in 2017 after Trump became president. She argued that Chavez-DeRemer had “sided with the most extreme members of her party,” blasted her record on abortion and criticized her decision to endorse Trump.

“She’s stood by Donald Trump at every turn,” Bynum said. “She’s standing by her man even after he was convicted of 34 felony counts.”

Jeffries said Bynum would be a vote for passing federal abortion protections and advancing what Vice President Kamala Harris has described as an “opportunity economy.” He also touted Bynum’s two previous victories against Chavez-DeRemer.

“We’re going for the trifecta, going for the triple crown, and we’re going for the three-peat,” he said.

Abortion and crime

Both parties recognize the significance of the two seats, which could play a role in tipping the balance of power in the House, where Democrats need a net gain of four seats to earn control. In both races, Democrats have leaned into abortion rights and Republicans have focused on crime.

“The Pacific Northwest is key to a House Democratic majority,” Dan Gottlieb, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement. “As different as these districts are, the through lines are clear: Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Joe Kent are content to stoke on the chaos and dysfunction we see in Congress and let politicians dictate women’s health care decisions.”

Ben Petersen, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, tied the two Democrats to the fallout from Oregon’s decriminalization of hard drugs.

“Republicans are full speed ahead to grow our majority because voters in both districts reject Democrats’ extreme agenda fueling Portland’s crime, fentanyl and homelessness crisis,” Petersen said.

In Oregon, Democrats have pointed to Chavez-DeRemer’s shifting stances on abortion. She supported the overturning of Roe v. Wade and said during her 2022 Republican primary that she would “be in favor of passing” legislation that would ban the procedure after fetal cardiac activity is detected, which is around six weeks. In Congress, she opposed legislation that would have blocked federal subsidies to insurance plans that cover abortions, but she also voted against a defense bill amendment to reimburse service members who need to travel out of state to receive abortions or other reproductive care.

Chavez-DeRemer has said that she would support the will of Oregon voters, who overwhelmingly support abortion rights, and that she is opposed to a national abortion ban. She said she opposed the defense bill amendment because she wanted to use that legislation to focus on national security and argued it wouldn’t affect Oregonians’ rights, in part because the state has a fund to help pay for people’s travel expenses.

“I am not pro-choice enough for the choice groups. I’m not pro-life enough for the life groups, because I’m where most Americans are, which is down the middle,” Chavez-DeRemer said in an interview.

Republicans, in turn, have pointed to Bynum’s record in the state legislature, as well as her past support for a 2020 ballot initiative that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs and sought to expand funding for addiction treatment.

“Not only was it a failed experiment, but people are dead because of it in Oregon,” Chavez-DeRemer said. “That accountability cannot just go away – you don’t get to just say, ‘I think this is not working out.’”

In 2020, Bynum backed the citizen-led initiative Measure 110 with reservations, noting that it would have looked different if it had originated with the legislature. Though the initiative passed with more than 58% of the vote, Bynum and other lawmakers voted to recriminalize drugs this year as the state saw a rise in fentanyl use and a delay in the treatment protocols.

“There were a lot of people in my caucus who wanted to continue to work through the status quo and say, ‘Well, we haven’t given it enough time,’” Bynum said in an interview. “And there were those of us who were like, ‘My kids can’t even ride the public bus because people are tweaking out.’ … That wasn’t what we signed up for.”

She has also defended her record on public safety, pointing to bipartisan police accountability reforms she led in 2021.

Other criticisms have scrutinized Bynum’s record on handling sexual harassment allegations. One Congressional Leadership Fund ad pointed to a campaign contribution she made to a colleague in the legislature who was under investigation for sexual harassment.

In recent days Republicans have also latched onto a complaint that alleged Bynum didn’t report allegations of misconduct made in 2019 against a campaign operative assigned to her 2022 campaign by Oregon House Democrats’ campaign arm.

Bynum is not under investigation. She has said that she did report the misconduct to the accused person’s employer. A spokesperson for the Bynum campaign called the allegation that she did not report harassment an attempt to “smear” the candidate that was “not based in reality.”

“MAGA Republicans are lying to Oregon voters about Janelle Bynum’s record because they know their candidate has no record to stand on here in Oregon,” the spokesperson wrote.

A nationalized race

While Gluesenkamp Perez has sought to distance herself from national Democrats – she has declined to endorse Harris or say who she will vote for in November – Kent has campaigned as a Trump ally.

He’s also sought to move away from some of the policy positions and controversies that alienated moderates in his first run – when he called for a national abortion ban that would overturn protections in states such as Washington, spoke at a right-wing rally in DC aimed at supporting insurrectionists charged in the deadly January 6 riot, and frequently had to disavow or distance himself from White nationalists and Nazi sympathizers.

Earlier this year, Kent laid out three things his campaign would do differently: stop discouraging Election Day voting, focus more on local issues and reach out to a broader base of Republicans. He has leaned into his personal story, including his status as a Gold Star husband after his wife was killed in 2019 by a suicide bomber in Syria, and has tried to mend fences with moderate Republicans. On abortion, he now says he doesn’t support new federal legislation on the issue but instead wants to promote pro-family policies, such as making diapers tax exempt.

The contrast between the two candidates’ approaches was clear at a recent debate with Gluesenkamp Perez. At one point during the debate, both candidates had the opportunity to ask each other a question.

In response to Kent’s question on why she voted against House Republicans’ legislation to ban transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports team, Gluesenkamp Perez said she took a “libertarian” approach to the issue and worried it would have subjected young girls to genital examinations.

She then asked Kent why he called her legislation to block a rule that would have made table saws more expensive a waste of time.

“While our southern border is wide open, while the price at the pump and the grocery store is really hurting working Americans, Congress is doing these little performative measures,” Kent said. “We need to do these big lifts to get the federal government bureaucracy out of our daily lives, in terms of our business and our natural resources industries, secure our border, stop the out-of-control spending – then we’ll talk about table saws.”

Eric Burleson, a 45-year-old saw mill worker, said Kent did a better job at debating, but he preferred the points Gluesenkamp Perez made.

“It seems like he was focusing more on the country, what he could do for the country, and she was focused on what she could do for our area itself,” he said.

Burleson said he voted for Kent in the 2022 general election but voted for Gluesenkamp Perez in this year’s August primary after getting a personal phone call from her office when he wrote in about an issue. The Longview resident, who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, is the sort of voter Gluesenkamp Perez has sought to win over. Burleson said he’s unsure of how he’ll vote in the presidential election, but he’s leaning toward Glusenkamp Perez at the congressional level.

“I don’t really choose between straight party lines. I kind of go with whoever I think has the best ideas,” he said. “If it’s a Democrat for one office and a Republican for another one, whoever has the best ideas, in my opinion, is probably who I’d vote for.”

In a brief interview following a town hall in Vancouver, Washington, Kent argued that his top priorities are local ones.

“I think the biggest issues right now, especially for Congress, it’s the out-of-control inflation, which is handled in DC, but it’s a very local issue,” he said. “And same thing with the border. That seems like a very big national issue, but if you look at what fentanyl has done to the community here, it’s pretty local issue as well.”

At the Vancouver gathering, Kent and his supporters leaned into those national topics. He echoed his warnings of an invasion at the border, saying there were “young and fit men” crossing into the US and joking that people should stay away from the US Capitol on January 6 because it’s “a trap,” after one voter spoke of a rumor that Democrats wouldn’t certify the election results.

After another voter asked what Republicans plan to do about the “cheating,” Kent went after Washington state’s all-mail ballot system, saying he didn’t think “Democrats import 10 to 12 million illegals here out of the kindness of their hearts,” and, to paraphrase Trump, that his margin in November must be “too big to rig.”

Kent conceded his narrow 2022 loss to Gluesenkamp Perez after paying for a recount but has asserted that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud influencing that result.

Kent urged those in the room in Vancouver to vote straight ticket to counter Gluesenkamp Perez’s efforts to sway Trump voters.

“That’s her entire strategy right now,” he said. “We’ve got to get all of our people who are going to get a ballot to vote Republican all the way down.”

Joan Dunn, an 84-year-old retiree from Vancouver who attended the event, agreed. Democrats, she claimed, tend to vote with their party, while Republicans will vote for people who are “nicer.” It’s a lesson her party has yet to learn, she said.

“It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “That’s not how you get control of the Senate and the House in order to do the country’s business.”

CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to reflect that former Oregon Rep. Kurt Schrader voted in a committee hearing against a proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs but supported a narrower plan on the House floor.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.