Driving Change
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez ’12 led a grass-roots congressional campaign and surprised the nation when she flipped a district.
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez ’12 was on the verge of a very big decision.
It was February 2022. The year before, Republican Joe Kent had announced his campaign for Congress for Washington’s Third District over the incumbent, the more moderate, Jaime Herrera Beutler, who had voted to impeach Donald Trump. Trump had endorsed Kent in September. Gluesenkamp Perez was charged up by Kent’s extremist politics; she has called him a “fascist” and a “white nationalist, Nazi sympathizer” online. She was considering running against him.
Her interest in public office was not without precedent. In addition to co-owning an auto repair and machine shop with her husband, Dean Gluesenkamp, she had been involved in her community and active in local politics since 2016, when she ran for, and lost, a seat on the Skamania County Board of Commissioners. Undeterred by the loss, she started working on the Underwood Conservation District board in 2018.
When the idea of running for Congress began to bloom, she called Hannah Love ’12, a political strategist and her former housemate, to ask her for advice. Love, wanting to be a true friend, tried to deter Gluesenkamp Perez at first. “I think you can do it, if anyone can do it,” Love remembers saying, but she cautioned against long hours and the potential of losing.
Making the choice took serious consideration. Gluesenkamp Perez cared deeply for Washington, where her family has deep roots going back generations, and where she’d spent childhood summers playing in the forest. But the true inflection point for her came during a calm moment, while she was nursing her son, Ciro, in the home she and her husband built from the ground up.
“That was the point where I was like, oh, I think I need to do this,” she said.
And she did. In what pundits later called the biggest upset in the 2022 election, she flipped her district to defeat Joe Kent through a grassroots campaign, with no financing from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—despite a two percent predicted chance of winning. Being a political underdog came with a kind of freedom, said Gluesenkamp Perez: “There was not an alternative to being who I am.”
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On a cool day in April 2023, the cherry blossom trees surrounding the Battle Ground Community Center in southern Washington State are out in full force: their flowering branches bob in the breeze, promising spring. There’s only half a second to admire them, though; I’m hurrying through the door behind Congresswoman Gluesenkamp Perez and her staffers.
Inside, more than 70 people from all over the state mill about before settling into seated rows. They’re aged young, old, and infant. They wear suits, suspenders, jeans, espadrilles, and baseball caps. And they bear titles as diverse as flower farmer, director of governmental affairs at the Washington State Potato Commission, representative from the Washington ATV Association, director of the Anti-Hunger & Nutrition Coalition, and scientific policy advisor for the Washington State Conservation Commission.
Yet all these people have something in common: they’ll each spend just two minutes talking to Glusenkamp Perez. In their allotted time, they’ll share their hopes and asks for the 2023 Farm Bill, a gigantic, complex piece of legislation that passes once every five years and encompasses such wide-ranging topics as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, crop insurance, land conservation, forestry services, commodities pricing, federal loan programs, and rural development. It’s a big deal. A podium stands in the center of the room, waiting for people to approach.
Facing them at the center of a folding table, Gluesenkamp Perez sits flanked by staffers with computers out ready to take notes and stacks of business cards to hand out after the session.
Her bright green pin pops out to designate her as a member of Congress. Otherwise, she’s unadorned. Wearing a blue oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, jeans, and Blundstone boots, she looks casual enough that she could go from the district office to a timber conference. Likely that’s because, sometimes, she does, in addition to petting cows at creameries and donning a hood to watch students learn to weld (all of which you can witness on her Twitter feed). When not in Washington, D.C., she spends her days in her home state visiting local facilities, meeting with constituents, and engaging in listening sessions like these. “Every day that I don’t have a vote in D.C., I’m in the district,” she told me over the phone prior to our day together. “I’m spending one-on-one time with community leaders, local electeds, and business owners. And I think that’s really critical. You have to know what’s going on in your district.”
Staying in the know, however, is a gargantuan effort, one that the congresswoman says other representatives in “safer” seats don’t have to worry about quite so much. We’re at stop number two of four, a light day according to Tim Gowen ’10, her deputy district director, and Gluesenkamp Perez looks a little wan. She’s recovering from a bout of the flu that left her, her husband, and their 19-month-old son sick with fevers earlier in the week. After one day off, she’s back on the road. Still, her gaze is steady as she smiles and waves hello to the people she knows in the crowd. She holds it trained on every speaker over the next two hours, nodding and taking notes and occasionally interjecting with excitement or concern, never once yawning or looking away.
Though she’s unassuming in appearance, Gluesenkamp Perez has a certain star power that draws people in. Maybe it’s her sincerity, or the fact that she’s funny, or that her general approach to life is pretty punk. She doesn’t boast a massive Twitter following, and she hasn’t pulled flashy stunts like attending the Met Gala like some other representatives (at least not yet). But it feels like she’s a local celebrity. During my day with the congresswoman in mid-April, I felt like I was buzzing. At all of our stops, she was excited to see people. But they were really excited to see her.
She urged people not to use any of their precious two minutes at the listening session on niceties, but most couldn’t resist. Joe Zimmerman, representing the Clark-Cowlitz Farm Bureau, ended his time by saying, “I’d like all of us to understand the historic situation we have where a Clark and Cowlitz County representative from southwest Washington is on the Ag commitee. I don’t think that’s ever happened.” Applause ensued.
Gluesenkamp Perez particularly related to several speakers. Rob Baur, who owns Baurs Corner Farm and identifies as the CTO, or “Chief Tractor Operator,” shared his ongoing problems with a new John Deere tractor to illustrate a need for federal right-to-repair legislation. Perez agreed emphatically. “You can’t wait three weeks [to fix the tractor] when you’ve got harvest coming,” she said.
Her connection was visibly strongest to Nicole Curtis, a community advocate at Northwest Harvest, a hunger relief agency, who took the podium to request permanent protection for SNAP. Wearing a low, tight ponytail, Curtis kept her head down as she read quickly from her script. She spoke of struggling to feed her two sons after a pandemic layoff and the end of SNAP emergency allotments in February after President Biden signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act. In closing remarks, Gluesenkamp Perez called her out specifically to thank her for making the time to be there. After the session, she rushed to speak to her first. I caught up with Curtis as folks were filing out from the community center. She is a huge fan of the congresswoman; she even donated to Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign. “She’s got a different energy; it’s refreshing,” she said.
The hours added up as we stopped at a community clinic and a food bank. Gluesenkamp Perez kept up the energy, even as she paused to occasionally blow her nose. Some of her remarks, like one on how empowering it is to know how to cook beans and rice, felt rote. But when she opens up to tell her own stories, she gets through to people. At North County Community Food Bank in Battle Ground, she shared that her grandma had volunteered at a food bank, which resonated with the crew. She also made it a point to emphatically thank everyone for their work throughout our tour.
After, I chatted with lavender-haired volunteer Bev Jones (Battle Ground Citizen of the Year 2016) to talk about the visit. Jones stays away from conflict, which makes it tricky to talk politics with neighbors displaying Joe Kent signs in their yard. But she’s happy Gluesenkamp Perez won and hopes that she hangs on to the seat. “I appreciate her being a woman in that position and a small business owner. Just her showing up with her questions today, I’m even more impressed,” she said. She paused and smiled, before doing a little wiggle. “She’s my girl.”
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When Gluesenkamp Perez decided to run for office, the first order of business wasn’t brainstorming how to fundraise or hire consultants, but securing childcare (an issue she has spoken passionately about; she and Dean often brought Ciro with them to the auto shop because they couldn’t find affordable daycare). She called her mom and mother-in-law to ask for extra support during the campaign. Then, she needed to get Dean on board; he was hesitant. “It’s a family decision to run for Congress,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “He really believes in me, and his perspective was, I’m not just saying yes to a campaign. If you run, you’re gonna win. And that’s going to change everything about our life.”
Dean ended up being right.
The odds were not in her favor. With a lack of support from the DCCC and even groups like EMILY’s List, which supports women candidates in favor of abortion rights, she embarked on an intensive grassroots campaign. (Emily’s List endorsed her in October 2022, less than a month before the election.)
“All the pundits said I had a two percent chance, and I get it, people try to make strategic decisions,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “But it’s hard when they say they want people who work in the trades, and women, and moms, and Latinos. Like, where the hell are you?” Finding media coverage was also a challenge. She reached out to me a year ago to cover her story; the New York Times declined the pitch (now, the Times’s coverage of Gluesenkamp Perez includes an array of reporting and opinion, with headlines like “A New Voice for Winning Back Lost Democratic Voters”).
When we finally got to have our interview, we lamented the paradox facing underdog candidates: you need a critical mass to get people to pay attention, but how do you gain that critical mass? Gluesenkamp Perez credits the support of her local community for believing in her at the beginning: “You just work your phone book, and go from there.”
One connection led to another, and once she had an audience, her message—of supporting working families, championing small business owners, ensuring abortion access, investing in clean energy, and increasing education in the trades—resonated. Her platform leaned centrist, which may have helped appeal to Republicans who weren’t sold on Kent’s extreme views. And surely, so did her earnestness as a regular, small business–owning mom. Without coaching or party pressure, she was able to talk about what was meaningful to her and people in her district. In interviews, she speaks candidly and passionately, often interjecting a curse or a quip into a serious remark. She’s shared personal stories during her campaign of her own economic hardships and a previous miscarriage before having her son.
After seeing Gluesenkamp Perez give her stump speech, Love was impressed by her authenticity. “That’s when I was like, if more people can see her do this, she could really win this thing,” Love said. Love worked on the campaign in a small role, helping organize several rallies and field events to harness a swelling of grassroots support. “The first event was unlike anything I’ve seen,” she said. There weren’t many traditional party activists; instead, attendees included first-time volunteers, first-time voters, and people who just wanted to meet Gluesenkamp Perez after reading about her.
Gowen joined the campaign during the summer as one of two staff members, with no prior political experience (Gowen previously owned a prepared foods store in Portland, Oregon).
Other Reed alumni also pitched in for the campaign. David Azrael ’13 assisted with social media; Sandeep Kaushik ’89 was campaign spokesperson. Washington First District Congresswoman Suzan DelBene ’83 has been a “huge supporter,” according to Gluesenkamp Perez. Notably, DelBene was the only member of Congress who endorsed Gluesenkamp Perez before the top-two primary election in summer 2022.
The campaign involved long, tough days. When she won, Gowen said, “We were all exhausted.” But in the face of the damning election predictions, the moment felt monumental to the tiny team. “It was one of the highlights of my life,” said Gowen. “It was a crazy thing that no one thought we were going to do.”
Gluesenkamp Perez was sworn into the 118th Congress on January 7, 2023. Now, six months into Congress, she’s been appointed to the Small Business and Agriculture committees. Having won, she said she doesn’t feel beholden to vote on party lines. “The things that feel small and unimportant to a lot of national players are the things that are really meaningful to everyday people in my district,” she said.
Instead, she wants to focus on serving her constituents—she doesn’t hide from them. She’s been holding town halls over recent months, something her predecessor, Jaime Herrera Beutler, failed to do. Some politicians are wary of hosting in-person meetings after former Arizona Representative Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011; Gluesenkamp Perez likes to remind people that she owns a gun (defense of the Second Amendment is part of her platform). The town halls have been going “shockingly well,” she said.
Gluesenkamp Perez has to balance national priorities with local ones, and some of her bipartisan votes so far have raised eyebrows—or backlash. She has joined as a co-chair of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, and as we were sending this piece to press, she was one of two Democrats to vote in favor of a resolution to block President Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan. (At time of writing, the Senate had passed the bill and President Biden had vetoed it; the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the plan this summer.) Her statement via Twitter felt like a red herring: it demanded dollar-for-dollar investment in trades education before she would support debt forgiveness. The tweet was ratioed (which means it received more negative replies than likes), with replies criticizing her and expressing hope that she gets challenged in the 2024 primary.
I remarked to my editor that the longer we waited to publish the piece, the more time Gluesenkamp Perez had to take important or controversial actions that we would need to address. But of course, this is the point of being a politician—to take a stand—and the challenge of writing an early-career profile. Gluesenkamp Perez didn’t run a typical campaign. She is not your typical congressperson, and she won’t do typical things. She’s still a developing story.
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It seems that Gluesenkamp Perez has never been one to ask for permission, or follow a conventional path. “She definitely gave our parents more gray hair than I did,” said Philip Perez, the congresswoman’s brother. The youngest of four, Gluesenkamp Perez grew up in Houston, Texas. Her father was a pastor in an evangelical chur