Late last year, Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a first-term Democrat from a rural district in Washington State, began receiving a deluge of alarmed texts from her friends. Before she was elected to Congress, in 2022, Gluesenkamp Perez ran an auto-repair shop with her husband; her professional and personal acquaintances still largely consist of people who work in the trades — construction, carpentry, woodworking. Now a number of those friends were venting about, of all things, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The C.P.S.C. had recently proposed a rule effectively requiring that all new table saws sold in the United States come equipped with a high-tech safety feature that stops and retracts the saw’s spinning blade within milliseconds of its making contact with flesh. The finger-saving technology has been likened to airbags in cars — a straightforward but ingenious safety solution — but many of Gluesenkamp Perez’s friends didn’t see it that way. They were worried that a government mandate would increase the cost of a new table saw by hundreds of dollars, while also giving SawStop, the company that developed the technology, an effective monopoly.
What may seem like a minor regulatory hiccup is to Gluesenkamp Perez emblematic of the disconnect between government and the governed that she has dedicated her short time in office to addressing. Too often, she believes, policymakers are not only disrespectful to people who work with their hands, but also ignorant of the reality of their day-to-day lives. “If the commission had had somebody who has worked in construction in the body, they would know that if you raise the cost of a table saw by $400, people are just going to put a circ saw on a sheet of plywood — and more people are going to lose their fingers,” she says. In April, she introduced legislation that would prohibit the commission from implementing the rule until five years after SawStop’s patent expires. (SawStop’s chief executive, Matt Howard, said that the company has promised not to enforce its patent once the rule is implemented.)
Sworn into Congress at age 34, with no previous experience as an elected official, Gluesenkamp Perez operates very differently from most of her fellow politicians. Interviewing prospective staff members, she’s as likely to ask them about what kind of car they own as about what kind of political experience they have. She hired her legislative director, in part, because the woman drove a Toyota Camry with 200,000 miles on it. “That says a lot,” Gluesenkamp Perez explains. But what really sets her apart is the way she thinks about the federal government itself — which she believes is woefully out of touch with the needs of working-class Americans.
Earlier this year, at a private dinner for Democratic representatives with Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Gluesenkamp Perez asked one question: “How many of your employees at the F.T.C. don’t have a college degree?” Khan couldn’t produce a number. Gluesenkamp Perez suspected that was because the answer is zero. (Through a spokesman, the F.T.C. said the actual figure is 8 percent.) To Gluesenkamp Perez, this served as further evidence of an overly academic, wonky approach to governance that produces bad, alienating policy. “I feel like in D.C., people have this idea that ‘equity’ is translating the lawyerly gobbledygook on government websites into Spanish,” she says. “That is not equity. Equity is being able to navigate the website with an eighth-grade reading level” — in English — “and without having to hire a compliance firm.”
When I met with Gluesenkamp Perez in her House office, it was the day after she introduced the table-saw legislation. She was still angry. Indeed, Gluesenkamp Perez was angry about a lot of things — that college graduates were getting their student loans forgiven but kindergartners in her district were stuck in classrooms without modern air-conditioning; that auto shops like hers could no longer source replacement parts from American manufacturers; that there was “a slow march toward everything being disposable, and not repairable.” Worst of all, she believed that these problems were largely attributable to her fellow Democrats, who, she said, “don’t respect people that work for a living.”
Gluesenkamp Perez has inserted herself into a debate that is convulsing the Democratic Party. Today the greatest fault line in American politics is not race, gender or geography — it is educational attainment. In 1960, John F. Kennedy won 52 percent of voters with only high-school diplomas, but lost college-educated voters with only 39 percent. By the time Joe Biden ran for president 60 years later, that trend had reversed: Biden won 56 percent of voters with college degrees, and lost voters with only high-school educations with just 41 percent. “There’s a point at which that inversion becomes so great that Democrats can no longer win national majorities,” says Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a center-left policy institute. (In 2020, Americans without college degrees made up three out of five voters.) “So that means that Democrats as a whole need to be constantly on the lookout for people who can break the faculty-lounge stranglehold.”
Democrats have been working through the stages of grief about their loss of working-class voters for the past two decades. When George W. Bush was in the White House and Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas” sat on every Georgetown bookshelf, the Democrats were in denial, complaining that right-wing Svengalis had hoodwinked the working class into voting against their own interests by plying them with contrived cultural grievances. Next came anger, the purest form of which was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and her “basket of deplorables” label for Donald Trump supporters. After Clinton’s defeat came Democrats’ bargaining phase, as they tried to accommodate the rise of Senator Bernie Sanders and the belief that he, and politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, signified a latent interest in socialism among working-class voters. But in trying to defang Sanders and his fellow insurgents, the Democratic establishment tended to adopt only the most performative socially liberal policies while rejecting ones that might actually threaten or change the neoliberal economic regime. In the process, Democrats seem to have only alienated working-class voters even more, and not just white ones. Black and Latino working-class voters are beginning to move to the Republican Party as well.
Which has now brought us to the current phase: depression. Democrats, despondent about their prospects, seem open to accepting a new approach to winning back the working class. And Gluesenkamp Perez offers one compelling vision for how to do it — if she can stay in Congress long enough to realize it.
It’s more than a little amusing that the person offering this vision is a graduate of Reed College, the famously liberal liberal-arts school in Portland, Ore. Gluesenkamp Perez went to college as an act of rebellion against her Mexican immigrant father and white mother, who raised her in an evangelical household outside Houston. She initially embraced Reed’s crunchy ethos, running the campus bike co-op. But in her senior year she began dating a mobile mechanic, Dean Gluesenkamp, who volunteered at the co-op but was not a Reed student, and noticed a new side of her supposedly inclusive college. “Boys at Reed would say rude [expletive] about him, like he wasn’t good enough to be there,” she says, “and that was very alienating.”
After finishing school in 2012, she and Dean married and opened their own auto shop in Portland, Dean’s Car Care, which developed a reputation for doing work on older cars; the Delica, a model of Mitsubishi minivan beloved by car-camping hipsters, became one of their specialties. They lived in a school bus that Gluesenkamp Perez bought off Craigslist, vagabonding around Portland until they found a rural piece of land on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, where they built a house for themselves and, eventually, their son.
In 2022, sensing an opportunity, Gluesenkamp Perez decided to run for Congress. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who had represented Washington’s Third Congressional District for six terms and was one of only 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, had drawn a tough primary challenge from Joe Kent, a far-right former Green Beret who had Trump’s endorsement. The district, which includes Portland’s northern suburbs and exurbs but is more than 7,000 square miles and largely rural, was considered solidly Republican; Trump won it by seven points in 2016 and by four points in 2020. But Gluesenkamp Perez thought she would have a shot, as long as she could run against Kent, who ended up beating Herrera Beutler by fewer than a thousand votes.
Like most Democrats in that year’s midterms, Gluesenkamp Perez sought to capitalize on the backlash to the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, often telling the story of having a miscarriage and walking through a gantlet of protesters outside a Planned Parenthood to receive urgent care. Unlike most Democrats, she pledged not to vote for Nancy Pelosi to be Speaker of the House, and spoke openly about the guns she owns.
What made Gluesenkamp Perez truly different, though, were the other issues she raised. While her opponent asserted that the 2020 election was stolen and that Dr. Anthony Fauci belonged in prison, she focused on the concerns of the community she knew, like catalytic-converter theft and supply-chain problems. Her biggest issue was pushing for “right to repair” laws, which mandate that consumers have access to repair tools for everything from their smartphones and home medical devices to their cars and tractors. “We’re more and more surrounded by these black boxes that we have no influence over,” she said. “I think it’s the American ethos that we know how to fix [expletive].”
On the day before the election, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast gave Gluesenkamp Perez a 2 percent chance of winning. She ended up beating Kemp by about 2,600 votes. “Kent’s extremism opened the door, and Marie was a person who could walk through and flip that seat,” says Aaron Ostrom, the executive director of the progressive advocacy group Fuse Washington, which supported Gluesenkamp Perez. One Democratic pollster, Cornell Belcher, called it the biggest upset of the 2022 midterms.
When Gluesenkamp Perez arrived on Capitol Hill, she tried to find commonalities with her new colleagues. She didn’t have much success. “I’m like: ‘Oh, your bio says you’re a small-business owner. What’s your business?’” she told Politico at the time. “They’re like, ‘Oh, we have a family real estate brokerage firm.’” One of the few friendships she did strike up was with Jared Golden, a third-term Democratic representative from Maine. Golden was first elected in 2018 — part of the anti-Trump wave in which 31 Democrats won in districts that Trump carried just two years earlier. But by 2023, Golden was one of only five Democrats still in Congress who represented Trump districts. He had a little more company in the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, but just barely. At its peak in 2010, the Blue Dogs had 54 members, but after the 2022 elections, only 14 remained. Then half of them left in a dispute over the group’s direction. With the coalition having dwindled to seven members, Golden was asked to lead it.
In his short time in Congress, Golden, a millennial Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, had established himself as one of its most independent-minded members. Representing Maine’s almost entirely rural Second Congressional District, he was one of only four Democrats who deviated from the party during the vote on Trump’s first impeachment (two of them subsequently became Republicans) and the only Democrat to vote against President Biden’s $1.9 trillion Build Back Better Act (over a tax break for the wealthy); at the same time, he voted for a $15-an-hour minimum wage and Biden’s $700 billion Inflation Reduction Act. “The Republican Party spends millions of dollars telling people I’m a progressive,” Golden told me. “The Progressive Caucus spends time telling people I’m a conservative. A lot of people, especially the media, like to call me a moderate. I would say I’m none of these things and I’m all of these things. And my constituents are too.”
For his first two terms, Golden steered clear of Capitol Hill reporters and had few allies in Washington. But at the start of his third term, he says he experienced a change of heart. “Eventually, if you’re going to be here and you feel like the party is moving in the wrong direction,” he says, “then at some point you just have to say I’m going to try and make it and change it.” As the head of the Blue Dogs, he recruited Gluesenkamp Perez and Mary Peltola, who represents Alaska’s lone House district (which, like Golden’s and Gluesenkamp Perez’s, was carried by Trump), to be his co-chairs.
Stylistically, the group’s three new co-chairs couldn’t have been more different from the Blue Dogs’ original members, who were mostly older white men from the South. The photo the Blue Dogs released announcing its new leadership — Golden in a plaid short-sleeve shirt revealing his tattoos, Gluesenkamp Perez sporting bangs, jeans and a denim shirt and Peltola wearing a riotous floral blouse — was jokingly referred to by some of their staff members as “the album cover.”
The differences were substantive, as well. The old Blue Dogs had come to be seen as the most conservative and big-business-friendly wing of the party. Gluesenkamp Perez and Golden wanted to drag the Blue Dogs into the Democratic Party’s modern era, refashioning them as a more populist group — one that pushes for a production economy rather than a financialized one, and one willing to take on big government and big business.
Most important, the new Blue Dogs wanted to make it possible for more people like themselves (“normal people,” Gluesenkamp Perez calls them), from more districts like theirs, to get elected to Congress. “For so long it’s been this narrative of to be a good candidate or a good representative, you should be a straight white male, no kids, J.D. and a trust fund,” Gluesenkamp Perez says. The twin realities of partisan gerrymandering and political polarization mean there aren’t too many places where the Blue Dogs think they can pick up seats. But the coalition’s chairs believe that in a handful of races, the combination of a red-but-not-too-red district and an extremist Republican candidate creates an opportunity for the right kind of Democrat. This cycle, the Blue Dogs have so far endorsed six candidates.
The most intriguing is Rebecca Cooke, who’s running to unseat the Republican firebrand Derrick Van Orden in a rural Wisconsin district. Cooke, age 36, operates a small hospitality business and works as a waitress. On the campaign trail, she is attacking Van Orden on abortion, Jan. 6 and a well-reported incident last year in which he cursed out a group of teenage Senate pages in the Capitol; she touts her parents’ dairy farm and her own employment history as crucial touchstones. “You don’t see a lot of people my age or with my type of background running for Congress,” she says. “And it’s because we’re all busy working.”
Gluesenkamp Perez sees a lot of herself in Cooke, and the two have become friends. But Cooke’s backstory also resembles that of another young Democratic congresswoman: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez’s working-class bona fides would seem to be even stronger than Gluesenkamp Perez’s; after all, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t own the restaurant where she worked as a waitress and bartender.
But when I asked Gluesenkamp Perez if she thought Ocasio-Cortez possessed the type of working-class perspective that she contends Congress is so sorely lacking, she demurred. “It’s not just your personal experience,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “It’s who you view as your constituency. Like, who are you there for? Are you there working for ideas? Or are you there working for people?” Because Ocasio-Cortez represents such a solidly blue district — where Democratic presidential candidates regularly receive 70 percent or more of the vote — Gluesenkamp Perez believes that Ocasio-Cortez is working for the former. “If you’re working for ideas, you are much more vulnerable to sort of activist capture than if you have the nuance of individual people,” she continued. “And people that work for a living are very diverse, and most of them are not socialists.”
After her upset victory two years ago, Gluesenkamp Perez was celebrated not just by moderate Democrats but even progressives. A picture of her wearing denim coveralls embroidered with the Dean’s Car Care logo — two overlapping red lug nuts made to look like a rose — led some to believe that she was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose symbol is a red rose; in fact, the shop’s logo is a play on Portland’s nickname, Rose City. “Some people thought I’d be like a working-class pet and just like a useful mascot, like I was an undercover A.O.C.,” she says. “But that’s not who I am. Some people are like, ‘She doesn’t really think that, does she?’ And I’m like, ‘I do actually think that.’”
Gluesenkamp Perez has voted in favor of Republican bills that sought to prohibit the federal government from banning gas stoves, reverse the District of Columbia’s elimination of mandatory-minimum-sentencing requirements and condemn the use of elementary schools as shelters for undocumented immigrants. She was also one of only four Democrats to vote for the House’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which contained amendments that limited gender-affirming care for transgender troops and rescinded the Pentagon’s program for reimbursing service members who must travel to obtain reproductive health care. In each instance, she cast these votes secure in the knowledge that the Democratic-led Senate would not let them become law. Her votes were essentially defensive — meant to deprive Republicans of an easy line of attack against her back in her district, and not a way to wage culture war herself. “If I’m talking about culture-war issues, I’m not relevant; I’m not doing my job,” she said a few months into her term. “It’s not the things that make people’s lives better.”
The vote that has defined her first term, and brought her the largest amount of abuse from Democrats, was one last year against a Biden-administration priority: student-debt relief. She and Golden were the only two House Democrats to vote for legislation repealing Biden’s $400 billion loan-forgiveness plan. For one, Gluesenkamp Perez didn’t believe that Biden’s plan benefited her constituents, nearly three-quarters of whom don’t have bachelor’s degrees. “When you ranked all the states that would have benefited, Washington, D.C., was first, and Washington State was 46th,” she told me. If Biden’s debt-forgiveness plan had included investments in technical education, she might have supported it. But it didn’t. “This was not a hard decision for me,” she said.
The reaction to her vote was fierce. Slate, which shortly after her victory praised her as “a darling of the Democratic Party,” now ran an article headlined “With Democrats Like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Who Needs Republicans?” Old Reed classmates besieged her with angry texts. And progressive activists bombarded Dean’s Car Care with negative online reviews. “This place is horrible,” one wrote on Yelp. “They charge interest that compounds daily. Ohh wait, that’s student loans.”
But some other progressives, even those who disagreed with Gluesenkamp Perez, saw a consistency in her position. “It wasn’t that some powerful people or powerful interests were the ones who persuaded her and she had to move to that position,” says Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’s chief political adviser. “Or that the Republicans had a very good argument and she needed to make sure that she works with Republicans, which used to be the classic arguments of a centrist. It was on the level, because she had a working-class argument for why she was doing this.”
The problem for Gluesenkamp Perez is that, so far, her working-class agenda hasn’t resulted in much legislative action. The signature bills she has introduced or supported — table saws, right to repair, one to expand Pell grants to cover skills training at community colleges — are stuck in legislative purgatory. When I pressed her on what she was doing substantively — and not just rhetorically — to, as she puts it, “get the voice of normal people at the table,” she became defensive. “We are super-thorough and kind of traditional in how we draft bills — meeting with stakeholders, doing outreach,” she said. “It is the priorities and ideas that are untraditional and different. That is what makes things take more time. I’m not running a Spirit Halloween store over here.”
Gluesenkamp Perez’s biggest problem at the moment is Joe Kent, who is running again. This time, of course, Trump will also be on the ballot, which means Gluesenkamp Perez will need a good number of ticket-splitting voters to stay in office. (Her first TV ad, released in late June, stressed her differences with Biden on border policy.) One rainy Saturday in May, she was in Longview, Wash., a timber town along the Columbia River, to rally about two dozen locals to her cause. Standing at the front of an old banquet hall, she implored them to think of the larger implications of the race and what their votes would say about them and their community. “I’m trying to get the political machine to understand that rural people aren’t going to put up with Joe Kent’s [expletive],” she said. “People think that we’re just ignorant, that we are small-minded, that we are uneducated in rural communities. And we know that’s [expletive].”
And, she went on, the implications of her re-election would be felt beyond southern Washington. “The reason that I am on the top of the R.N.C.’s hit list is not because of my bangs,” she said. “It’s because if Democrats figure out how to hold and represent seats where people work for a living in rural communities and in small towns, places like here, we will break the map on what it means to have a governing majority.” They had already done it once, she reminded them. “All of the eggheads and all of the economists and all of the statisticians said we couldn’t do what we did,” she told them. “But you all showed up, and you believed it. Nobody saved us but us.”
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