BLUE DOGS BARKING — Democrats lost the White House and the Senate last week, and seem poised to lose the House. But the state of Washington bucked trends. It’s the one state in America where Donald Trump came out ever so slightly worse: As of Tuesday, he’d received 0.06 percent less of the vote than he did in 2020. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), meanwhile, ran ahead of Harris in every county in her district by 4 to 7 points. Now she is at the forefront of a handful of Democratic lawmakers ready to provide a blueprint for Democrats eager to right what went wrong. “People like Marie and [Maine Democratic Rep.] Jared Golden are the tip of the spear” to bring back working class voters, said Democratic political consultant Lis Smith, who gave Gluesenkamp Perez informal advice during the campaign. “Part of how you address it is you get … better, more authentic, more credible messengers.” Capturing support in red, rural parts of the country is not a new goal for Democrats. It was a component of former President Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012, and it has been a consistent goal of moderate members of Congress like Gluesenkamp Perez who represent broad swaths of rural terrain. But in 2024, despite efforts to target them, Democrats’ support in rural counties continued to collapse across the country , even in majority Black or Latino rural counties. Thanks to her ability to buck this trend, Gluesenkamp Perez has been swamped with media requests since the Associated Press called her reelection, and some operatives are calling for the party to use her as a model. But recruiting hundreds of candidates who think like ‘MGP,’ as she’s been nicknamed, is not so simple. The Democratic party, which clusters increasingly around urban centers, has a Republican comprehension problem. As far back as 2016, a Pew study showed that Republicans were more likely to have friends from another party than Democrats. Twenty-four percent of Democrats said they had no friends who were from the other party, compared to just 14 percent of Republicans. That leaves Democrats groping in the dark about what drives voters to split tickets, and how to choose candidates who can appeal to them. “A great thing about Marie is that she doesn’t pander to the people in D.C. and New York who don’t have the faintest fucking clue how to win in districts like hers,” said Smith. “Those people have probably never lived or worked in a district that wasn’t a deep blue district.” Gluesenkamp Perez, in fact, shares some key similarities in style with another politician who won her district in the southwest corner of Washington — Donald Trump. For all their substantive differences, both ran on messages geared toward the economic worries of working class Americans and leaned into a reputation for being anti-establishment. Neither pull their punches. They are not perfectly polished. Where her Republican predecessor in Congress was criticized for not holding town halls, MGP showed up to everything. In August 2023, I interviewed her while she practiced throwing an ax for the upcoming Morton Loggers Jubilee, an annual festival in red, rural Lewis County. She was never going to win the sparsely populated county — Trump won 65 percent of the vote there in 2020 and 2024. But MGP improved on her 2022 performance there by nearly 4 percentage points. “It was people who I think a lot of members wouldn’t normally talk to,” Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign director Tim Gowan said, noting her outreach ranged from shellfish growers and timber workers to big business. “That informed all of our messaging, our strategy.” She wears Sambas and shuns makeup, and her sometimes-awkward bluntness gets poked fun of on social media — traits that would make most party operatives look elsewhere. But together it serves to burnish her authenticity and makes her resemble her neighbors, the people who ultimately decide if she returns to Congress. “You do not need to try hard to tell me that she is from Skamania County,” said Jordan Evich — the deputy chief of staff to former GOP Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler, who represented the district from 2011-2023 — with a laugh. “I have met people like her before.” Nowhere was this more clear than in the advertisements her campaign began plastering across the television early in the cycle, which often focused on her auto shop. When she showed up at the Clark County Fair in August, her campaign was running a spot during primetime Olympics coverage about the right of local business owners to repair their own equipment. It’s not a subject that the political class in D.C., New York City or Los Angeles are well-versed in, but it’s a policy that resonates deeply with working class people. In fact, as Gluesenkamp Perez stood chatting with a blacksmith near the fair’s antique tractor display, a man approached with his young son. “I’ve seen your commercials!” he exclaimed. “Sorry there’s so many,” she quipped, smiling apologetically. But he pressed on. “They’re well done, and it’s straight to the point,” he said. “You quickly relay your message and what you stand for.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at nfertig@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @natsfert.
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