“I think we’re all very tired of clickbait politics, we want people in Congress to work and not become celebrities on Twitter,” Glusenkamp Perez said on MSNBC, in one of her many cable appearances. news she was doing from D.C. that Monday morning when she visited the Capitol for orientation for new members.
Glusenkamp-Perez pulled off an upset (political website FiveThirtyEight gave her a 2 percent chance of winning) despite receiving almost no national aid. Big Democratic outside spending groups largely ignored the race, spending about $300,000, and only in the final days of the race. Just off Interstate 5 in Washington’s 8th Congressional District, the largest national Democratic groups spent nearly $6 million.
Republicans have held the 3rd District seat since 2010, when six-term Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler was first elected. Herrera Beutler was swept out of the primary this year, chastised by Republican voters for voting to impeach Trump over the Jan. 6 attack.
The district is consistently Republican, but not bright red. It spans the fishing and logging towns of the Pacific Coast to the farmlands of Lewis County and Skamania, but is dominated by the suburbs of Vancouver and Portland.
After the loss of Herrera Beutler, Glusenkamp Perez’s camp saw the race transformed.
In a strategic memo, a week after the primary, the campaign noted that in 2020, Biden won 46 percent of the district. The strongest statewide Democrat in 2020, Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler, won 55 percent of the district.
