Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who pulled off the biggest federal election upset of the year when she flipped southwest Washington’s reliably Republican 3rd Congressional District to blue in 2022, is again embroiled in one of the tightest U.S. House races in the country.
But this time, instead of facing off against right-wing firebrand Joe Kent, who’d never won elected office, she’s up against John Braun, a Navy veteran, manufacturing business owner and mainstream Republican who has represented portions of the 3rd District in the state Senate for 14 years.
Numerous analysts of varying political stripes say they are genuinely uncertain who will prevail in November, in part given a recent poll showing them in a dead heat.
Given that Democrats have a real chance to regain control of the U.S. House this fall but Republicans also have a path to retain their narrow edge, national attention and a flood of campaign cash will be trained on the race.
Most election analysts are confident Braun and Gluesenkamp Perez will emerge victorious in next week’s nine-candidate open primary, from which the top two vote-getters will advance to the fall general election.
The third strongest candidate, according to polls, analysts and the money race, is progressive Brent Hennrich, who is aggressively challenging Gluesenkamp Perez from the left, accusing her of being a Democrat in name only.
The fact that Gluesenkamp Perez, who co-owns and co-operated an auto repair shop with her husband, twice beat Kent to represent the sprawling, significantly rural district is notable because President Donald Trump won it decisively in each of his three races. That means thousands of its residents voted for the 70-something hardline Republican billionaire in 2020 and 2024 — yet also inked their ballots for the 30-something pro-labor, pro-choice Democrat.
That both explains and is explained by her status as one of the most centrist members of Congress and one who helped revive the so-called Blue Dog Caucus, composed of the House’s most conservative and moderate Democrats. As a lawmaker, she’s challenged party orthodoxy and voted more often with Republicans last year than all but one other House Democrat. That, in turn, has generated notable ire from voters in the newly resurgent far-left Democratic flank, both nationally and inside the 3rd District.
Braun says he’s moderately confident he can return the seat to Republican control. His record in the state Senate has been consistently conservative and pragmatic, he says, a match for the district. He has experience shaping budgets and can point to practical examples, such as voting to restrict state financial aid to just five years of college, not six, that “bend the cost curve” to limit government spending.
The latest publicly released poll, from early July, showed him neck and neck with Gluesenkamp Perez. He is campaigning nonstop and has the support of a large network of volunteers knocking on doors and making phone calls, he says. And the super PAC run by U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has committed to pumping millions into the race, something that hasn’t happened in the 3rd District since 2018.
Still, Braun concedes the race will be tight and “we’re going to have to run right until the finish line if we’re going to win this.”
In 2022, Gluensenkamp Perez secured just 50.1% of the vote, squeaking past Kent by just 2,629 votes. Once in office, she defeated him by a significantly wider margin in 2024.
This year, she said, she plans to campaign hard on two points. Even while in the minority in Congress, she’s brought home tangible wins for her district, including $2 billion in federal funding and important design concessions for a new Interstate 5 bridge. And she will play up the fact that Braun welcomed an endorsement from Trump – whose popularity has fallen significantly in the 3rd District since he won 50% of the vote in 2024.
“John Braun’s candidacy is really predicated on an endorsement from Trump, and I think that’s inconsistent with the independence (3rd District residents) want to see,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Braun declined to answer a question about his ties to Trump. In a campaign appearance last week, he praised policies and developments brought about by the Trump administration but never mentioned Trump by name.
Braun’s campaign manager, Max Lavey, said the senator “has certainly talked about President Trump many times in the past.” Braun’s not naming the president that evening “wasn’t intentional,” Lavey said.
Analysts, including at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, say Braun and other Republicans face stiff headwinds in this year’s midterm election, in part because midterms are normally tough for the party in power – but also because Republicans aren’t perceived as having tackled voters’ sky high concerns about affordability. Trump has only a 39% approval rating in the district, according to a recent poll conducted by Emerson College, and the Iran war and its impact on gas prices and other related costs pose significant drags on Republicans’ popularity, they say.
“Events in Iran make it a little more challenging,” Braun told a crowd of about 30, mostly men over age 60, who turned out for a meet and greet at a Brush Prairie sports bar last week.
But Alex Hays, a longtime Washington state Republican campaign consultant, makes a credible case that Kent was uniquely unpopular with 3rd District Republican voters – and that Braun is all but certain to give the incumbent a far stiffer challenge.
A Democratic outlier
Gluesenkamp Perez, 38, has broken norms as a candidate for Congress and is by nearly every measure an outlier among Democrats. Even her biography is unconventional.
She grew up in Texas as the daughter of a Mexican immigrant pastor of an evangelical church. She went on to attend Portland’s Reed College, where students skew highly intellectual, secular and left-wing.
Gluesenkamp Perez now defies those characteristics, styling herself as an anti-academic, pro-trades mom who got her hands dirty in her family’s auto shop, shuns the leftist orthodoxy of her party and attends regular congressional Bible study sessions that are otherwise exclusively attended by Republicans. She, her husband and their 4-year-old son live in rural Skamania County in a home the couple built themselves.
She frequently highlights her time spent with tugboat operators, electric linemen, cardboard box makers, family farmers, lumberjacks and the like. She says the issues that animate her aren’t partisan but practical: It’s hard to find a slot in daycare, it’s expensive to fill a prescription, shop classes should start in middle school and get more respect. One of her top priorities, on which she says she is making progress in the face of big moneyed opposition, is the so-called right to repair – whether that means getting access to the parts and instructions to fix your own tractor, repair your iPhone, restore functionality to military equipment or install a simple replacement part on your car.
“As more and more people have newer cars, they’re like, ‘Holy cow, replacing the headlight was $1,200.’ It’s eating away the middle class,” she said in an interview after wrapping up her appearance in last weekend’s Camas Days Grand Parade.
District voters Kristine Doiel, her mom and her sister were among the throng crowding sidewalks at the parade Saturday. When Gluesenkamp Perez and her sign-bearing supporters walked past, the trio erupted in intense applause.
“We are die-hard Democrats,” Doiel explained. That Glusenkamp Perez is a moderate who frequently votes with Republicans, she said, “I am OK with that. I am wishing we were all more centrist.”
Navy vet, business owner, lawmaker
Braun, 59, leans heavily on his biography in making the case 3rd District voters should send him to Congress.
He’s a Navy vet who served as a submarine captain who inherited his family manufacturing business with about 25 employees and grew it to nearly 350 workers. He’s also a longtime leader in the Washington Senate who helped balance budgets and lowered property taxes for most homeowners in 2017 by instituting a sales tax on internet purchases to bolster schools.
“The most important thing about me: married to my wife, Marlo, for 37 years. We have four children, all grown up now,” he told the crowd gathered for pizza and campaign conversation at a Brush Prairie sports bar last week.
Braun represents a stark contrast to Kent, a former Green Beret who went all-in on Trump, seemed to align himself with some white nationalists and alienated some Republicans with his harsh attacks on Jaime Herrera Beutler, the Republican who represented the 3rd District for more than a decade, said Hays, the Republican consultant.
Braun speaks softly and gently couches some policy positions counter to some in his party. When one voter at the Brush Prairie gathering declared non-citizens should not be issued driver licenses because it could allow them to vote illegally, as happened with hundreds of people in New Jersey, Braun pushed back – in the nicest possible way.
“In a pure world, I think you make a strong argument,” he said in a kind tone of voice. “But if folks are here in a legal status … you want them to be able to work. You want them to be able to take care of themselves. You don’t want them to be further reliant on public services. The driver license allows them to do that. So that would be the argument for (it), even from a conservative standpoint.”
Over the years, Braun has led his caucus toward the center, observers say. Low and predictable taxes are a priority for him, he says. He’s helping fight a new state income tax on millionaires the Legislature approved over his opposition this spring but that voters could undo this fall. He lives on a farm near Centralia and reports making more than $1 million a year from his family company that manufactures ambulances and other first responder equipment.
“I don’t believe government creates jobs. I don’t believe government creates economic success,” he said. “What government can do is help set the conditions – a stable regulatory environment, stable tax environment – that allow individuals to plan for and be successful long term.”
At the event in Brush Prairie last week, 3rd District voter Bill Berman of Ridgefield expressed strong support for the Republican office holder. Berman said he agreed with both leading candidates that the Vancouver area badly needs a new I-5 bridge to reduce congestion. But he said he trusts only Braun to champion a bridge that has low or no tolls and prioritizes Clark County residents – not residents of Portland, where Gluesenkamp Perez’s husband runs their auto repair business.
Third candidate
Hennrich is running as a progressive eager to tax the rich to help working class people. His No. 1 policy priority is to move the nation toward a single-payer healthcare system. He’d begin, he says, by expanding the pool of people covered by Medicaid, improving its payments to providers to expand access to care and making Medicare more affordable for seniors.
He doesn’t mince words, calling national Republicans fascists, Braun a millionaire worried about protecting himself from Washington’s new tax on income over a million dollars a year and Gluesenkamp Perez a person with “no moral code” because she’s voted “yes” on bills into which Republicans inserted provisions that she had pledged to oppose along with legislation she strongly championed.
But he had raised only $259,000 as of June 30, according to federal election filings. Gluesenkamp Perez, by contrast, had raised $6.2 million, more than three times the $2 million Braun had collected, records show.
And both Gluesenkamp Perez and Braun can count on millions more in so-called independent expenditures flowing in, primarily from Democratic and Republican party and leadership PACs. In 2024, such spending reached nearly $19 million, with a slight majority of it spent attacking Kent.
This year, outside money lavished on largely negative TV, cable and online ads will likely surpass the previous mark, given that there are fewer genuinely purple districts across the country and national Republicans’ greater hopes for Braun than Kent.
Voters already have their mail ballots in hand and have until Aug. 4 to turn them in at ballot boxes or get them postmarked for return by mail.
Pocketbook issues
Braun is campaigning on limiting government spending, keeping U.S. borders secure and strengthening requirements that voters prove they are citizens. He says he favors a neutral, market-based approach to energy sources, rather than one that provides financial incentives for green energy options.
He says he wants a strong military and tax policies that favor job creation.
Gluesenkamp Perez says she will continue her work to give Americans the right to repair their equipment, to ban members of Congress from selling stocks and to direct more funding and policies to favor training and employment in the trades. She also says she’ll continue to push to limit lawmakers’ ability to stay in office while cognitively impaired or to depart for lucrative lobbying jobs.
She’s worked to lower housing costs, saying state and local rules have made it slow and expensive to build. A provision she introduced into the federal housing bill that became law this month grants extra funding to localities that speed permitting and increase the housing supply.
Who will win?
Local progressive Democrats’ anger with Gluesenkamp Perez, 3rd District voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump, and the expected flood of outside spending for and against Braun and Gluesenkamp Perez all make predicting the outcome of this race a fool’s errand, multiple analysts said.
As the editor at Cook Political Report who specializes in U.S. House races, Erin Covey has given a lot of thought to the race, one of just 18 out of 435 House races nationwide and just five in the West that her election expert site rates a true “toss-up.”
The most recent poll, commissioned by the Northwest Progressive Institute and conducted by Emerson College from July 8 to July 10, found that 26% of voters who plan to take part in next week’s primary said they would vote for Braun and 25% said they would pick Gluesenkamp Perez. That put them at a statistical tie, given the poll’s 4.4 percentage point margin of error. An additional 11% said they would choose Hennrich, the progressive, while 26% said they were undecided.
Looking ahead to November, when asked to choose between Braun and Gluesenkamp Perez, 43% said they would vote for him and 42% for her, with 16% undecided.
Hays, the longtime Republican consultant, calls the deep uncertainty about the outcome “a good sign for Braun,” given that he is challenging a two-term incumbent.
He said he thinks the 3rd District is home to a subset of conservative voters who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump in 2024 and also sided with Glusenkamp Perez over Kent. He predicts those voters will gladly vote for Braun, given his more moderate positions and constructive temperament. “He is a breath of fresh air,” Hays said.
And he expects an absolute flood of national Republican spending on Braun’s behalf. “Nationwide, this is the only seat that I am aware of where Republicans have any (credible claim) that they’re ahead in terms of a swing district to take away from a Democrat,” he said.
That said, Gluesenkamp Perez could once again come out ahead, he said.
Covey said Gluesenkamp Perez faces a fundamentally new challenge this year, compared to 2024, in that “the Democratic base has moved left … There’s a lot more frustration with Democratic Party leadership for not providing, in the minds of their voters, enough resistance to the Trump administration. And as one of the most moderate members of the caucus, she is an easy target in that way.”
But, while some of Gluesenkamp Perez’s votes with House Republicans “are very unpopular” with Democrats in the 3rd Congressional District, Covey said, “a lot of them make sense in the context of her district.”
Most of the voters who told the poll takers they are undecided about the race are or lean Democratic, said Andrew Villeneuve, founder of the Northwest Progressive Institute, which commissioned the poll.
Democrats who are frustrated with Gluesenkamp Perez’ moderate or pro-Republican stances could sit out the race in November, Covey said. But, she said, they are more likely to “hold their nose” and vote for her in the end, “given the stakes of this election” and “to make sure that they have a Democratic majority in the House.”
Hays agrees.
Villeneuve, who correctly predicted in 2022 that Gluesenkamp Perez could flip the seat when almost no one else foresaw it, says he thinks odds are in her favor again this year – primarily because Braun’s showing in the July poll is virtually identical to Kent’s in the institute’s June 2024 poll. That one found 46% of voters planned to vote for Kent while 45% indicated they would choose Gluesenkamp Perez.
This year “while Republicans have a candidate who looks better on paper, the electoral dynamics have not improved in their favor,” Villeneuve wrote in his analysis of poll results. He chalked that up to Trump’s performance in his second term.
The poll found, for instance, that 62% of 3rd District voters said Trump administration policies have raised prices, while just 25% said they had lowered prices and 13% were unsure.
Given Republicans’ strong headwinds in this midterm and the growth in population in Clark County, a Gluesenkamp Perez stronghold, her path to a narrow victory appears possible, Villeneuve said.
“She just needs to mend the fences and get people who already share her values for the most part, her ideas, her principles, even if they think that she’s let them down,” he said.
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