Two Drinks with . . . Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

Welcome to Two Drinks, the column where The Free Press catches up with a newsmaker, trendsetter, or power broker. This week, Madeleine Kearns sits down with Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the Democratic congresswoman who’s constantly in trouble with the left flank of her party for voting with the GOP on everything from funding ICE to protecting the bottom lines of fishermen. Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez, who is 38 and represents a coastal district in Washington state, talked about bringing up her kid in rural America, why Blue Dogs overperform in elections, and how speaking publicly about her miscarriages made her feel “naked”—and much, much more.

“I am always going to be an underdog,” says Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the Democrat serving Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District. “This seat was drawn to be a Trump district. It is not a purple district. It is the only district Donald Trump won in the last three elections that a Democrat is holding and is running for reelection.”

The 38-year-old, who before running for office owned an auto-repair shop with her husband, Dean, in Portland, Oregon—not far from their Washington home—defied the odds in 2022 when she flipped her seat. She did it again in 2024, defeating Republican Joe Kent for a second time. (“Good hair, bad ideas,” is how she describes her erstwhile opponent.) And this November, she hopes to pull it off a third time in a toss-up against the GOP’s John Braun.

Her success—which she says is rooted in her “respect for people’s reasonableness”—is generally attributed to the fact that she’s a moderate; a co-chair of the Blue Dog Coalition, Gluesenkamp Perez regularly gets in trouble with her party for voting with the GOP, on everything from immigration policy to environmental matters.

Not that she minds. “I think it’s generally bad for democracy when we’re like, ‘There is one way to be a Democrat,’ ” says Gluesenkamp Perez. “I don’t think that’s good for anybody when there’s one way to be anything.”