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Whispers from Washougal hint how Democrats went wrong in the election
Nov. 9, 2024 at 6:00 am Updated Nov. 9, 2024 at 6:00 am
U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Vancouver, speaks during an
election night watch party at the Hilton in Vancouver. She defeated
Republican candidate Joe Kent in Washington’s 3rd Congressional
District. (Karen Ducey / The Seattle Times)
U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Vancouver, speaks during an
election night watch party at the Hilton in Vancouver. She defeated
Republican candidate Joe Kent in Washington’s 3rd Congressional
District. (Karen Ducey / The Seattle Times)
Danny Westneat By Danny Westneat
Seattle Times columnist
After such a harrowing election, everyone’s got questions. Some spring
from anguish, such as one I keep hearing here in the blue bubble:
“What country am I living in?”
Others are more practical, such as Democrats asking: “Where did we go
wrong?”
Or this one from the former head of the Washington GOP, Caleb Heimlich,
who’s wondering what his party might glean from the local elections:
“Why is Washington the only state in the country that moved left?”
I’ve got answers! Maybe more like observations, which I hope are backed
with enough facts and data to give them some heft.
We start down in Southwest Washington, in Washougal. This is home to
U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat who won her rematch
against MAGA challenger Joe Kent, despite her district voting, once
again, for Donald Trump.
This is where Democrats can maybe start to understand how things went
off track.
Gluesenkamp Perez burst on the scene two years ago by flipping a red
district to blue. An auto shop owner, she did it with a sort of rural
whisperer approach. She talks about restoring shop class to high
schools, for example. She wasn’t shy about calling out her own side for
catering to elites.
“How [bleeped] is it that we don’t respect or listen to people until
they have a college degree?” she said last year.
But Gluesenkamp Perez caught heat from progressives who felt she wasn’t
pure enough. She crossed over and voted with Republicans sometimes. When
she voted against student loan forgiveness, on the grounds it wasn’t
fair to tradespeople, her auto shop got bombarded with negative reviews.
“This place is horrible. They charge interest that compounds daily. Ohh
wait that’s student loans,” one typical review said.
Summed up the lefty news site Slate: “With Democrats Like Marie
Gluesenkamp Pérez, Who Needs Republicans?“
One Democratic congressman said he’d even gotten emails from fellow
Democrats around the country to shun her: “‘You’ve got to get rid of
Marie Pérez,’ ” he reported the requests said.
But the election results show she’s on to a kind of modern working-class
politics that her party desperately needs to understand.
An analysis of voting returns shows Gluesenkamp Perez ran more than 5
percentage points ahead of her own party’s presidential candidate,
Kamala Harris. She amassed about 14,000 more votes in the 3rd District
than Harris did — meaning a lot of people voted for Trump and then
crossed over and backed her.
The redder the county, the more voters crossed over. Those 14,000
crossover votes were more than her total lead.
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She’s now beaten a Trump-endorsed candidate twice in a Trump-friendly
district. The question “where did Democrats go wrong” might be reframed
as “where did Democrats get it right?” With one answer being here in
Southwest Washington.
Rather than try to purge her, national Democrats and progressives could
pilgrimage to Washougal to learn a thing or two. About how to make tents
bigger, not shrink them with purity tests.
On to the nagging question for the local GOP: Why did Washington tilt
further left, when all else seemed to shift right?
The short answer, the data shows, is but five letters long: T-R-U-M-P.
In most presidential elections, a party’s national candidate is expected
to run ahead of the candidates down the ballot, lifting them in a
“coattail” effect. Harris, for example, won about 75,000 more votes
statewide than the Democratic candidate for governor, Bob Ferguson.
But Trump incredibly underperformed all eight GOP candidates running
statewide in Washington — all of whom lost. Trump pulled in 150,000
fewer votes than the GOP’s pick for governor, Dave Reichert. Trump got
fewer votes even than no-name Republicans who had never run for public
office before, for down-ballot positions, including secretary of state.
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GOP lands commissioner candidate Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted to
impeach Trump when she was in Congress, outpolled Trump by a whopping
200,000 votes. Yet she still lost to Democrat Dave Upthegrove.
What an anvil Trump was for Republicans here. This is proof he’s dead
weight for the party locally, even on a night he won the presidency.
Why this phenomenon is more pronounced in Washington than in other
states isn’t known. I suspect it’s because Washington is relatively
well-off, while the demographics that shifted to Trump the most tended
to be lower-income and Hispanic voters.
But if Gluesenkamp Perez can whisper across a divide to Trump voters,
state Republicans might likewise try harder speaking to the rest of the
state in which they live. Dropping the MAGA extremism would be a start.
Finally, to those wondering what country you’re living in: It is
startling that the nation just reelected someone who tried to overturn
the last election. His win means he got away with it. Also, as soon as
it became apparent that Trump was ahead, all talk of election fraud
miraculously ceased. It was a big lie all along, yet here we are.
It’s important to put what just happened in context, though.
Much of the media has been acting like Trump won a historically sweeping
triumph. Trump himself boasted that “America has given us an
unprecedented and powerful mandate.” Though that isn’t true, some
publications came undone with superlatives.
“A stunning victory has crowned Donald Trump the most consequential
American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” hyperventilated The
Economist magazine. “In what was supposed to be a knife-edge election,
he has won a mandate … The world lies at Trump’s feet.”
Please. At least wait to see whether he can pass a bill. (Remember
Obamacare repeal?)
The reality is this was a knife-edge election. Trump’s going to win far
fewer total votes as well as a lower vote percentage than Joe Biden did
against him in 2020. Nobody gushed about that being a landslide. Trump
pretended it didn’t even count.
Take the Midwest battleground states. Biden won Wisconsin, Michigan and
Pennsylvania by a combined total of just 256,000 votes — a squeaker.
Through midday Friday, Trump was winning them by slightly less, 250,000
— about 1.5 percentage points.
After the pokey West Coast states count all their ballots, Trump will
have lodged roughly a 2 percentage point national win. That’s equal to 1
out of every 50 voters changing their minds. It’s half the margin Biden won.
In politics, close doesn’t count with respect to who gets power, so all
this is symbolic. But it matters, because we didn’t just crown a king.
The 49% still gets a say in whatever direction the country takes. It
needn’t be cowed or silent, just as the losing side wasn’t after it
swung slightly the other way the last time.
So if you’re out there angsting about what kind of country you’re living
in, the nonhyperbolic answer is: One still divided. One unsettled, one
still in the middle of a pitched democratic debate.
And one not at anybody’s feet.
Danny Westneat: ***@seattletimes.com; Danny Westneat takes an
opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.