Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: A Democrat Urban Progressives Need to Come to Terms With

To listen to the author in conversation with Gluesenkamp Perez, go to Blue City Blues, S1, episode 19: “Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on What Urbanites Get Wrong about Rural America”

The Democratic Party is not in a good place. A Wall Street Journal poll that dropped a few days ago shows the party’s favorability is at its lowest level in 35 years, with only 33 percent of voters holding a favorable view of the party. A supermajority – 63 percent – disapprove. Even more alarmingly, it shows that even though Trump’s chaos, cruelty and ideological excesses have left him underwater with the public on a wide range of issues, including on the economy, inflation and tariffs, on eight of the 10 issues tested voters still trust Republicans as much or more than they do Democrats, including on the economy, inflation, immigration, and even tariffs(!).

Assessing these results, prominent Democratic pollster John Anzalone (who conducted the poll along with Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio), stated: ““Until [Democrats] reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.” Receiving less attention, but perhaps even more alarming, last week Emerson College Polling released results showing Vice President J.D. Vance (narrowly) leading potential ’28 Democratic nominees Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (each by three points), and Pete Buttigieg (by one) in hypothetical head-to-head matchups.

The inescapable conclusion is that the Democratic party’s brand is seriously tainted, particularly with culturally normie and non-college educated voters – the sort of voters who tend to decide American presidential elections. The question is, why? One answer – one I’ve been highlighting for a while now – is that the cultural and political gulf between educated urban progressives and rural and blue collar Americans has accelerated in recent decades past a tipping point. The downstream negative consequences for the Democratic Party from that divergence are profound. The party has been left uncompetitive in huge swathes of the country where the density of college graduates is low.

While urban progressives still claim to speak for the working class, they seem increasingly incapable of talking to them. As Obama political strategist David Axelrod has observed, Democratic leaders often interact with working class communities like “anthropologists.” He adds, “You can’t approach working people like missionaries and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us.’”

But one Democrat demonstrating a pathway for Dems to reconnect with blue collar voters is Blue Dog Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of the 3rd Congressional District in Southwest Washington. I remain a big Marie fan after consulting on her campaign in 2022, when she pulled off that congressional election cycle’s most stunning upset by defeating MAGA extremist Joe Kent in a race where national Democrats wrote her off and prediction models gave her a two percent chance of prevailing.

The magnitude of Marie’s achievement in carrying that district (twice now) is enormous. Outside the blue urban enclave of Vancouver, WA, the 3rd CD remains largely red-leaning Timber Country: it voted for Trump in all three recent presidential elections, and no other Democrat had carried it in any race, federal or statewide, in 15 years. It is one of the epicenters of the class, cultural and demographic earthquake that threatens to make the Democratic Party a minority party in the United States for the foreseeable future.

So David Hyde and I invited Marie onto Blue City Blues to talk with her about the growing urban/rural chasm. In our conversation, Marie, who (like us) attended Reed College as an undergrad but who went on to own an auto repair and machine shop with her husband before her election to Congress, brought a thoughtful and unique perspective on the nature of growing hyper-partisanship, and how it is distorting our politics and leaving many voters feeling left behind. We explored what she learned from her experience running for the county commission in deeply rural, overwhelmingly Trumpy Skamania County in 2016, a race she lost, but one where she listened intently to the anger and resentment of her fellow rural voters who felt ignored by urban elites.

We also discussed how Marie sees the blowback from progressive Democrats in blue urban bastions like Seattle or Portland who expect her to align with their positions on every issue, and about her efforts to revive and reinvent the moderate Blue Dog Coalition as the voice of blue collar voters within the Democratic Party. And we talked about her open avowals fo her religious faith, and the tensions that creates for her in a party increasingly dominated by secular, cosmopolitan progressives.

My own assessment is that Marie has been successful where other Democrats have fallen short by combining three things: a hyper-local focus on Southwest Washington issues (a VA clinic in Lewis County, funding a replacement bridge across the Columbia River) and constituent needs, a disciplined commitment to anti-partisanship (she repeatedly refused to answer media questions if she was voting for Kamala Harris), and an authentic lunchpail populism (centered on off-the-radar-screen issues like right-to–repair and costly table saw safety mandates) that has her giving side-eye to the elitist concerns of both parties. And that’s an approach that could work in a lot of currently red districts around the country where blue collar, non-college educated, less affluent voters predominate.

I really think Marie is on to something important, politically. If they actually mean what they say about reconnecting with the working class, educated urban Democrats ought to be listening to her closely rather than – as is too often the case – denouncing her loudly. Listen for yourself to see if you agree.

Blue City Blues, S1, episode 19: “Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on What Urbanites Get Wrong about Rural America”