Politicians at the highest levels usually take a similar tact. Even if these ultracompetitive creatures disagree intensely on issues and burn to win, if locked in close races, superior candidates generally realize that their campaign rivals have some redeeming qualities. They know their opponents appeal to large swaths of voters and plan their campaign strategies accordingly.

That’s not the case in the fight for Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, between freshman Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) and her vanquished 2022 Republican rival, Joe Kent. They have been sniping at each other for more than two years over a pair of campaigns, and it is only intensifying as Election Day 2024 approaches.

They are telegenic, relatively young candidates who stand out from the older white guy genre of many congressional contests. And neither is a career politician — Kent’s losing 2022 congressional bid was his first run. Gluesenkamp Perez had made only one run for public office, losing a race for Skamania County Public Utility District commissioner.

“Here are two nonpoliticians,” said Jim Moore, a political science professor at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, about 34 miles southwest of Vancouver, Washington, the 3rd Congressional District’s biggest city.

“They haven’t built up the politician armor of people saying things, and you just let it roll off your back and deal with it,” Moore said in an interview.

Winning the district is key to both parties’ chances of claiming a House majority. Democrats need to net four seats in the 435-member chamber to gain control. But Gluesenkamp Perez, while the incumbent, is, in a sense, playing political defense. Washington’s 3rd Congressional District is one of only eight held by a Democratic lawmaker but which, in 2020, would have voted for then-President Donald Trump over President Joe Biden. (Eighteen House seats are held by Republicans in districts that would have backed Biden, who bowed out of his reelection bid over the summer so Vice President Kamala Harris could be the Democratic nominee against Trump.)

The sprawling district Gluesenkamp Perez and Kent are fighting over covers Washington’s southwest region, from the Pacific Ocean to the Cascade Mountains about 125 miles inland. It also takes in Vancouver, which has a population of more than 192,000.

It is politically competitive terrain. When the 118th Congress ends on Jan. 3, 2025, the district, and its similarly shaped predecessors through several redistricting processes, will, over the prior 32 years, have been represented by Democrats exactly half that time, 16 years, and Republican House members also for 16 years.

Gluesenkamp Perez’s 2022 win there was perhaps Democrats’ biggest upset of the cycle, in which they blunted the expected “red wave” and gave Republicans only a razor-thin majority. That campaign resulted from Washington’s all-party primary, in which Kent, a former Army Special Forces member and later a CIA field operative, knocked out from the race the district’s 12-year incumbent, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican. Herrera Beutler, in January 2021, voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

That set up the general election fight in which Gluesenkamp Perez, an auto-repair shop co-owner with her husband, beat Kent, 50.14% to 49.31% — a difference of 2,629 votes out of nearly 320,000 cast. At the same time in the 3rd Congressional District, Trump would have beaten Biden under the newly redrawn lines 50.8% to 46.6%. Even while Biden easily won the state of Washington over Trump, about 58%-39%.

The politically competitive nature of the 3rd Congressional District race has made it a backdrop to deep personal animus between the political rivals over the past two years — more so than in other contests in which congressional candidates repeatedly run against each other. It is a feud that played out publicly again in late September, when Kent chided Gluesenkamp Perez for missing a candidates forum in the district. She could not get there due to a House floor vote on the federal budget agreement to keep spending going at current levels through Dec. 20.

“Perez skipped the debate last night in Centralia, but I was happy to answer questions from voters and to hold her accountable for her record,” Kent wrote in a Sept. 27 X post. “Learn more about her votes for inflationary spending, & open borders and against protecting women at http://MarieWatch.com.”

To which the congresswoman responded on her campaign X account, “As I told the hosts in advance, I was flying back from D.C. last night and the forum began before my flight landed. I can’t time travel or teleport to wherever you pop up in public to tell your lies. But I’m glad to hear it went better than your last town hall in Lewis County.”

Her social media post included a link to a March 2, 2022, front-page headline in the Chronicle, a newspaper covering southwest Washington, “White Nationalists Dominate Discussion at Joe Kent Town Hall.”

2024 congressional race redux

Like the 2022 race, Kent has the endorsement of Trump this time. Kent was a vocal election denier about Trump’s 2020 loss to Biden, and he has emerged as a leading critic of U.S. and Western assistance to Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Kent described Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands to claim large parts of Ukrainian territory as “very reasonable.” Kent’s views were pretty much the same after nearly two years of a long-grinding Russia-Ukraine war.

On a podcast hosted by Sean Parnell in January 2024, Kent said, “Look, I don’t want America involved in the actual territorial dispute between Russia and Ukraine. I view that as an issue between two Slavic cousins. Like, they can figure out where those borders go.” 

Later on in the podcast, Kent continued, “[Putin] understands all this, and so like he’s never really had any aspirations to anything but unite the Russian-speaking people. I mean, I’ll let the Russian-speaking people hash that out on their own.”

Kent brings hard-earned experience to his foreign policy views, which critics, starting with Gluesenkamp Perez and Democratic allies, label isolationist. Kent is the widower of Shannon M. Kent, a United States Navy senior chief petty officer and cryptologic technician who was deployed to Syria and killed in the 2019 Manbij bombing. Kent, in the aftermath, became a vocal critic of U.S. military intervention abroad.

Kent, though, has had some political self-inflicted wounds, including a long history of associations and comments that threatened his standing with swing voters.

For instance, in 2022, he hired a campaign consultant who was a member of the Proud Boys, a right-wing nationalist group implicated in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. He also vowed to impeach Biden, supported a national abortion ban, and called for Anthony Fauci, lead White House science adviser during the COVID-19 pandemic, to be charged with murder. In late July this year, Kent suggested during a virtual town hall that Secret Service agents may have been “in on” the recent assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Those positions have resonance on the populist Right but likely limited appeal in a premier swing district. This is why voters were willing to give Gluesenkamp Perez a hard look in her initial congressional bid.

She has blasted Kent’s reticence to support Ukraine over Russia.

“Turns out Joe Kent’s kooky tweets aren’t even original — he’s just taking them straight from a Russian propaganda Telegram channel. Our foreign adversaries don’t deserve a stooge representing them in Congress, but that’s all Joe Kent would be,” Gluesenkamp Perez wrote in a Sept. 18 X post.

Gluesenkamp Perez calls herself a better fit for the district. She grew up in Texas as the daughter of a Mexican immigrant. After attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Gluesenkamp Perez built a house in rural Skamania County with her husband. The pair owned a car repair business across the Columbia River in Portland.

Gluesenkamp Perez, as a candidate in 2022 and during her first nearly two years in the House, presented herself as a political centrist who emphasized her rural and working-class roots. In May, she was among only two House Democrats to vote for Republican-led legislation to overturn Biden’s student debt relief program and nullify the freeze on federal student loan payments and interest.

And on Sept. 18, Gluesenkamp Perez was among four Democrats to back a bill House Republican leadership pushed including language that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, known as the SAVE Act. The proposal lost 202-220, with 14 House Republicans voting against, saying they opposed stopgap spending bills.

“She’s a very good fit for the district. She comes from the rural part of the district, rather than downtown Vancouver,” said John Horvick, senior vice president at public affairs firm DHM Research, in Portland, Oregon. “She can present herself as somebody who honestly represents blue-collar communities. At the same time, she’s hip, and she’s cool.”

She was among the most vocal Democratic elected officials warning Biden, age 81, against seeking a second term. The congresswoman even went further than most after Biden’s desultory June 27 debate performance, saying he would lose to Trump in November.

Negative campaigning

Kent, 44, in his second congressional bid, is seeking to show a more centrist side. He has focused more on public policy issues, such as criticism of the congresswoman’s role in securing $600 million of federal funding to rebuild one of the region’s main arteries, the aging Interstate 5 bridge.

Kent, as the New York Times noted in May, “has branded the reconstruction plan an ‘Antifa superhighway.’ He has claimed that the proposed project, which includes a light rail and tolls, will bring unwanted urban elements from Portland into the car-centric, predominantly white community of Clark County, Washington, effectively serving as ‘an expressway for Portland’s crime & homeless into Vancouver,’ as he wrote on social media.”

Gluesenkamp Perez, 36, said that shows her opponent hasn’t changed.

“The only thing different about Joe Kent in 2024 is the color of his yard signs. They used to be red. Now they’re green. Oh, and Trump hasn’t endorsed him this time. He’s too weird for Trump,” she wrote on X on June 6. (Trump did end up endorsing Kent in late July.)

X is, in fact, a favorite forum for the 3rd Congressional District rivals to spar.

“Marie Perez & the Dems are screaming about abortion, J6 & Russia to divert attention from their Bidenomics & open border. The top Dem priority — print billions more, causing more inflation, for their defense contractor donors while fentanyl & illegals flow into our communities,” Kent wrote on April 8.

Gluesenkamp Perez responded that Kent “wants to … end vote-by-mail … throw out election results he doesn’t like … give rioters who attacked police officers Get Out of Jail Free cards … take away all access to abortion … whine when people talk about his extremely unpopular and dangerous ideas.”

Gluesenkamp Perez frequently stresses on the campaign trail the need for Congress to elect more “normal people” like herself.

“Far-right weirdo Joe Kent is back, and the sequel is worse than the original,” her campaign recently wrote on Instagram.

Kent, for his part, is betting that the district’s Republican lean gives him the edge this year.

“It is a district that leans to the right. Republicans have some structural advantages there, in party ID, and presidential vote history,” said Horvick, the political analyst. However, while “that district will likely vote for Trump again, it’s not a Trumpy district.”

House Democrats, nonetheless, are fighting hard to hold on to the seat since it could help determine which party has the majority in the 119th Congress.

House Republicans are fighting to tie Gluesenkamp Perez to the border crisis and rise of fentanyl, in a sign that the GOP is looking to hit vulnerable Democrats over Harris’s immigration agenda.

In a television advertisement released on Sept. 17, the National Republican Congressional Committee accused Gluesenkamp Perez of ignoring the influx of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border, a major policy concern for voters in the 2024 election.

The video features a clip of the congresswoman saying, “Listen, like, nobody stays awake at night worrying about the southern border.”

“Perez isn’t worried? That’s where the flood of fentanyl is coming from, and it’s killing our kids,” the video states. “But Perez sleeps easy in D.C. while overdoses here skyrocket.”

“Marie Gluesenkamp Perez won’t fix this. She’s too busy denying it,” the video continues.

Whatever the result after Election Day, Nov. 5, in the grudge match between Gluesenkamp Perez and Kent, it seems unlikely there will be a congratulatory phone call between the two-time rivals, even though opposing NFL linebackers usually at least exchange a handshake or fist bump after a hard-fought game.