VANCOUVER, Wash. — Democratic Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is expected to hold her seat in Washington's 3rd Congressional District, The Oregonian projected after new results posted Thursday night.
Vancouver-based newspaper The Columbian was first to call the race, which has remained too close to call since election night. At the time, county elections offices in the district still had tens of thousands of ballots to count. But subsequent updates have not been kind to Kent and have broadly maintained Gluesenkamp Perez's 12,000-vote lead over the Trump-endorsed Republican.
By 7 p.m. Thursday night, election officials had dropped results from about 32,000 more ballots. The gap between Gluesenkamp Perez and Kent narrowed only slightly, with her still holding a three-point lead — now about 11,000 votes.
While there are still votes to count, the vast majority are in Clark County, where Gluesenkamp Perez is favored.
"I'm excited. You never know how things are going to go, turnout was difficult to model, and then, we had the bombing of the ballot box," she said. "I mean, this has just been a wild election season."
After the race call, Gluesenkamp Perez released a statement, calling it a "decisive victory" — one that was all thanks to grassroots supporters in southwest Washington, and in spite of doubts from national pundits.
"You have to bring the nuance of your local situation to the table, when we all bring what we really understand and those values and perspectives to the table, that's how we get good legislation that works across the country," Gluesenkamp Perez said.
Nationally, the Democratic Party struggled in the November 2024 elections — losing the presidency and at risk of holding minorities in both chambers of Congress.
Clark County Elections, as of Saturday afternoon, has reported 3,543 challenged ballots, meaning that signatures do not match or there is no signature on the ballot itself. The agency added that the number is always changing, as they're continuing their full signature review.
KGW asked Glusenkamp Perez if her re-election in a district that has historically favored Republicans shows a different path forward for her party.
"We need normal people to show up and feel a sense of agency and ownership over the path that our country is on," she said. "We have got to change who we think is qualified or capable of running and holding offices like this. If we want things to get better, we can't look to politics to fix it."
This 3rd District race is a rematch of 2022, when Gluesenkamp Perez and Kent faced one another without either one being an incumbent member of Congress. The race was even closer then. In the end, after a machine recount, Gluesenkamp Perez won by just 2,600 votes.
A Democrat taking the district for the first time in over a decade was just the last of many unexpected outcomes in 2022. Prior to that election year, moderate Republican Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler seemed safely ensconced in the district seat. But her vote to impeach former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in 2021 prompted a revolt from within the Republican Party, making her a target in the 2022 primary.
In Washington, all candidates compete in a nonpartisan primary and the top two vote-getters advance to the general. When the dust settled in 2022, Kent and Gluesenkamp Perez emerged with the most votes, effectively unseating Herrera Beutler.
Both were political outsiders heading into the primary. Kent was a special forces veteran and Gold Star husband, while Gluesenkamp Perez owned a car repair shop with her husband.
Aware of her precarity as a Democrat in the 3rd District, Gluesenkamp Perez has been among the most bipartisan members of Congress, attempting to focus on hyper-local issues that impact working families directly — issues that she's acknowledged on the campaign trail are not "glamorous."
"How do we make it easier to build your own home? How do you make it so that you can buy things that are worth having that were made here in America? That is the long work of building wealth in the middle class and agency in the political process for normal people," Gluesenkamp said to KGW, following the announcement of her projected victory.
Kent, on the other hand, waged a much more global campaign, pointing to inflation under the Biden administration, immigration and the Mexico border, and U.S. money going toward foreign conflicts.