But knocking out the moderate-leaning rep won’t be easy.
But knocking out the moderate-leaning rep won’t be easy.
I n mid-November, Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D., Wash.) approached the House podium to defend her own peculiar legislative move: a resolution rebuking fellow Democrat Jesús “Chuy” García (D., Ill.).
The Illinois Democrat had timed his congressional retirement to best position his own chief of staff to succeed him in what she argued was a brazenly corrupt election maneuver that interfered with what would be an otherwise competitive race for his seat. “If you’re not going to run, you don’t get to choose your successor, no matter how noble the work you have done beforehand,” Gluesenkamp Perez said in defense of her resolution. “That’s what this is about, accountability.”
Her gambit succeeded. Twenty-two House Democrats joined Gluesenkamp Perez and a united House GOP conference in rebuking García — frustrating Democratic leadership and stoking Democratic infighting all while she attempted to bolster her own electoral bona fides as Washington’s most moderate representative who bucks her own party even when it’s unpopular.
Naturally, her lead Republican challenger isn’t buying it.
Gluesenkamp Perez is “fantastic at public relations,” concedes John Braun, a longtime businessman and former U.S. Navy officer who serves as the minority leader in the Washington State Senate. He acknowledged the García reprimand as a case in point. “But it all increasingly feels scripted to me and many others in the district,” he added. As he and others see it, “she’s just playing the script to keep the seat, rather than using the seat to make things better” for her district and the country.
Two-term Gluesenkamp Perez has indeed endeared herself to Blue Dog Democrats by regularly bucking her own party and carving out a unique political persona in Washington State’s red-leaning third congressional district. She’s done so by joining House Republicans in a range of legislative efforts, from censuring Democratic Representative Al Green earlier this year for interrupting Trump’s joint address before Congress to overturning former President Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan and helping the GOP advance a stopgap funding bill last month to end the record-long shutdown.
But this cycle, Braun, the longtime senate minority leader in Washington’s state legislature, is trying to pierce this carefully crafted persona in a district that he maintains is one of the top GOP congressional pickup opportunities of the 2026 cycle.
“She is genuine, but she is really working hard to ride that middle so much that she’s just not getting anything done,” he said.
He insists this seat will be one of the most competitive and closely watched House races of the next midterm cycle. After all, Braun emphasized in a recent interview, Donald Trump carried the district in 2016, 2020, and 2024. And a Republican win in this red-leaning battleground district in 2026 would balance out his home state’s extremely left political tilt.
“This is a chance for Republicans to hold the line and pick up a seat and maybe move Washington back to the right a little bit, at least in federal representation,” he said.
Knocking her out won’t be easy, especially during a midterm cycle that could be a bloodbath for Republicans. An auto shop owner who gives off working-class appeal, Gluesenkamp Perez has emerged as one of the quirkiest members of Congress. She’s often seen sporting flannels in her social media videos, where she regularly goes viral for talking — often in an awkward cadence — about quirky issues such as headlight brightness, daylight saving time, or U.S. military members’ right to repair their own equipment. Or the burdensome licensing regulations governing whether day-care workers are able to peel fruit for kids.
Braun says she’s regularly fixated on issues that are simply not “top of mind” for her constituents. “Headlight brightness or daylight saving time, or the right to repair. I’m not sure I even disagree with her on any of these issues.” But as he sees it, “they’re not the issues people wake up every day — in Washington, at least — worried about. They’re not affordability or public safety or children’s education.”
Gluesenkamp Perez squeaked out her first congressional victory in 2022 when she ran against longtime Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of ten congressional Republicans who joined Democrats in voting to impeach Donald Trump over his conduct relating to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Republican backlash to that vote split Republican support between Herrera Beutler and her strongest GOP challenger, controversial retired combat veteran Joe Kent, giving running room to the underdog Democrat in the district’s jungle primary.
Gluesenkamp Perez then held onto her district in 2024 — the same cycle when Trump swept all seven battleground states and Republicans held onto their narrow House majority. Next come the midterms, which typically benefit the out-of-power party.
Gluesenkamp Perez’s team dismissed Braun’s criticisms and insisted that the two-term congresswoman’s centrism will vault her to victory again in 2026.
“We know it’s hard for a career politician like Senator Braun to understand what people outside of Olympia care about, and encourage him to keep watching Marie for pointers,” her spokesman told NR. “She is the most bipartisan member of the Washington delegation and works hard to gather input from folks in all corners of her district. That commitment to her community is why she has been so successful working across the aisle to deliver on what matters to hardworking people in Southwest Washington.”
The race is shaping up to be a competitive contest between two fundamentally decent people, says southwest Washington resident David Nierenberg, an investment manager who has financially supported Gluesenkamp Perez’s congressional campaigns.
Nierenberg has known Braun for a few years now, having worked with the Republican senate caucus leader in an unsuccessful effort to stop the governor from pushing a progressive tax plan.
“I’m saddened, really, that this is the race between him and Marie, because they’re both good people,” says Nierenberg, a Democrat turned Republican turned Democrat who has soured on the contemporary GOP over its obeisance to Trump in recent years. “To give you a sense of what a good guy does just before he entered the race, he called me and told me that he was going to run against Marie. It was just a courtesy call, but it was an unusual, decent thing to do.”
Defeating Gluesenkamp Perez will be extremely difficult in 2026, says Nierenberg, especially if the midterms end up being a bloodbath for the GOP over frustrations with the Trump agenda.
“She’s unusual, but she is perfectly suited to represent our district, and she practices what you might call the politics of place,” he said, adding that she is a perfect fit for the district’s track record of electing pragmatic moderates.